On The Importance of Sitzfleisch: Or, What It Takes.
Do You Have The Gritty Skill That Defined Last Week?
Across the AXIA trading desks.
Sunday 2nd – Sunday 9th February 2025.
London, England, and Limassol, Cyprus.
You’re in a peculiar airport terminal waiting for your delayed flight. Being the most unlucky trader in the world, both announcer and airline are playing a perverse game with you and other most unlucky traders in the world pacing in front of the boarding gate, looking at the plane from the window or slouching in metal chairs.
But! At any time, day or night, the aeroplane will suddenly commence boarding. This leaves mere moments to get through the gate before it shuts. Did you risk a brief toilet break or doze off? Better luck next time! No refunds. Buy another ticket tomorrow; please fly again.
Those who caught the flight… well… the powers that be who run the airport for their connecting flight have whimsical moods too…
You must continue this the next day and the next day, regardless of your success in catching the plane. This is what the environment demands. You can’t lie down with headphones and a movie because the boarding comes and goes in a flash. Letting yourself be distracted at the last moment of waiting wasted the past ten hours of arduous, unending, grinding alert.
Last week’s trading experience was such a test. It was not a test of going 0 to 60 but going from 60 to 0—waiting for “our main man” to drop the T word. Action! Action!— then understanding how to wind down to the baseline marathon pace of the week. It’s not a lone injection of instant volatility but a continuous state, a stormy sea with enough cumulative opportunities to move the needle of your P&L. This was a test of what the Germans beautifully call Sitzfleisch. That is—sitting flesh. The ability to endure. To toil. To grind without distraction or respite. It’s more than stamina, and it’s everything in trading. May you be blessed with an iron arse.
A trader must maintain deep immersion for continuous market observation and alertness, enabling decisive action. Who do you bet on? The security guard watching Netflix, sipping soda, grazing on doughnuts? Or the half-savage, perched in a tree, pissing in bottles, trench knife in hand—waiting, watching, ready to strike? And yet to do this in a constant state of accumulating fatigue—go home by 3 a.m. Sunday, then 2 a.m. Monday, then 10 p.m. Tuesday. Such were the hours for AXIA’s Cyprus team last week. And that doesn’t mean coming in later, distracting or entertaining oneself because the aeroplane can leave anytime. Consider the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) articles becoming routine.
This deep immersion in market flow—spotting changes over time—is essential for a news-event trader navigating the Trump 2.0 Tariff Theme as it is for the so-called ‘technical’ traders. Their operations must evolve with the market. You need to experience everything.
You need to experience it all because the second best way to put meat on one’s gluteus maximus is to endure these grindy hours yourself. It’s a skill! Earned by doing the thing to raise the bar on the trader’s mental and physical endurance. You run more by running more. However, the best way to develop the skill is in an ultra-low-volatility environment. Tread carefully around traders who learned to fight for scraps. They know how to hunt.
A trader’s reality involves long stretches of mundane toil, punctuated by frantic action. Then, the trader returns to the slow grind of watching paint dry. The same is true across the firm, where traders at every level have spent the past week building and pushing P&L. A youngster just clawed back from a negative account; others hit the $100,000 threshold in a day. Some went further—multiples of that. A few crossed seven figures since the trading year began.
But these performances are no longer interesting in this market! The trading details are same same: a déjà vu of A Tale Of Two Truths. If you’ve experienced that, you’ve seen the same action: no big trade but a stream of ‘smaller’ opportunities. Sitzfleisch is the unspoken skill. The intangible advantage. It carries a cost—a physical, mental, and strategic burden. These costs are rarely discussed, lost in the space between obvious details.
The Descent
Let’s go deeper; I’ll be your Virgil. Saturday and Sunday allowed for rest and reflection, crucial for human discretionary traders. Morale and excitement are high; traders are risk-seeking and open to future opportunities. The payout happens on Sunday night and Monday. Then the challenges start with lower-tier opportunities; the ground turns swampy and requires more effort for less gain. Opportunities diminish; P&L volatility increases, draining you emotionally and physically. Going from zero to twenty is one thing. But up ten, down five, up twelve, down six? That’s something else, yes? Morale drops, fatigue increases. Welcome… Wednesday. You’ve slept late and little. Now you put in hours for little market-moving Executive Orders, comments, social media posts, or—anything! Energy is expended. But you need to endure until Friday.
This is where the real Sitzfleisch test begins, or when you start building tolerance. Surviving the week reflects the grindy demands of a multi-decade trader. Weakness is easier to invite. Peak fatigue—the trader cannot reflect and rejuvenate; you burn the candle at both ends. You can spot symptoms. Here we go again! Another late night—nothing, of course! Why do we keep doing this? Why even come in tomorrow? This was heretical on Sunday yet common by Wednesday. The trader now shirks risk instead of seeking it. They assume something won’t happen, perhaps wishing it won’t happen so they can sleep. The creative market navigation faculties are impaired; the trader is more reactive and knee-jerk than proactive and no longer thinks laterally to grade opportunities and information. For example, proactiveness in scaling size to match low- or high-tier opportunities.
Creative? Yes, markets aren’t a singular problem to solve, now and forever. They demand navigation skills in an ever-changing environment. Navigating persistent novelty requires creative problem-solving—answering a novel question the market is temporarily and abruptly asking. When one feels sleepy, tired, or has low morale, creativity is the first faculty to be lost, which is your primary advantage against other humans and machines. What then?
The two wings of the trader are conviction and stamina. But conviction comes from a creative wellspring, dealing with novel information and meaning—to know our past and future in the context of markets and the trader’s story. To know when to go for it, summon the trader’s flighty muse: conviction. In a non-linear environment, conviction—and leverage—must be applied to these special moments where the trader can identify and stick to it by believing in it.
Edge In Whitespace
What will separate future traders is what has already separated great athletes: recovery. For instance, a Cyprus floor trader struggled to sleep after a long stint, only getting home by 3 a.m. The question, as Alex Haywood suggests, is how can this trader reduce it to thirty minutes next time? When skills are maximised, as in high-level athletics, outperformance and sustainability are found in this whitespace area—recovery.
This applies to psyche and spirit. How can the trader restore space for quiet reflection within a week that didn’t permit it? The body can recover faster than the mind, which was stressed all week, maybe months. Remember Spring 2020? Rejuvenation methods: walks, nature, kids, family, friends, reading or other creatively fulfilling activities are explored as much as blow-out parties that the Immortal Cypriot knows—purposeful recovery of spirit. Return to baseline.
In the long term, trading impacts both body and health. If “gradually. Then suddenly” describes financial bankruptcy, it applies to the body. There’s a cost. Dealing with this involves the longest investments to see a return—perhaps the most wicked investments—not returns, but just enough to delay decline. For the best traders, their bodies will retire them before the markets do. When all else is maximised, perhaps the new trader who will outclass us by 2055 will be the one who takes their health seriously and implements the best practices today.
Those who have consistently outperformed have developed and maintained their Sitzfleisch. Others lost it due to recent bountiful market activity, so they don’t need to stick around mentally or physically. Another opportunity is around the corner, but only in this market state. Those without Sitzfleisch—ask anyone who survived the 2013-2016 ultra-low volatility period. You don’t have the Sitzfleisch to focus, watch, prowl, and strike for merely—only—one trade a day? A good trade every fortnight? A trade that moves the needle every quarter? If you miss that, who knows when you’ll eat next? Don’t show me a new trader who can talk about probabilities, psychology, macroeconomics, and their passion yet cannot endure 300 seconds without vaping, scrolling, talking, or walking. In a world that has obliterated boring, show me a new trader who can be still with nothing, and I will show you a King. The dry times will come again; it’s better to train das Sitzfleisch now; it’s invaluable compared to today’s capricious P&L because this unspoken skill is fundamental for future gains and a long career.
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.