Dear Practitioners,
We continue The Counterintuitive Shape of Trader Development with a study of abundance gone wrong. Part III(a)—Choice and Its Discontents asks why too many options, tools, and time fail the novice, while constraint forges the performer. The claim is simple and uncomfortable: launching a trading career is less a knowledge problem than a design problem. Reduce the degrees of freedom and intensify discovery; widen them too early and you dilute it.
Across early careers—The Warrior, The Razor, and those only just emerging from the Minimum Viable Trader (MVT) phase—we watch constraint harden into design. Guardrails compress the feedback loop between action and consequence, forcing selectivity, recombination, and developing trade-sense—navigating, not solving, markets. Traders and markets are emergent systems: transient order appears against boundaries. Abundance flatters the learner; constraint frees the performer.
Next week, we’ll shift from thesis to fieldcraft with Part III(b)—Forcing Focus. It follows the young Collector and others through fuzzy engagement, survival imperatives, and the practical discipline that keeps a novice alive to grow, essentially guardrails for a proto-framework MVTs could set up. Then, we close in on the finish line at the end of October for Part IV, the treacherous transition toward the Always Viable Trader—unlearning what kept you alive without losing coherence as you widen.
Previously on ‘The Counterintuitive Shape of Trader Development’:
Part I—Start Narrow, Grow Wide. A paradox introduced: markets can only be navigated, not solved—yet the novice must first “solve” the immediate environment just to survive. Constraint, inexperience, and limited runway become creative allies; the trader as start-up, building focus through scarcity.
Part II—Tilting at Windmills. The over-prepared learner meets reality. Passion turns delusional, theory replaces sight. Only pressure—be up this month or you’re fired—breaks the fantasy. Constraint restores perception, birthing the Minimum Viable Trader: narrow, fast, fragile, yet capable of pivot and survival.
Part III(a) begins below.
Part III(a): Choice and Its Discontents
Abundance fails the novice yet remains forever welcomed. The problem of abundance reveals the primacy of career strategy, which is a design problem. Brilliance, trade-by-trade, remains Sisyphean when a higher-level, invisible, and counterintuitive process undoes it all. It’s a foe with many faces: the trader’s resource dilemma, the tension between learning and performing, the lag between skill investment and payout; love and energy for this domain. It is an issue of too much of the good: preparing for this new career with plenty of time and savings. Then, investing that time and effort as a learner, reinforced with boundless energy and love of the game. That is to say, most wish to start wide but are instead only launched narrowly, often by force.
Part II: Tilting at Windmills explored how the over-prepared learner can become a glutton for knowledge, losing their sense-making because they’ve overridden their critical observation with theory and ‘knowledge.’ Passion is often tied to the hip of delusion, because maintaining the fantasy is preferable to risking reality, especially if the over-prepared learner must start over, or perform within the narrow straightjacket of the minimum viable trader. An abundance of choice permits the unimaginative and superficial. Neither survives the markets.
Constraints are both teachers and liberators of creativity. The most enduring insights are self-discovered, as is the depth achieved when the novice has few pieces to work with. Consider the novice learning with three chess pieces instead of fourteen. They would quickly discover the possibilities of a bishop and knight to take a piece, then intuit how to abstract these combinations into general concepts about the game. Later, they’ll know these relationships, aimed at a specific goal, as tactics. Compare a second novice who is presented with the far wider choice of learning the game with all the pieces on the board. They started wide. To keep up they remain superficial, yet is inevitably swallowed up in the vast ocean of choice, and then eventually outclassed by the first novice who started narrow.
In an image, constraints accelerate learning because the feedback loop of action and consequence is as tight as the constraint. So the young Warrior’s story is recast: a depth quickly reached by two pieces—the S&P and Bund—visualised through the simple: current order flow on the price ladder. Later, he’d recognise these as market correlations. There was yet another constraint: how could this relationship work towards one goal: “be green every day,” and nothing more. The rest would come quickly.
Creativity must battle constraints. The greater the challenge, the more distinctive the outcome. Consider a novice forced to make new recipes from a few unrelated ingredients: scarcity compels recombination, revealing relationships that abundance would hide. When the constraint cannot be overcome by brute-force trial-and-error, the search ends and synthesising begins. This leads to creative breakthroughs or intuitive leaps. Constraint, by limiting options, raises the probability of reorganisation. Creativity emerges from constraint in a way analogous to ecosystems developing resilience: under resource limitations, systems adapt internally with feedback loops that stabilise and innovate within their bounds. The Razor, from Traders of Our Time, is a product of harsh constraints overcome through creative acts. As we wrote in Traders:
“These acts of mastery conclude when a trader has to fight for their very conception, to struggle for it—to fight for expression against anything that might devour it. One great act of defiance. Magisterial careers, then, are born from continual resistance.”
The Razor has built a unique career sticking to his constraints. Like many novices, this meant trading a single lot at a time and minimal daily risk. This forced him to take a ‘mere’ tick where few thought to look, understand or condone, because the majority preferred to retain their choice abundance. Like the young Collector, every lost tick was a step closer to career death, forcing selectivity and precision to trade whatever the market offered. The young Razor launched as a minimum viable trader (MVT). But he swerved away from what normally occurs beyond this MVT-siege state: choice. To retain an ‘all-in, all-out’ approach, even as his size reached hundreds of lots; still aiming to capture a tick to ensure consistency above all else.
This retains a shrunk universe for The Razor—choice isolation—providing him the same benefit of an MVT: consistent creative attempts to capture market phenomena, and forcing a high standard for his infrequent trade selection. Traders who know The Razor remark on his unconventional thinking, yet it is precisely because of these constraints that few would entertain that has led to our trader overcoming them that leads to his ingenuity. It forces recombination of the parts. Choice abundance might have prevented The Razor from carving out a unique path, rendering him mediocre, relative to the eight-figure pioneer he is today. It’s one thing to dominate a niche, but another to create one entirely; such is the gulf between a seven-to-eight figure trader.
Both traders and the markets, we continue to observe and argue, are a product of emergence. That is because they are both complex: dynamic, non-linear, chaotic environments. Yet it requires constraints. Without them, a system with infinite freedom dissipates energy across infinite possibilities. Constraints introduce tension and channel structure for coherence, patterns, and stable phenomena to emerge, lasting only while the boundary conditions hold. This ‘self-organisation’: the spontaneous emergence of order from interacting parts under constraint. Is visible in Saturn’s hexagonal storm or traffic flow adapting around a blockage. This is how trader and market are greater than the sum of their parts—a property not observable in isolation! Starting narrow enables emergence; then grow wide as a trader.
Constraints compel proactiveness. When choices are boundless, one drifts reactively; narrow limits force intentional planning. Given I can only trade a single tick, and must be profitable this month, what does that mean for everything else? The ability to reflect on one’s behaviour and adjust—metacognition—is a hallmark of emergent intelligence. That is to say: the trader has begun to navigate markets. Their intelligence is their newfound trade-sense.
The central connection across these observations is the scarcest commodity: focus. The minimum viable trader incarnate. “Where are you making money? I haven’t got the time!” Nothing pulls a performer out of a learner more than focus on the pain of failure. Focus is lost in abundance, especially in the desire to preserve the novice’s choice and freedom of action. This is seen in the majority of unfocused novices today, looking at countless markets, endless products, and infinite tools—from indicators and patterns to number crunching. To be told how this works rather than deriving insights or creatively overcoming constraints themselves. Instead of enduring the throes of creative overcoming, they leap into new territory expecting quick results and retaining superficiality. The abundance of time, funds, energy and ‘love of the game’ means they would do this for as long as it lasts.
We return to the concept of starting narrow and growing wide. Constraints launch, and an abundance of choice flounders a novice’s career. Constraints teach that to grow wide, start narrow. Because that narrowness creates conditions to grow, and those who start wide paradoxically never do. Reduce the degrees of freedom, and you increase the intensity of discovery. Launching a career is not a knowledge problem, but a design problem. And the counterintuitive conditions must exist for either a team or individual to launch themselves or others as a minimum viable trader.
»Next week: Forcing Focus
Fuzzy engagement, survival imperatives, and the practical guardrails that form a proto-framework for the Minimum Viable Trader. It’s the hinge between the MVT and the Always Viable Trader.
Acknowledgements, Permissions & Disclaimer
Grateful acknowledgment to AXIA for granting access to their London trading floor and to observe and learn as “writer-in-residence.”
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.