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 rare, unified source of information. Below is an exploratory article tying into various observations and experiences of traders across the AXIA desks. This is another purpose of Asymmetrist: to explore the fringes, tie into our known, strange financial world, and make the implicit, explicit for practitioners. For more detail on the experiments, science and other matters, readers should consult Coates’ work.
As he says, we assume stress and decision-making is a psychology matter—a mere quandary of the mind. Why is there such a body reaction, especially as traders are relegated to twelve-hour chair-warming shifts? Since we seemingly don’t use our bodies?
Feeling Your Reasoning
In an image: human decision-making is embodied—we are not a brain in a vat; trapped in this piss-weak-good-for-nothing-mortal coil; instead, we think with our bodies, as Coates puts it, and our pre-conscious processing and gut feeling drives us; far ‘smarter’ than our conscious self. The nature of this embodied decision-making is examined throughout Coates’ book, and he reveals how it is a physical experience, that we do indeed ‘think with our gut’ and that “good traders … do not just process information, they feel it.”1
Consider the argument that higher forms of cognition, of thinkin’—philosophy, literature, and trading—are possible because of the repurposing of the same processes of your brain that execute movement. Such is neuroscientist Daniel Wolpert’s argument, and he points to the humble ‘tunicate’: a sea dwelling tube-stuck-on-a-rock creature, which, after moving around in the sea to find a new home, ingests its brain. Life is good on the rock, why move?
Coates writes that if you don’t move, you don’t need thy brain, revealing the priority of movement over thinkin’. We notice this in the sudden clarity of thought when walking. Thus, the evolutionary imperative: thinkin’ gets you killed. Move first. Worst of all, if you sit and think! If elevated thoughts are a derivative of the ancient brain—executing movement—what happens to your cognitive powers when idle, sedentary, or for long stretches of time? This apparent luxury afforded to many, and so recently?
That is one view—out of many—of how embodied we are, as opposed to the classic Western notion of a separated mind-body-spirit (Holy Trinity, yes?). Throughout history, we’ve spent much time damning each one in turn, only to realise how ironically human these attempts were, and how many other problems arise when we try.
What about feelin’ it? Gut feelings? Decision-making involves your gut—so relays Coates—and it is as involved in decision-making as your brain; another embodied example. Gut feel is the sum, complex total from a massive surveillance operation run by the body. There is no clear separation between an analyst and their cold, intellectual decision-making and the fly-by-wire gut feeling fast shooter who trusts instincts. Logic and emotions are not antagonistic, as many assume: that traders need to purge emotions to reach the lofty pantheon of profitable traders. It’s part of the complex whole. Coates relays an experiment which inferred that a patient’s intellect counted little for good decisions. How? The patients had brain damage that impeded access to signals from their bodies; they could not receive “homeostatic and emotional feedback,” which made the difference.2
Bodily feedback partly amounts to ‘gut feel’: muscles, hormones, the nervous system, heart rate, breathing, and other feedback systems generate action—movement! Coates writes that the gut, packed with “approximately 100 million neurons ... and produces the same neurotransmitters as the brain.”3 Far more goes on down there than just digestion; brain affects gut—gut affects brain in mood, feelin’ and thinkin’.
This feedback is accentuated by ‘interoception’—the continual inner-body surveillance operation. This allows the mind and body to collect all information, even subtle or intangible things like the air in a room, and transform it into tangible output: an experience, a feeling, a thought.
Here’s the rub! You don’t need a physical altercation to experience a strong physical response. We consume stories for their physiological effects. We watch horror movies for the tension... or a song to get your blood moving... or inspirational stories to have your guts well up as you glimpse the future. Imagine if you couldn’t feel that! If you were a brain in a vat with only green fluorescent fluid.
This is consequential for us as traders. We use our bodies to navigate the market, especially in the ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ shock moment where the data-driven operator or algorithm fails. But we pay for these powers too, because our body treats financial risk as real physical risk. This means your body prepares for exceptional, instant, physical movement—your hormonal profile explodes; your central nervous system lights up; your lungs pump; your heart scrambles into your throat each time you hit that gut-spilling roller-coaster market flow. This decision-making is purpose-built and extremely fast in eliciting changes—chemically and electrically throughout the body as it needs to react to fast situations like a four-hundred-pound silverback gorilla barreling down towards you, or the S&P 500. But your body treats it all the same. And did you think you could get away with this year over year without consequence?
Financial Violence Is A Civilising Force
Generating visceral body reactions repeatedly in persistent uncertainty has a price, especially in a complex, chaotic environment. Humans haven’t developed to handle such long-term disruptions to our physiology, particularly, as Coates highlights, by sitting in chairs all day as traders. Especially when one better regulates such emergency releases from frantic movement—like adrenaline and cortisol—with actual running or intense physical activity followed by recovery. However, as traders, we don’t easily regulate any of this. We retain it all in the chair, doubling these adverse effects with little recovery.
Coates reminds us that this transforms into heart disease, diabetes, immune disorders, and other serious effects, including long-term sleep and recovery disruption. Trading is not unique in this regard, but it is an important reminder for those expecting something different.“Stress hormones linger in our brains, promoting pathological risk aversion, even depression, and circulate in our blood contributing to viral infections, high blood pressure, abdominal fat-build up and gastric ulcers,” Coates writes. “Financial risk-taking is as much a biological activity, with many medical consequences, as facing down a grizzly bear.”4
What’s unique and insidious for intraday trading is that exposure to peak stress can occur days apart, compressing the timeline and amplifying the physical toll. Even a ‘victorious’ big up-day can be pyrrhic, involving several loss cycles before the win, with impacts on the body experienced repeatedly in hours. It happens repeatedly regardless of the trend direction on a trader’s P&L.
But the toll can be immediate! Coates describes a subtle “learned helplessness,”5 observed on trading desks, where the trader… disappears. The once adequately stimulated, ‘smash your racket on the court because you know you can do better’ type of trader is now… oblivion. Routine slips, his language is dismissive, not decisive; they abandon their captaincy and seek comfort as a resigned passenger. They’re doomed, no longer masters of their fate. They’re secretly thankful to miss volatility; now opportunity avoidant instead of opportunity seeking, because of the market’s persistent, uncontrolled electric shocks; dealing in constant uncertainty and prolonged chaos has overwhelmed mind-body-spirit.
This partly reveals the AXIA floor’s intuition that trading is more akin to a sport than an art or science. We’ve made this explicit: you trade with your body, not just mind, processing information and reacting with what’s below your neck as much as above it. There should be no separation. Trading isn’t a mere cerebral exercise, and neglecting the body atrophies the mind. Neglecting the body atrophies the longevity of your trading career. Power then, to those who bulwark their bodies to offset the costs of operating in unstable, chaotic environments.
Sustaining Your Body’s Intelligence
We’ll use one trader from AXIA’s trading floor to examine deeper because of his presence on and off the floor. He’ll be known as The Godfather. You’ve encountered him within Asymmetrist. Yet, he will soon be known to the world as one of the ten in Traders of Our Time: Navigating the Market’s Impossible Landscape, a book co-authored by yours truly and AXIA’s Alex Haywood. In Chapter Eight, our trader is described as:
“Now at age forty-three, with a nearly twenty-year career behind him, The Godfather trades at his best and looks at his best with a lean, athletic physique cultivated over years of getting it right. That comes from the iron discipline required to trade as committedly as a young trader should and persistent training for Brazilian jiu-jitsu like a man two decades younger while juggling his responsibilities as a husband and father of three. He is, then, the benchmark for senior and junior traders.”— Extract from Traders of Our Time.
The Godfather is a career reinvention and energy story; the man is laden with it. Next to his trading routine, his training ethic in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu has served him. The idea of sport or exercise to improve energy levels is well known. There’s no need for footnotes to acknowledge that water is wet. Exercise fights the long-term effects of stress.
However! Our layman’s hypothesis, if you permit, is that sports training and exercise soften the negative feedback of Coates’ “winner effect”6—that is, if you are on the losing side. In short: winning a fight or competition in many male species—including humans—leads to a surge in testosterone; physical anabolic effects—the good stuff; the gym rat says!—and the winner’s persistence and fearlessness harden, creating a reinforcing surge of testosterone for the winner, making his winning streak more likely. The loser experiences the reverse, a downward spiral.
How can we offset this? Barbell training raises testosterone and produces anabolic effects. If the trader faces consistent losses, strength or overall sport training can offset the negative drop in testosterone levels and help deal with instability and chaos. Like athletes who do preparatory work, ‘pre-hab’ and ‘re-hab’ to ensure physical performance, traders should treat their strength and exercise levels as integral to trading performance. This is especially important for those who wish to remain long-term functional, healthy with competitive energy levels despite age.
The question of testosterone’s impact on risk-taking tolerance and confidence is understood, yet it may play into vital physical skills for a trader. Coates writes it enhances visual attention, focus, and information filtering, “maintain search persistence, or augment visuo-motor skills such as scanning and speed of reactions.”7All are vital for order-flow price ladder traders and navigators. The Godfather demonstrates it dramatically; he stands in better shape than those fifteen years younger with matching energy levels. “It keeps me sharp, and keeps me fast,” as The Godfather says, frequently hitting the same best prices as The Warrior, known for speed. That’s the intuitive conclusion. It’s hard to disprove the alternative as The Godfather might be touched by the Gods and gifted with energy, with or without the gym. Yet, consider the bigger picture—what is the best way to build resistance to stress? By frequent, non-lethal exposure to it, and sport provides the right, timed stress doses outside the markets.8
When instilled, routine and habit are the tonics for handling chaos, providing stability, predictability, and familiarity for your mind-body-spirit, which can’t be found in markets. A solution for those chronically stressed is not a quick holiday abroad but a focus on familiarity and routine—seeing, hearing, and feeling the same surroundings and faces—to handle the chaotic, fast-paced life—the markets.9 The new roll-out-of-bed rambler junior trader is behind on the news and overnight moves, and they’ve lost the sense of the market pace. They’re exposed to the long-term stress of the market bearing down on them—there’s no support of a foundational familiarity, a routine, in their life.
Coates’ experiment shows that long-term stress exposure is more harmful for novices. While veteran traders have volatile and high testosterone and cortisol levels, regardless of their ‘surface level’ emotions, they quickly return to baseline after market action. Short-term cortisol surges are helpful, yet detrimental long-term. The reverse is true for novices: their cortisol levels can’t return to baseline, leaving them agitated and anxious, becoming opportunity-avoidant instead of opportunity-seeking.10
Routine is even more critical for the new trader than the veteran. How would this roll-out-of-bed junior compete with The Godfather, who was bred in routine and familiarity? One committed to being orderly and timely and allow himself to be as fast, aggressive, and determined on a trading floor, honed by sport and matured, not withered by age. The Godfather survives because he learned to handle chaos and wear it sustainably.
Trader: A “Hunch Athlete”
The ability to generate strong bodily reactions—gut feelings—and perceive them through “sensitive interoceptive pathways”11 define what Coates calls a hunch athlete.
He argues that some traders, like athletes, have more powerful gut feelings. Yet how does the body know how to react to market actions and patterns? Intuition draws from specific experiences. The somatic marker hypothesis proposed by neuroscientists Antoine Bechara and Antonio Damasio suggests our memories are not just stored as abstract events but are tethered to the physical sensations we experienced at the time. Every memory we form is linked to the physical sensations we experienced in that moment—these bodily imprints serve as internal signals that guide our future decisions in a similar—now familiar—situation. When confronted with a familiar situation, we don’t just weigh our options ‘logically’—brain in a vat—but sense them with our bodies. “When we scroll through the options open to us,” Coates writes, “each may present itself with a subtle tensing of muscles, a quickening of breath, a slight shiver of dread, a brief moment of calm, a fission excitement—until one just feels right.”12
With this in mind, observing The Adventurer is more potent. All three, like The Godfather and The Warrior, are in Traders of Our Time and noted for their physical presence. They are expressive, gesticulate, and loud, wearing their emotions on their trading desks. It’s a bloody show. Once, The Adventurer tried to rein in his expressiveness, shouting, swearing, and yelling, and become as unreactive as possible, but then he experienced a sharp drop in trading performance. Strange!—unless it was these somatic markers, engraved into his body through pain and every emotion, that he was tuning out or ‘consciously’ overriding.
Using Coates’ hunch athlete hypothesis, ‘trading talent’ may be better understood as heightened interoceptive ability—the capacity to sense and interpret internal bodily signals. The Adventurer, a ski racer before becoming a trader, reinforces the idea that interoceptive sensitivity plays a role; his sport demanded sharp reflexes and split-second decision-making. Perhaps athletic disciplines select against those lacking this sensitivity, filtering out individuals struggling to tune into their internal cues. The sport heightened The Adventurer’s interoceptive sensitivity through enhanced body awareness, which served him well in trading. Coates points to research showing heartbeat perception serves as a reliable stand-in for visceral awareness and that overweight individuals exhibit lower heartbeat awareness, as if the body’s signals are dulled or obstructed. Yet another compelling argument for staying fit and athletic, a principle The Godfather exemplifies.
This can make The Godfather’s and The Warrior’s flow and news trading skills effective. They can become quick and convicted operators in fast-moving market narratives. The Warrior’s memory of market moves, patterns, reactions, and headlines from a decade ago could be steeped in these somatic markers. His manic-like presence at the desk and emotional pain might be effective to engrain these markers and sharpen his intuition and gut feelings. Like Coates said, good trades feel information. Others in Traders of Our Time, like The Razor, The Hero, and The Engineer, employ trading strategies and styles regarded as colder, slower-paced, methodical, and analytical. Yet, The Engineer monitors his state and physical tells when trading—the heaviness of his legs, the sweat on his forehead—to understand his position-taking. He draws on gut feeling, even if he’s silent.
And then there are the traders at the desks. The noise and the conversations wash over a trader and feed into their pattern recognition, transforming into a gut feeling: the traders’ talk, how they eat, the atmosphere on the floor, or the absence of it! Nothing revealed this auditory importance more than a trading floor lost due to COVID-19 stay-at-home orders. This was a disembodied experience, as if trading half blind—the markets were roaring but the traders mute; a silent movie experience.
The New Professional Stays New
Traders now have longer careers, but the maturation period to become consistently profitable is longer too. Years, not months, if operating in the most open-ended, bountiful yet dangerous environment: discretionary, outright trading. Burnout is no longer the accepted assumption but a symptom of failing to prepare and not building sustainable physical practices from the beginning. The trader must structure their life and protocols as an athlete does because the future competitors are already doing so. Thus, it has become a minimum to compete. As we said in Sitzfleisch, when all else is maximised, it will likely come down to this: recovery. What you do off the trading floor, over years and decades, will determine your longevity. To endure is to regard yourself as athlete-like and accept the lifestyle sacrifices: to train, recover, and preserve. Perhaps the reverse situation, and assumption, was self-fulfilling: if burnout is fast and inevitable, why sacrifice and labour on sustainable practices? Why plant crops when the world will end in a few months?
As mentioned in Defeating the Discombobulating Dialectic Part II, the anomalous will become the centre: the monastic, athlete-like trader once on the fringes—an odd fellow!—dominates today. The new traders of tomorrow will entertain no separation of trader-athlete like mind-body. Those in the far future may not realise there was a separation, similar to the entrenched dogma between various trading methods, edge and their reductive labelling.
These athlete-like demands also glint of the more significant career forces shaping markets and traders. Evermore power goes to the trader who forgoes the immediate, invests for the future and remains steadfast in the absence of apparent signs—or seeming regression—in the promised rewards. In other words: faith. Such it has been for the strange, frontier-like skill acquisition, to leverage other tedious, difficult high-effort practices unrelated to trading. And to make explicit the ancient wisdom of preserving and enhancing the body to power the mind, for they are one. Your body is your edge; don’t let it be your end.
Acknowledgements, Permissions & Disclaimer
Grateful acknowledgement to AXIA for granting access to their traders.
The photograph, provided by Axia Futures, is used with their permission, and they retain full ownership and copyright over the image.
Disclaimer: Do Not Do Stupid Financial Decisions. This Is Not A Game.
John Coates, The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: Risk Taking, Gut Feelings and the Biology of Boom and Bust (London: Fourth Estate, 2012), 85.
Ibid., 90.
Ibid., 104.
Ibid., 4.
Coates, The Hour Between Dog and Wolf, 213.
Ibid., 166.
Ibid., 167.
Ibid., 224.
Ibid., 238.
Ibid., 229.
Ibid., 114.
Ibid., 90.