Trading With Your Body: On The Importance Of Honing Your Natural Intelligence
Your body is your edge; do not let it be your end.
Like the tales of old, those who can do what most cannot must pay for it. Those who see the future pay with their eyes. Those who steal fire from the gods pay with their liver. Those who reap the bounty of an uncertain or impossible environment pay with their minds and bodies. Yet, we rarely appreciate the toll on the latter. Trading comes at a great cost, and we aren’t discussing the financial ones.
An athlete’s biography should mention what the sport does to an athlete: the physical cost. A study of trading is deficient without examining its effects on a trader. Over time, dominant athletes will retire not due to competitors but from injury or disease before the biological clock comes. The same is true for the best traders; your body will retire you before the market does.
Trading bears the cost of professional sports upon the trader. But why? We’ll use John Coates’ book—The Hour Between Dog and Wolf—to explore this, a ra…