The Idea INDEX
Node 004. (This Entry May Evolve)
First Published: 18.09.2025
This is a public work in progress.
An evolving index of links, notes, observations, and narrative fragments left to incubate, accumulate, and sometimes collide. The Idea Index Explained Here.
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What’s the minimum needed to monetise the current market environment? And how quickly and effectively can one get there? Monetisation is defined by engaging with market phenomena to achieve positive P&L over a series of trades.
Thought experiment: at some uncertain point, with enough neurons, consciousness emerges. At some uncertain point, with sufficient knowledge, processes, skills, and experience—including their complex relationships—a ‘trader’ emerges. Beyond this, adding ‘more’ becomes sub-optimal, because the trader has enough of ‘the right stuff’ to monetise the current environment. Yet, ‘more’ is exactly what a trader needs to sustain a career, because the current environment will change. But the minimum viable trader is only concerned with launching a career as fast and effectively as possible. Yet, launching a career is very different from sustaining it. And, as ever, a challenging contradiction to navigate.
To restate: what is the minimum viable trader who can monetise the current lowest hanging fruit in the market—no matter how scrappy or inefficient—to start building or recovering an account? That is, launch fast, and keep adapting. To create and expand the surface area for luck: a chance meeting with a positive influence—a team, perhaps. To allow a chance encounter with an exceptional situation for a huge payout and increased account size: buying time to stay in this career and then expand and learn adjacent. To expand, develop, and learn reflects the process of innovation and discovery, which takes time and is unpredictable. It also requires a connect-the-dots experience, and many dots can only be discovered with live, battle-scarred trading. Monetisation buys time.
Alternatively: faster monetisation creates traction. To realise the implications of running a real money account and the implications of relying on this cash flow. Experiencing this—validating and testing such a career—is already a significant milestone. Importantly, it is also where novice traders can conclude it isn’t for them. Do you want the end-game? This is success: to monetise and exit (with perhaps small financial gain) quickly is better than dragging out years of simulated, or trading of little consequence in the way of building a career. The opportunity cost of another life is too great. Yet traction permits staying power: cash flow for business and personal expenditures. Justification of the time invested by the trader to their personal and professional lives. Even the most hardcore isolated individualist cannot escape the benefits—and secretly: relief—of this social traction.
Kernel
You can’t choose your starting environment or the kind of trading it requires. Many newbies have this backwards, approaching a ‘style,’ ‘method,’ or ‘strategy,’ as a choose-your-own-adventure. [NB: Another future Idea Index entry: confusing the market with a trading ‘tool’.] But your career should move toward the power to choose. Mastery is to outgrow the market’s mercies.
In a trader’s career, going from nothing-to-something differs from going from something-to-great. It’s counterintuitive and often obscured by traders of all experiences. Nothing-to-something is to maintain a siege mentality—“I’ve got to make it happen!” This is to be a start-up. Time is short. Length of financial or belief runway? Unknown. You always have less than you’d think. That’s why getting product to market, as in a start-up, or trader to market—barebones yet functional—has been the origin story in many successful trader’s careers. Often, the market filters out anything else.
Pressure can be artificial but beneficial to tackle the “trader’s resource dilemma.” Per Traders of Our Time: “Too little time, few financial resources and relationship pressures ruin new and old traders alike, yet possessing too many resources ensures the same outcome.” The aggressive trader management at the former prop firm of The Collector, The Adventurer, The Razor, The Engineer, The Warrior and others partly fostered this do-or-die mentality. Each reached a level where they had ‘enough’ to monetise that environment and got the show on the road.
For example, readers of Traders of Our Time would recall The Warrior observing a peculiar relationship between two markets and resolving to trade precisely that relationship, and nothing more. He retained the ability to see the market world fresh, like a child, stumbling upon a ‘risk-on’, ‘risk-off’ correlation between the S&P and the Bund, without knowing these terms. He didn’t amass more indicators, charts, ‘strategies’, ‘methods’ or seek validation—just trade it! At this early start, isolation was ironically beneficial as it is detrimental for the rest of a trader’s career. He didn’t resolve to make elaborate plans—read: elaborate trades—but aimed to merely take a few ticks out of each market, to be “green everyday.” He can figure out the rest later. And all of this was within months of joining a trading floor and considering it as a career. That’s how fast and simple this minimum viable trader got himself to market and evolved from there.
Constraints Aid Career Design
Our novice Warrior’s story inches us towards career design, interchangeable with strategic design, which traders need to get right from the beginning. Consider a strategy classic for minimum viable traders: turning weaknesses into strengths. What are the new trader weaknesses? Constraints and inexperience.
What amazing strengths! Constraints teach. Consider the insights derived by the novice with only a bishop and pawn to play with in Chess compared to a full board. Imagine the depth already learned from these two pieces—how they move, work together, and achieve goals, rather than the numerous choices of fourteen more pieces, forcing superficial learning to deal with overwhelming choice. Derived insights are the strongest, loaded with a chance for innovation. Constraints drive insights. Imagine the insights derived by a trader forced to first watch a single price ladder with no other external input, knowledge, information, tools—no other pieces—and then to trade the phenomena they can naturally observe. What depth to maximise at this foundational level! Perhaps that can even be enough to launch an MVT.
Constraints liberate creativity. Consider creating an effective story and evocative narrative through black and white images alone. No sound, no dialogue—how can the filmmaker move the audience under such constraints? Imagine the insights a filmmaker might gain, but one could bet reliably on the creativity and innovation that is more likely to arise with constraints rather than an environment with infinite choice, budget, and time—relinquishing most constraints, and therefore permitting slack. We’ve returned to the trader’s resource dilemma.
Both examples reveal the detriment of choice, especially for the novice. The Warrior benefited, accidentally, through choice isolation. He had fewer tools, charts, screens, and distractions than current novice traders over fifteen years later. What ails the novice, against the ethos of the minimum viable trader, is bloat.
New trader intakes among the AXIA desks and retail domain reveal a skew towards over-preparation, to bloated proportions. There is bloat in process, routine, journal-debriefing; excessive simulator time to experience ‘more,’ trade more patterns, more indicators, etc. A gluttony driven by fear of starvation—chasing an ‘it’ moment, or attempting to ‘solve markets’—as if more would de-risk the enterprise.
Worse yet, the rate of change in the market environment, and subsequently the sudden jumps required in different skills needed to navigate it, is more aggressive than ever. This makes the need to ‘prepare more’ self-fulfilling. By the time the novice trader launches live, the environment has likely moved on. It’s also partly why novice live traders enter immediate drawdown after time on the simulator. They advanced from simulator to live trading due to temporarily ‘solving’—learning then optimising the best practices of the current environment—likely at the peak potency of the current environment. Because even the lowest hanging fruit could be plucked by the novice. The only solution is the MVT—launch quick, launch minimal, ride the wave for as long as possible, to buy some staying power to learn and pivot. As mentioned to T.W.—a recent AXIA Cyprus trader gone live in June 2025—all that can be done is to stem the bleed and learn fast, and adapt. Pivot as they say out West.
The MVT will be outdated, but consider their experience and skills to be ‘T’ shaped, to borrow from adjacent industries. The MVT will find the lowest hanging fruit in the market—going deep on it—through total focus on it with attention and capital. They will extract from that opportunity as much as possible. They will still learn—consciously or not—other skills, and gain valuable experiences through immersion. These adjacent skills and experiences are comparatively more shallow, yet when the market shifts, there is enough traction, runway, and a clattering table of “spare parts”—experiences, information, knowledge, skills—to duct tape together to relearn and monetise the next environment. This is the horizontal part of the ‘T’ that develops as the trader goes deep into one skill—the stem of the ‘T’.
We shouldn’t discount further fragility. Fast success—fast monetisation—has doomed many traders. This is through lifestyle inflation failing to readjust after cash flow ceases, because markets changed and the trader didn’t. Or the trader ignores the P&L lag effect, adjusted to their learning rate. There’s a less pessimistic view. Regardless of how fast the trader monetises, they’d eventually face these pressures and traps. Better they fail faster and sooner, learn with more chances to try again without having to learn the same lesson twice.
Inexperience
We return to the bloated ‘preparer’ curse. They are likely outdated by launch compared to the MVT, and resistant to change because of the sunk cost of unlearning or discarding their months or years of work. They replicate a disadvantage of an experienced, profitable trader—making strong P&L in a stable market environment renders the trader increasingly resistant to change. This violates the advantage to the novice and MVT: inexperience.
In periods of intense change, inexperience is an asset. Consider the classic: new entrant disruptor vs incumbent disrupted; those preparing for yesterday’s war vs those launching tomorrow’s. Inexperience prevents anchoring to outdated assumptions, techniques, conventions, and practices. A veteran trader of twenty years remarked to Asymmetrist how much “baggage” an older trader carries, and the enviable position of the beginner not carrying the emotional luggage or practices of an old environment. To relearn, as some veteran traders argued, is harder than to learn fresh. Alternatively: extreme change is the best equaliser between the experienced and the inexperienced, because nobody knows. There is envy of the novice, because experienced traders know—consciously or otherwise—that solving the market makes one resistant to change. The greater they have ‘solved’—optimised—and gained from that environment, the more liable they become to giving back P&L once change occurs.
Other novice traders can be bloated on theory and never pricked with the needle of reality. Those stuck in the simulator for too long, or without a lucid community, are in a one-man echo chamber. They hallucinate, to borrow the term. They stick to fantastical ‘methods’ and ‘secrets’ that are unworkable or built on extreme “layers of abstraction,” as The Hero calls it. What they’re attempting doesn’t survive live trading because of the dirty, real friction of trading: slippage, commissions, tiny margins of error, connectivity, lag, etc., and the physical burden of being “in the market” all day.
Remember: more knowledge or information doesn’t reduce uncertainty. You can’t outlearn your way to a free lunch. Conversely, you can’t plan your way to outsized gains because they happen in exceptional, non-conforming circumstances. Surprise! For example, beyond a certain time and exposure to recurrent market phenomena, you can’t practice more on the price ladder (drills or otherwise) on the simulator for risk-free trading or guarantee success. Or to reach a level of ‘good trading’—there is only good enough.
Bloat indicates a violation of the necessities for the minimum viable trader—and all successful traders: Observation. Doing so fresh is crucial. Inexperience and constraints are powerful because a trader with only a price ladder or similar, can view things anew, like a child. They can derive insights, innovate, and not be prejudiced against the current environment. Perhaps monetising it faster than experienced traders.
Post-Launch
The minimum viable trader has only their observation powers and builds from there. They have all the constraints, and they emerge as a trader as they learn from them and creatively break from them. They know little, but just enough for freedom of re-creation and action. Most importantly, they’ve been tested by the market and managed to make something out of it. They now have real staying power to figure out the rest.
But the minimum viable trader must transition from the siege mentality to the open journey for the rest of their career. They must not be at the whim of every market environment but monetise, or navigate in all. The learning experience of a lifetime is to become an all-seasons trader, exploring one’s limits and learning from others, because that’s where growth takes place. To grow adjacently.
The minimum viable trader isn’t antagonistic from the “slow-brew trader,” prized on the desks and observed in Traders of Our Time. That superficially non-performing trader, yet harbouring deep processes and learning, which yield greatly later. These traders often are one of the same. Yet seems as but a small bridge, long forgotten, in a long trader’s career which is left forgotten, because of seeming diminishing relevancy to the veteran, older trader.
Even The Engineer, prized for his results as a ‘slow-brew trader’, was actually a minimum viable trader. While he was wrestling with the market profile and low volatility, small ranges of 2014-2016, he was maintaining a break-even account through small, scrappy, scalp style trades on the price ladder which were staples among traders of his old prop at the time. That was his low-hanging fruit. Or whatever semblance of fruit in a desolate landscape. But it was enough. Don’t starve and fail by trying to jump the chasm of the trader you want to be, by ignoring the trader you must be today to make tomorrow possible.
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Acknowledgements:
The photograph, provided by Axia Futures, is used with their permission, and they retain full ownership and copyright over the image.