I Contain Multitudes, Part I: Trading in the Future Perfect
A trading-floor cross-section on Market Profile, branching futures and composing a position before the day’s facts are complete.
Dear Practitioners,
The following is a spiritual successor to The Answer to a Trade Is Another Trade, or: 46 Mid-Year Field Notes from the Trading Desk. Many of you wanted more of that cross-section form. This time it narrows to two connected problems: how a trader reasons forward before the day’s facts are complete, and how a position should grow—or refuse to grow—as those facts arrive.
Some of what follows will be familiar. Perhaps banal. A buying tail is a buying tail; the initial balance is the initial balance. The difficulty rarely lies in knowing the vocabulary. It lies in organising observation, expectation, disconfirmation and risk in the correct order.
The Profile gives the Bund example its strict grammar. It does not supply the trade idea. The exercise is wider. Whatever the instrument or approach, the trader must still ask what has to happen next, what should not be happening, and how many separate things the trade requires from the world before it can pay. The Bund and Profile make the exercise concrete; the underlying reasoning travels across markets and frameworks.
The specific Bund session grew from recent discussions with traders at AXIA’s Cyprus office. Yes, still here!
This is Part I of I Contain Multitudes. Part II turns towards the self: the professional identities a trader may need to inhabit, and what happens when the mask that once served them refuses to come off.
Good trading to you all,
Bogdan
Let us first consider, then, the branching overall narrative that has emerged by midsummer. Various traders on the floor have been making headway in trying to discover what comes next, but moving into it requires them to remain reactive to and ready for the Iran War theme without remaining completely and utterly focused upon it. They need to open themselves towards further skill development away from the headline. To trade, as we have said many times in Asymmetrist, the flow between headlines.
What follows is another cross-section of my discussions with traders across the career curve. Much of this has involved helping traders rediscover the Market Profile, or more broadly, develop a non-headline-driven framework. Building on the recurrent theme across When Tools Become the World, The Answer to a Trade Is Another Trade and, most recently, The Quality of Your Questions, and Questions of Quality, remember the following. Whatever ‘magic’ the Profile appears to possess lies in the thinking that comes with it: the higher-level thinking about one’s own approach, what one is observing, and how one is approaching it.
The Market Profile is a strict grammar, not the market itself. Each letter represents one 30-minute period and records the prices at which the market traded during it. It permits the trader to visualise the session forward and, as market action produces more information, eliminate possible end-of-day structures. It helps narrow the haystack rather than pluck out the one needle that confirms what they already believe. It cannot be the generator of ideas. It gives structure and organisation to the huge funnel of information the trader is taking in. Absent all the other information and factors at work—theme, narrative, macroeconomics, positioning, flows and so on—it will render a trader one-dimensional.
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