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 are sitting in a peculiar airport terminal waiting for your delayed aeroplane. Being, of course, the most unlucky trader in the world, both announcer and airline are in the mood to play a most perverse game with you and all the other most unlucky traders in the world anxiously pacing in front of the boarding gate, looking down at the plane from the window or slouching in those metal chairs.
But! At any time, day or night, the aeroplane will suddenly commence boarding—with mere moments to run through the gate before it shuts. Did you risk a brief toilet break or vaguely doze off? Better luck next time! No refunds. Buy another ticket tomorrow; please fly again.
And those who did catch the flight… well… the powers that be who run the airport for their connecting flight have whimsical moods too…
Yet you must continue doing 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 there with headphones and a movie on because the boarding comes and goes but in a flash. Letting yourself be distracted on the eleventh hour of waiting just wasted the past ten of arduous, unending, grinding alert.
Such was the experience of last week’s trading; 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!—but then understanding how to wind down to the baseline marathon pace of the rest of the week. It is 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 in either direction. Well, old boy, this was a test of what the Germans beautifully call Sitzfleisch. And may you be blessed with an iron arse.
Sitzfleisch—sitting flesh. The ability to endure. To toil. To grind without distraction or respite. It’s not just stamina. It’s an iron arse welded to the chair. And it’s everything in trading.
A trader must preserve a state of deep immersion to enable continuous market observation and alertness, permitting 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. the past Sunday, then 2 a.m. on Monday, then 10 p.m. on Tuesday. Such were the hours for AXIA’s Cyprus team last week, for example. And that does not mean coming in later, distracting or entertaining oneself because the aeroplane can leave anytime. Consider the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) articles slowly becoming par for the course.
This deep immersion in market flow—spotting its changes and twists over time—is just as essential for a news-event trader navigating the developing Trump 2.0 Tariff Theme as it is for the so-called ‘technical’ traders. Their operations must evolve, just as the market itself will. There is no getting out of it. You need to experience it all.
And 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 simply 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 within an ultra-low-volatility environment. Tread carefully around the traders who grew up learning to fight for mere scraps. They really know how to hunt.
A trader’s reality is long stretches of mundane toil, punctuated by frantic action—only to come off that high and return 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 even crossed seven figures since the trading year began.
But these performances are no longer interesting in this market state! The trading details themselves are same same: déjà vu of A Tale Of Two Truths. If you’ve experienced that, you’ve already seen the same action over the past few weeks: no singular big trade but a stream of differing ‘smaller’ opportunities. Sitzfleisch is the unspoken skill. The intangible advantage. It carries a cost, a burden—physical, mental, and strategic. These costs are rarely discussed, lost in the space between more obvious details.
The Descent
Let’s go deeper; I’ll be your Virgil. Saturday and most of Sunday allowed for rest and reflection. The latter is crucial to all human discretionary traders. Morale is high—floor-wide—so is excitement; the traders are risk-seeking and are not dismissive of future opportunities. The payout happens on Sunday night and on Monday, too. But then the slugfest starts with lower tier opportunities; the ground turns to marsh, swampy and requires evermore effort with less gain to navigate it. 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 entirely, yes? Morale drops, fatigue increases. Now welcome… Wednesday. You’ve slept late and little so far. Now you put in hours for little in the way of market-moving Executive Orders, comments, social media posts, or—anything! Precious energy is expended, nonetheless. But you still need to endure at least until Friday.
This is where the real Sitzfleisch test begins, or when you start building tolerance. Take that as the literal skill of surviving the week as it also reflects the grindy demands of a trader whose career lasts multi-decades. Now, weakness is easier to invite. Peak fatigue—the trader cannot reflect and rejuvenate; you burn the candle at both ends. You can also 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 rather than seeking it. They assume something won’t happen, perhaps even wishing it won’t happen so they can sleep. The creative market navigation faculties are becoming impaired; the trader is more reactive and knee-jerk-like than proactive and no longer thinks more laterally to grade the opportunities and information coming their way. For example, proactiveness in scaling size to match these low- or high-tier opportunities.
Creative? Yes, markets are not a singular problem to solve, now and forever, but instead demand navigation skills in an ever-changing environment. Navigating such persistent novelty requires creative problem-solving—answering a novel question that the market is temporarily and abruptly asking. When one feels sleepy, tired, or has low internal morale, creativity is the first faculty to be lost, which is also your primary advantage against other humans and machines. What then?
As noted, conviction and stamina are the two wings of this creature, the trader. But conviction is partly built from a creative wellspring, dealing with novel information and meaning—to know where we have come from and where we are about to go—in the context of both markets and the story of the traders themselves. To know that this is the moment to go for it, to summon the trader’s flighty muse: conviction. In a non-linear environment, conviction—and thereby leverage—must be applied to these special moments in time where the trader can uniquely identify it and stick to it by believing in it.
Edge In Whitespace
Beyond conviction, what will truly separate traders of the future is what has already separated great athletes: recovery. In the immediate term, take, for instance, a trader on the Cyprus floor who was struggling for two hours to fall asleep after a long stint, as he only made it back home by 3 a.m. The question, to echo Alex Haywood, 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 in this instance.
This also applies to both psyche and spirit; how can the trader restore space for quiet reflection within a week that did not permit it? The body can often recover faster than the mind, which was bludgeoned, stretched and stressed all week, perhaps months. Remember Spring 2020? Many rejuvenation methods are observed: walks, time with nature, the kids, with family and friends, some reading or other creatively fulfilling endeavours are explored as much as blow-out parties that the Immortal Cypriot knows well—purposeful recovery of spirit. Return to baseline.
In the long term, trading also bears an immense cumulative impact on both body and general health. If “Gradually. Then suddenly” has been used to describe financial bankruptcy, so it is for the bankruptcy of body. There is a cost one way or another. Dealing with this involves the longest investments to see any return—perhaps the most wicked of all investments—not returns, but just enough to stave off inevitable decline for as long as possible. 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 all by 2055 will be the one who takes their health seriously and puts in place the best and novel practices today.
Those who have still outperformed on a relative basis have already developed and maintained their Sitzfleisch. Others have lost it due to recent bountiful market activity, so they don’t need to stick around mentally, physically, or both. Another opportunity is around the corner, but only in this market state. And those who don’t have Sitzfleisch at all—well—ask anyone who survived the 2013-2016 ultra-low volatility crucible. You don’t have the Sitzfleisch to focus, to watch, prowl and strike for merely—only—one trade a day? How about a single good trade a fortnight? Or a real trade that moves the needle only a quarter? If you miss that, who knows when you’ll eat next? Give me not a new trader who can talk a good game about probabilities, psychology, macroeconomics, and their passion yet cannot endure 300 seconds without vaping, scrolling, talking or walking about. 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. Because the dry times will come again, it is better to train das Sitzfleisch now; it is invaluable compared to the capricious P&L of today because this unspoken skill is not only fundamental for future gains but critical for keeping 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.