eMail Archive
19th May 2025
Preface To:
Dear Reader,
The Dispatches of April and early May have explored Liberation Day's aftermath—its psychological fallout, performance highs and lows, and the questions it left behind.
But what about the day itself—Wednesday, April 2nd?
In Part IV, we experience the tension and execution through the eyes of a young, fast-developing trader on AXIA’s London desk. Readily accessible and forever patient, he’s been a generous resource to Asymmetrist, and we’re grateful for it.
This Dispatch captures more than a single trade. It shows why community and team structure are essential, especially if you want to build a real news trading edge. Behind the big clips and lightning reactions is a slick, fast-talking, one-liner–slinging cadre of market operators. If news trading is to be your core, they must be your backbone. Implicitly, you will see the importance of: correct market selection, multi-market execution, and being primed like an athlete in the semi-finals, not just casually showing up to do random exercise as a form of escapism.
April and May—particularly May 12, when China and the U.S. agreed to reduce tariffs—have brought the Liberation Day series full circle. The past weeks have produced a performance disparity like few other periods. Why? Because of how the headlines have been released, and the extreme speed at which markets discount them. What’s worst-case Monday becomes best-case by Wednesday. (Like how a small loser turns into a big one—and suddenly that first loss looks like a win.)
Soon, I’ll write to you with a special Postscript Dispatch reviewing this period, to make more of the implicit explicit.
25th April 2025
And On The Third Day…
Preface To:
Dear Reader,
At the time it felt endless. Yet the entire show began—and now hangs—in intermission, suspended since the first few weeks of April. After the Wednesday 9 you’ll read about in Part III, the status quo returned. Market liquidity came back. And, finally, we could all breathe over the Easter break.
But as it always is: tomorrow, we go again.
Speaking of tomorrow—
Spring is the season of renewal: the closure of the ruin of winter, and the blossom that follows. From Easter to Nauryz, across the world, the start of something new is celebrated. For something to bloom, something must fade.
It was hard to ignore the timing of this Liberation Day series. Hard to ignore the rhythm of ruin and rejuvenation—the death-and-resurrection story so many traders live through in their careers. Just as we experienced this same loop on a smaller scale across Monday 7, Tuesday 8, and Wednesday 9—captured in Parts I through III.
It is a universal story. One told in markets. One told everywhere.
I trust you’ll sense what was left implicit in the background—what charges the series with a deeper reflective power. It is all embedded in the first sentences.
10th & 15th April 2025
Preface To:
Dear Reader,
As the action unfolded this week, Asymmetrist was embedded directly on AXIA’s first floor in London—right where the chaos hits first. These Dispatches—The Liberation Fallout Series—will be coming fast to cover this peak in the Trump-Tariff theme. What you’re getting are raw, hot observations from a trading floor burning with ambition.
3rd April 2025
Preface To:
Dear Reader,
Happy Spring! This one’s an experimental Dispatches—a quarterly review of the trading floor itself.
You can get your market round-up from many sources. In fact, you should be doing this yourself—reviewing Q1, like any serious market practitioner.
But what you can’t get anywhere else is how the traders performed relative to everything you’ve been seeing, reading, or trading. “The Traders Behind the Market” is Asymmetrist’s tag-line for a reason.
Just as I was putting these Dispatches together, I had one eye on the little Big Chart Prez T was holding up during the Liberation Day conference. And… well—Q2 has started as bombastically as Q1. The First Floor at AXIA London must have manifested it considering the amount of Red MAGA hats that are adorning the monitor stands.
For those of you reading Traders of Our Time—thank you—you’ll be treated in today’s Dispatches to a catch-up with some of the traders you may have just met on the page. If not, the piece will still serve you just as well—like any other from Asymmetrist.
We interview both AXIA’s Haywood and The Hero for different vantage points. And for practitioners, we’ve added something new too: suggestions—prompts, perhaps, as the word of this decade—to actually apply your Q1 takeaways into Q2.
Remember: AXIA’s best tend to sharpen themselves at these quarterly turns. Whether explicitly—like The Hero and The Engineer—or implicitly, like the usual suspects. I hope this helps you do the same.
2nd March 2025
Preface To:
Dear Reader,
The physicality of trading has never been far from Asymmetrist. How could it be? Any practical discussion of trading and traders decays when it drifts too far from the physical experience and its demands. From Stamina—where we saw the relentless endurance of our Immortal Cypriot—to the body-eroding Sitzfleisch, a quality made ever more apparent in the era of Trump 2.0 and whatever may come this spring.
But the body is more than an inconvenient attachment to the three-pounder lodged in your cranium. On the contrary! You trade with the intelligence of your entire body—something we explore in today’s Feature.
Yet, at what cost? Drawing on the body’s intelligence extracts a toll, much like the one borne by professional athletes. We examine this, too.
Lately, my thoughts have turned to this: smashing the old assumption that trading is a purely cerebral endeavour and making it imperative that strengthening and caring for the body is foundational to extending a trader’s shelf life. What can be done? We write about some of AXIA’s senior traders, but this applies to all traders—to avoid the pitfall of neglecting the body in more ways than one and to embrace a prophylactic mentality.
11th February 2025
Do You Have The Gritty Skill That Defined Last Week?
Preface To:
Dear Reader,
Last week, I visited AXIA’s relatively new trading floor in Limassol for the first time, and what a way to spend it! Consecutive nights burning the midnight oil, waiting for Prez T to drop the other T-word, possibly bundled with the explosive names: Canada, Mexico, China, Japan… EU?
For the first time, there was no single trade to write about in the Dispatches—but instead, let’s look at the week as a whole. If you only looked at the P&Ls and performances, you’d have missed the real lesson of last week. We are now in deep theme mode, where the markets can only focus on so much, and they will experience their own peaks and troughs.
This brings to mind those numbing weeks in Spring 2020—chained to the desk, bound to the screens—which led to all sorts of problems. It exposes new traders to a key skill that often goes untrained—the very skill that frequently hinders turning market concepts into execution.
The lesson reveals the need for Sitzfleisch—the physical and mental staying power, irrespective of energy or emotional drain. A skill that can be, and must be, trained. Sitzfleisch is not a bonus—it’s the foundation. If you lack it, the markets will discover this, and they won’t be kind.
24th January 2025
The Champagne Flows, But The Danger Grows.
Preface To:
Dear Reader,
This week, we experience the perspective of a fast-growing young trader on the AXIA London floor, who just dinged his first-ever multi-six-figure day on President Trump’s Inauguration Day.
By Jove!—this trader’s been working hard. The P&L has merely caught up to the work seeded long ago. You will have a taste of this and understand how to navigate the various trading opportunities that will come and pass relatively quickly. And in-between Trump’s comments this week—and nearly 20-hour shifts—our endearing young trader still corresponded with Asymmetrist as swiftly and effectively as ever, just as he did back on November 19. What a lad. Thanks, HH.
Secondly, this trader’s performance was anomalous compared to much of the group. We’ll explore why for our learning benefit. Mini-spoiler—it’s the navigation of a specific type of whipsaw, along with the skill set and mentality required.
Lastly, and rather darkly, this week provided an opportunity to look forward. What is to come? And we don't mean specific trades or economic prognostications.
Indeed, we are examining patterns and cycles that are far more consistent because—in case you missed it—another insidious, hidden cycle has just begun that will significantly impact the careers of everyone in the trading performance pursuit. And that also means you.
For now, the rising tide of a high-opportunity environment will raise all boats. But what occurs when the tide goes out?
If you have been learning from Asymmetrist thus far, please consider the Dispatches from Monday the 20th as a stark warning. Yours truly has personally, while collating the experiences of others, seen far too many traders with potential go out this way. There are only so many mistakes one can make. I can only hope this will help you in the future.
10th January 2025
Preface To:
Dear Reader,
Happy New Year!
What better way to illustrate the market’s 0-to-60 demands than Monday, 6th January 2025? Traders returned fresh—morale and psyche nourished—yet with the lingering danger of holiday-mode inertia. The ski boots are still on. You’re shaking off a late-night haze after delayed flights back to the UK. And then, mid-morning—
11:02 – Trump Aides Explore Tariff Plans for Every Country – WAPO.
Trade! Trade! Trade!
And so, dear reader, the Trading Timeline begins. This is exactly what Dispatches is about: a day of botched headlines, Trump’s Truth to follow, and opportunities (or pitfalls) for everyone. A perfect lens through which to view the market from multiple perspectives—different means, methods, and madness. A glimpse into the synaptic tempest of the prop firm organism, roaring back to life after holiday hibernation.
This led to a mega Dispatches. A chunky one to start off 2025. Imagine the collected writings by year-end, with a hawkish Trump 2.0! As one of the traders said, he’s got the House and the Senate under Republican control, no further term, and four years to catch up… dare one say that dreaded four-letter acronym that begins with Y and ends in OLO?
But it’s not all triumph, because what is to follow in the next few months is fraught with danger. An insidious effect upon a trader’s career—especially the young and frail—that I’ve personally experienced myself; and seen others succumb to. But it affects all traders up and down the experience curve. Strengths into weaknesses…
20th December 2024
A Little eBook For You…
Special Email for the Asymmetrist eBook:
Dear Reader,
My heartfelt gratitude for entrusting Asymmetrist as both subscribers and readers. Your support is the lifeblood of this endeavour, and on behalf of Asymmetrist, I would like to wish you a joyful holiday season and a prosperous New Year. May the winds of change forever blow in your favour.
The holiday season, I hope, will offer a moment for reflection, respite, and—of course—reading or re-reading. For market practitioners, this is a fitting time to take stock of the year, learn, adapt, and prepare to make 2025 your best yet.
The most enduring traders I know hold firm to the belief that the best is always ahead—they know no other way.
In anticipation of your travels or time offline, I’m pleased to share a small token of appreciation: The Asymmetrist Reader: The Primordial Months. This complimentary eBook, exclusive to subscribers, includes all published material since inception. Such as the stream-of-consciousness journey of A Cut in Time, the nostalgic tale of our Cypriot trader’s six-figure news trade, the U.S Elections to our first-ever Feature, published this very week. I've also penned a new introduction that explores some of the influences that have shaped both myself and Asymmetrist.
If you’re looking to catch up on reading, this is your perfect opportunity.
17th December 2024
A Prompt For Your Trading Year End Review.
Preface To:
Here’s another marker of a sustainable, professional trader: they think cross-disciplinary. The trader of tomorrow is a generalist—receptive to ideas from all angles. And one day, if you’re lucky, you’ll venture out and see that the processes shaping your domain have already played out eons ago in another. Perhaps you’ll even realise your high-tech is someone else’s sticks-and-stones. But, that makes you very lucky indeed—you’ve glimpsed the future of your domain. The rest is detail.
But there’s another benefit, too. It allows you to review yourself more coolly, to reflect with fewer blind spots, free of the baggage of emotional investment. When you see your story having already played out elsewhere—same processes, different characters—you gain the rare power to observe yourself objectively. The same clarity we use to spot others’ blind spots often escapes us. But, replace yourself with something very similar—well, then we’ve hacked the system.
As the year-end approaches, I present to you Asymmetrist’s first-ever Feature—a thought piece capturing me at a moment in time, shaped by what is streaming through my brain and enriched by my interactions with all sorts of traders. This is a developing topic, seeded long ago and now beginning to sprout—a small seedling emerging at year-end. Carry it with you into your yearly trading review and reflections, and, in doing so, journey into the domains of Michel de Montaigne, the essayist; Steve Jobs, the founder; and Ezra Pound, the poet.
What do they have in common? Well, Tovarish’, it’s going to be a Red Christmas indeed! Because to understand them—and to learn how to evaluate your own trading—is to read, reflect, and practice what someone once encapsulated as: PERMANENT REVOLUTION.
2nd December 2024:
Preface To:
Dear Reader:
You’ve previously read about Tuesday 19 November’s events: I now present Part II—with the key message bringing us full circle:
The practitioner of tomorrow has already dissolved artificial operational boundaries. And they will be the ones to redefine our domain.
Tuesday 19 provides the special scope of both looking at the details of a trade to learn from and as an example of the more important higher-level—yet often intangible—forces that shape your career.
That is, the boundaries, the reductive habit of thinking as a technical vs fundamental-news-macro-event trader. The worst of the two camps can shun and scorn the other. Either camp believes the other to be lucky at best and a hoax at worst. And typically, both novice and reinventing veterans can pigeonhole themselves into one camp. Worse yet, the effects can be even more insidious when the determined practitioner avoids debate but still thinks and operates so reductively due to a less-than-conscious bias.
So that makes this trader, another young buck we interview in Part II, all the more impressive. Not just his performance shy of six figures on the day. He began his career in the news camp and is now embracing the other. To walk by his desk to spot market profile charts, next to his news-first price ladders! To successfully begin to integrate it, and yet simultaneously not be overwhelmed by the influence of others, as some traders unwittingly pull a destructive, complete 180 in approach.
In an image: this trader has dealt with the discombobulating dialectic; this rough Gordian knot, in the only way a practitioner knows how. Just trade the damn thing! To cut through complexity with pragmatism, not dogma. As so did Alexander the Great with his sword.
But! There is an even greater invisible force shaping careers lurking above: the anomalous becomes the centre. Or, what was once on the fringe, strange and unique, now dominates the mainstream. Just ask what wild thing Copernicus used to say about the Sun and what orbits it… or Darwin’s crazy idea that emerged from spending time in the Galápagos…1
And isn’t that a perfect way to describe the emerging traders of today that dominate tomorrow?
Perhaps the traders of tomorrow-tomorrow would never even know there was a difference between so-called technical and fundamental trading. And in their world, one day, so will another anomalous trader on the fringes displace them…
22nd November 2024:
Preface To:
Dear Reader,
The market flows on Tuesday 19th, the update to Russia's Nuclear Doctrine, and the subsequent downplay, present interesting Dispatches.
But it ain't because of the crazy, flashy, P&L gains or losses.
This series, and really the Asymmetrist as a whole, isn't here for the usual, but the unusual—that's where the best learning takes place, where expectations shatter. If anything, numerous scientific breakthroughs came from that one annoying anomaly, the exception you just can't ignore. So it went for Darwin, Curie and Einstein. Though note: the very act of surviving and thriving in these markets places you in an extremely unusual category already. But we're diving even deeper.
Why is Tuesday 19th compelling? We have a rare observable instance of the market's self-fulfilling prophecy. That Gordian knot of what the market really is, and by extension, what is the 'legitimate' market approach. Which to the New Professional—the practitioner—is a redundant question. Spoiler: asking that question already sets you up to fail.
Firstly, there was considerable outperformance from that apparently impossible species—the 'technical trader'. And spoiler, again: Two of AXIA's eight-figure traders are diametrically opposed. One, a hyper-tactical bulldog news-trading order flow savant—the Cypriot you've read about. The other, your librarian-like, puzzle solving, Market Profile aficionado—technical!—trader with unbelievable consistency and performance. They dominate their niche—that's the requirement to leap from seven to eight figures—yet their skills deeply overlap one another.
Secondly, some of AXIA's young bucks outperformed on a relative basis. Why not use this as an opportunity to see it from their perspective? It's one way for this 29-year-old to feel even older…
And as I sat down with them, I got reams and reams of outstanding stuff. So much so we'll experiment:
Today's Dispatches will be split into various parts! And until it all comes full-circle, consider this specific issue to be a living, organic document. An experiment with the series, if you please.
8th November 2024:
Sometimes, The Real Surprise Is No Surprise At All.
Preface To:
Dear Reader,
It was the first time for some graduates who had been on the desks for three weeks, just as it was for some young traders who've been trading live for three years.
This is the nature of the domain we're in—the U.S. Elections are just an obvious example. And the next time around in four years, they'll either be trading bigly or not trading at all.
The same applies to even the most subtle opportunities, and those are the best ones. AXIA's Alex Haywood says this all the time—and rightly so—some of the greatest opportunities are forgotten, unworked, not debriefed, not digested. No one likes to do the boring work. But one of AXIA's greatest eight-figure traders built his success off boring. Invest in the work now and pay yourself years down the line. This must be the spirit of the New Professional. Or in other words, the professional is the one who stays new.
And what a marker these American elections are! In my head, Trump never left. It feels like it was only a few months ago when yours truly was shorting ZBs on Trump's tweet about a Phase 1 Deal with China. But then came the pandemic… then, oh yeah, there was some other President. Who?
There's one thing that stuck in my head on the night of Gunpowder, Treason and Plot—5th November (it's an English thing)—and that was John Bolton's quote on Trump: “I think everybody ought to be ready because Trump never loses. And if he loses, it's because it's 'stolen' so it will be difficult.” But—yes! He just described perfectly every successful trader.
And then I was waiting, and waiting—give the traders some vol, some surprise! Let them bank! Give me a great story! Twist, surprise, conflict and challenge…
But sometimes, the real surprise is no surprise at all.
Four More Years. Bring on the Trading Timeline. Asymmetrist will be there.
31st October 2024:
Can It Be Any Other Way?
Preface To:
Dear Reader,
It’s often difficult to convey this to new traders. In my early trading days, I certainly didn’t appreciate it either. How one can—and must—go from 0 to 60. The stop-start nature of markets, the volatility crunch following a volatility explosion necessitates it. And of course, as the AXIA team often says, it’s about keeping the P&L after that vol crunch! But then, the big context!
Eight months to a novice trader is a lifetime; it’s all you know. From January until August, it was a different world of low opportunity. Or what you would imagine a ‘normal’ opportunity to be. You start to act by the seeming rules of the game, only for the entire world to flip in instantly. The Linear Mind need not apply. It’s as if you grow up on an innocent planet, quaintly living its polite Regency period, only to then be destroyed by flesh-eating aliens—a mere byproduct of an interdimensional, universal war that has raged for a million years and extinguished untold, unnoticed civilisations. You are but a grain of sand—probably less than that. All you know…
And that was early August for the novice trader. Then came Lagarde’s comments, then the Iran-Israel missile strikes and their retaliation dance. And it’s not even as hardcore as it can be. But to the double-decade experienced traders, it’s but a moment in time. Yet, they still know to push each opportunity to the max. When could the next one be?
That is the context of these Dispatches No.2—the stamina of preserving over eight months and then going all out after so long. It’s difficult to do.
And then I woke up on Friday and heard about AXIA’s prime-time news trader smashing Japan’s LDP election.
He’s done it again! But why am I even surprised? He always smashes it or pulls it out of the bag. Just… indomitable. Always the talk among AXIA’s new traders, and I’ve been a fan since day one.
But how to even tell this story? How can I not write it in one intense session, with the same mania as our news trader approaches it? Immersion writing. Fuelled by Boney M’s best hits on repeat and a glass or two of sherry (the writer’s PED). Let loose the graphite!
And I also felt that mania, his spirit and intensity—visualising the desk and price ladders. But I was still in disbelief. He’s just everywhere! Always ripping and tearing. He hunts those flesh-eating aliens for fun and profit. I just had to stand up and exclaim to the great grey sky:
Oh, that Immortal Cypriot!
As observed and noted in Fletcher, Angus. Storythinking: The New Science of Narrative Intelligence. New York: Columbia University Press, 2023. pp. 15–16.