Dear Practitioners,
Welcome to the latest instalment in The Counterintuitive Shape of Trader Development series.
Part III(b)—Forcing Focus looks at how constraint, once survival becomes design, forces clarity. Through the young Collector and others, we see how siege conditions—no time, no capital, no second chances—strip away fuzzy engagement and turn scarcity into a framework. The market itself becomes the guardrail: fixed times, fixed actions, fixed risks. Precision replaces the slack born of abundance.
The best MVTs learn that focus is not born of discipline but of necessity. When opportunity arrives episodically, survival prepares you to recognise it.
Next week, we move toward the threshold between the Minimum Viable Trader and the Always Viable Trader: the dangerous transition where focus must widen without dissolving.
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)—Choice and Its Discontents. Abundance fails the novice. Too many tools, time, and good intentions dissolve focus and dull perception. Through The Warrior and The Razor, we see that constraint accelerates learning by tightening the feedback loop between action and consequence. Creativity and trade-sense emerge when resources run out, not when they overflow. Markets and traders alike self-organise under pressure; order appears only within boundaries. The paradox returns: to grow wide, one must first start narrow.
Part III(b) begins below.
Part III(b): Forcing Focus
Constraint forces focus, whether imposed by market or circumstance. In Parts II and III(a), we saw how constraint by design pushes the novice—once they enter a siege mentality—to tighten the feedback loop through selective trade, market, and opportunity choices. In this way, the market becomes the guardrail: the field of action that binds the trader between cause and consequence, forcing precision, recombination, and the development of trade-sense—navigating, not solving, markets. These very constraints become the ingredients of both creativity and effective learning, even as the performer has to break out of the learner.
The siege mentality becomes design. The minimum viable trader (MVT) with this mentality does what they can with what they are given—from a trading floor, community, or team, and from the current lowest-hanging fruit in the markets. They can’t choose their opportunities or starting environment. The foodstuff might be a hard fight for scraps: a few ticks from a data print showing exceptional, monetisable behaviour, some order-flow funk on the DAX, a slowly unfolding market profile in an ultra-low-volatility environment, or a raft of headlines creating then breaking narratives. Opportunity arrives episodically; survival prepares you to recognise it. Eventually, the trader pivots and recycles previous experiences to tackle new ones.
Siege mentality protects or revives the perceptual faculties: the ability to see rather than to know. It also diminished the young Collector’s ‘fuzzy engagement’ problem—the condition that haunts many novices. Engagement is often fuzzy because traders participate where there’s just enough opportunity: good enough to enter, yet not bad enough to exit. While an outright futures trader’s year often hinges on ten-or-so pivotal moments, as The Engineer observed, most still wade through this vast fuzzy majority. It’s the nature of the beast: the biggest trades lurk beneath the surface, revealing themselves only at the last moment; too late for those who’ve disengaged entirely.
Traders with sizeable accounts have many portals to manage this fuzziness. They can use dynamic sizing, or scale-in, scale-out, which permits them to expand or contract conviction and size as opportunity comes into focus. They can stay in trades, as the situation remains fuzzy, then commit real size if the right moment occurs. For others, it’s a matter of bean-counting: their financial needs are met, and a significant account lifeline allows them to go extended periods without trading.
The MVT lacks these advantages, yet the best transform this weakness into strength. Each trade—or cluster of small trades—could end the careers of the young Collector and the Razor. So you’d better be sure! This constraint in freedom of action becomes the MVT’s advantage, forcing the ultimate focus: if these were your last bullets to save your career, would you take this trade? Those who evolve from MVTs often retain this precision even as their size grows. The siege mentality’s afterglow persists through their most defining growth periods. They trade as if survival still depends on it, because until recently, it did. This is how starting narrow enables growth: the unyielding focus it demands creates the consistency required for scaling.
Fuzzy engagement worsens without focus on a singular career objective. If the novice doesn’t see this domain as a career but as a casual market presence, performance erodes. As explored in Traders of Our Time, career objectives or a trader’s place in their career determine the right decisions in participation or trade management. Instead, and to the novice’s detriment, the “correct” decision is treated as if in isolation, with no consideration of who is taking, then managing, the trade. The “right decision” is subjective to that trader’s career period. For example: should I run this potentially big trade? An MVT who finds themselves in a trade with unexpectedly large unrealised profit has no business risking it all for more, because that gain could save them from the precipice. Giving back that unrealised P&L could jeopardise an entire career.
Yet traders pushing boundaries and growing their accounts are likely making the right choice to run the trade. To them, giving back unrealised P&L or taking a loss is secondary to capturing outlier trades that can ten-fold their best day, week, or month. The MVT is not in that place, yet novices often conflate the two—“because that is what all the best traders are doing!”
But all traders are only ever a few bad periods away from counting their last bullets. Ask The Adventurer and The Hero from Traders. The abundance of choice and resources had permitted slack and a higher tolerance for losses; they were quick to trade within questionable circumstances—the worst of fuzzy engagement. Then their sudden financial scarcity, and the real risk of losing their careers, forced focus. After near-total account loss, The Adventurer would proceed with remarkable precision and consistency to rebuild quickly. From Traders:
“You should come back to simple principles and focus on the things you can control. Accept that it is unlikely you will make millions the day after a bad run and just focus on the trade ahead. Slowly, you regain confidence after a few small successful trades, yet it provides you the opportunity to hit a big trade, which gives you much more breathing space … sometimes, you just need to pick a positive number out of your trading account and regard that as the new ‘zero,’ the hard floor. All of a sudden you will really trade like you mean it; like I say—it is always about perception.”
In essence, fuzzy engagement—I knew I shouldn’t have, but why did I?—is a sign of contradictory objectives or a misunderstanding of a trader’s stage in their career, or of subverted perception in the case of these experienced traders, The Adventurer and The Hero. Building or rebuilding an account, as The Godfather said in Traders, is different from pushing boundaries. Similarly, we’ve rediscovered the bane of every novice: the antagonism between learning and performing. The learner participates widely; the performer, precisely. The learner participates to experience; the performer, to survive. The young Collector, once a junkie for learning and participation, was forced into an MVT fighting simply to survive the next month. That is why the time constraint—be up this month—solved his fuzzy engagement: it pulled him out of conflated objectives and into one goal, trading for a single visceral purpose—staving off career death.
The stories of The Hero, The Adventurer, and the young Collector show that nothing forces focus on a singular objective more than existential survival. This life on the precipice, seemingly a weakness, has again made many careers. In contrast, abundance of choice and resources permits too many career objectives, eroding standards both trade by trade and across the long arc of a career. One can get it all right in the moment yet be undone by misunderstanding career imperatives. Just as easily, one can fail by not connecting a string of successful or failed trades to the right context: how each day folds into the year, how the conceptual meets the practical, how the daily plan serves the career objective. The trader’s task, then, is to tether the immediate to the structural. Doing so is often the mark and the function of possessing a framework.
Forcing Guardrails: A Proto-Framework for an MVT
Both novices and MVTs—especially the most minimal—don’t know what they don’t know. Unknown Unknowns. Market engagement can seem justified at any time, as can any manner of trade management. In other words, this is what it looks like to operate without a framework. Most traders have one, even those who reject the idea or work from fragments of a tacit structure—they can’t articulate it, but it happens. Recall the young Collector, who stripped away most justifications for engagement to focus on a handful of trades that forced precision. Order-flow anomalies and economic data releases occurred at fixed times, limiting participation to precise moments crossed with precise action. His world narrowed to the least fuzzy form of engagement. The MVT needs these happenstance ‘guardrails’, because inexperience and the hunger to perform push them to engage whenever opportunity merely seems to appear. This specificity in engagement criteria becomes the guardrail that creates a binary discipline—when to trade, what to trade, how to trade—often through static sizing: all-in, all-out. In this way, the MVT is prevented from drowning in overwhelming choice. Choice isolation becomes the guardrail itself.
However, the novice can’t set such a high bar because they don’t yet know what it looks like. They lack a framework to deploy or even conceptualise to address fuzzy engagement and other shortcomings. This requires time, experience, and understanding, which can only be gained by growing wide after starting narrow. The benefit of launching with constraints is that it forces a framework upon you—a built-in guardrail. “Trade headlines; hit as early as possible, all-in-all-out; if off-side—get out; if on-side—get out.” A career can be viably launched not through greater knowledge, but through the deliberate design of limited participation. By day two, fuzzy engagement has already been dealt with. Because the novice focuses on a few pieces, they learn them deeply and quickly, growing T-shaped while piecemeal learning the adjacent: the market narrative, central-bank policy, macroeconomics, risk-on/risk-off, hawkish/dovish. They’ll use this in their careers while monetising it.
One can abstract this to different skills and contexts. The Hero described his own evolution and advised novices to “start micro” on the price ladder and then grow wide. He came to the market profile later, making the transition intuitive for someone who once traded tick-by-tick in the Bund and EuroStoxx—narrow, constrained—in a low-volatility, tight-range environment. By understanding the market auction at its simplest, he learned those few pieces and their relationship deeply, then grew T-shaped into using market profile and other adjacent skills. Low volatility and tight ranges—another form of constraint—acted as a padded cell, making it harder for the novice to hurt themselves. This was also The Warrior’s experience in the lull between the Great Financial Crisis and the European Debt Crisis: thick liquidity on the bid and offer, tight ranges, quick trades risking mere ticks, sometimes just one.
Overwhelming choice also explains both underperformance and the appeal of the so-called, much-abused idea of ‘technical trading.’ The impatient spot a pattern and mistake it for opportunity. Endless choice provides no constraint to simplify and learn from, nor a basis for overcoming it. New traders who are vehemently ‘technical’ suffer the downstream effects of choice abundance rather than isolation. The fuzziest engagement—which market, what time, how?—yields a different answer each attempt.
Ironically, the determination to be a technical trader—to view markets reductively, early in one’s career—is to start wide, not narrow: the widest of wide. It is to crave freedom of action and drown in it, because even the simplest tools are immeasurably deep. Consider how one might erroneously confuse a solitary cloud for an entire global weather system. Or how a novice might look at the Engineer’s or the Hero’s screens, see mere market-profile charts and daily candlesticks, and mistake simplicity for ease.
From Traders:
“The Engineer just as much considers recent economic data prints, recent central-bank comments, the current macro-environment, the yield curve or other minutiae-like subtle changes in the order flow. So where does the sordid chartist stop and the legitimate market approach begin? A technical-trading approach does not deliver inferiority or superiority by picking up the tool, but, as a truism, it depends on how it is used.”
A cursory view of The Engineer and The Hero reveals two ostensibly ‘technical’ traders with extremely high engagement standards. They’ve developed frameworks that evolve with them and with the market. We can read them as the same guardrails—only now much of it has sunk into unconscious competence. The older Collector watched how they would stalk, prepare, and participate in a potentially lucrative “market-profile play” with the same seriousness he once reserved for a central-bank meeting: not to take all the trades, but to take the trade.
In contrast, novices require far less awareness—trade sense, knowledge, skill, or experience—to engage transient market phenomena such as the young Collector’s “PMI trade.” What could an MVT do with so little? What are the fewest parts required to jerry-rig something together? Do they need deep macroeconomic understanding, central-bank nuance, higher-time-frame patterns, statistics, or a mental library of order-flow behaviours? Eventually, yes—but not now, especially when the MVT can borrow group expertise explicitly as needed. Where are you making money?
Which brings us back to the besieged MVT. For them, it doesn’t matter to maximise every opportunity or showcase finesse, aptitude, or “talent.” But I need that one more tick to respect the EV of the trade!—that’s how focus slips. They can only, and should only, think so far ahead: aim simply to be green every day, as the Warrior said, then build and pivot from there. Be up this month or you’re fired—that was how the young Collector launched himself. Scrappy, dumb, and crude yet effective beats the untested Knight-Errant who speaks it all yet never acts. Just take the money! as a certain trader said. The rest will follow.
They Started Narrow
We notice the same ultimatum applied to the Voyager from Traders. After floundering twice in his career, people resurrected him first by pressure—you’re fired; show me your trading plan if you want to come back—then by resource pressure—I’m broke! This forced an MVT mentality onto the Voyager and was rewarded.
Narrowness also launched other traders that Asymmetrist readers know: J.N. and F.K., both now growing widely in real time. J.N. began with fixed-income spreads, a more conservative and constrained objective. That narrowness—applied in the right place—focused him on understanding cross-market relationships, macroeconomics, correlations, and spotting “value” on the curve and across asset classes. These fundamentals were later recycled and sublimated into outright futures trading and news-driven opportunities. His early criteria were explicit—instrument, spread structure, time-of-day—guardrails that reduced participation and created this proto-framework.
F.K.’s early career followed the same continuity. He engaged in ultra-niche order-flow anomaly trading that honed the fundamentals of structuring a trade. Later, he transplanted this experience into a wider market understanding and execution of news opportunities he monetised this year. His early participation was narrow because the phenomena he traded forced it. The phenomena itself forced a framework—one anomaly, one entry, one exit. This made decision close to binary, not lost in choice. Similarly, our fine freckled friend, first met in Inaugurating the Next Cycle, began his career trading solely headlines—not economic data or the broader menu a “news trader” would pursue.
He too started narrowly. Then, he burst out of the Minimum Viable Trader phase faster than most, and now grows wider each year in the range of opportunities he can monetise. His execution was once constrained to “all-in, all-out,” grabbing the sure ticks a headline offered rather than complicating execution in an ocean of choice that overwhelms the novice.
We’d even argue—unsolicited—on R.G.’s behalf, whose “Letter to the Editor” began this avalanche, that his early career was too marked by choice abundance, not isolation. He did what he was supposed to and did it well: experimental and social learning, journaling and debriefing, iterating on different traders from temperament to approach. But starting wide came at the expense of performance, confining him to several years of alternating success and failure. Yet the years of iteration did not exempt him from eventually jettisoning much of it to focus on this year’s main opportunities—executing them with the nail-dragging grip of a besieged MVT determined to keep his gains. That hard-fought consistency launched him this year, resurrecting his account, allowing him to draw from it for expenses, and to keep building it. Not unlike the young Collector’s own experience—of whom R.G. sits just behind in AXIA’s Cyprus office.
That brings us to the final caveat and warning of the MVT: there comes a point at which the trader has learned enough. The moment is indeterminate, dictated by market conditions and opportunity. Realistically, it will not come in the first days or weeks. Months? Debatable, and contingent on context. This is not to condemn learning itself, but to insist that novices remain lean learners, aware of the dangers of choice abundance—of becoming the overgrown, overprepared learner.
R.G. also offers a view of what comes next. After such focus, a trader eventually becomes redundant if they stay narrow. The danger deepens when markets remain stable long enough to seduce them into sameness. Growth demands widening—expanding opportunity sets—but doing so requires unmaking what once worked. They must relinquish the very habits, mentalities, and reinforcements of success that launched them. It takes courage to walk out of the stronghold and embark on the open, solitary journey of the Always Viable Trader.
Launching a career is antagonistic to sustaining one. The transition between the two is treacherous: another field of mass-career casualties. To forget that the Minimum Viable Trader is a temporary design is to lose the advantage it conferred; its strength lies in its expiry. Yet, with the exception of this strange, contractionary phase of the MVT, longevity still depends on learning, openness, and a measured return to choice abundance, the very thing we’ve spent this essay arguing against. In the hands of a hardened, successful MVT—one who can pull a performer out of their learning-self—those roots take hold. Thus begin the first shoots of the Always Viable Trader.
» Part IV: The Always Viable Trader—continues the journey.
Survival becomes expansion. The trader leaves the fortress that kept them alive, confronting traps of bloat, non-linear P&L, and the peril of identity. The task now: to widen intelligently, seeking meaningful surprise, not randomness.
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.
great piece, wonderfully written!