Dear Practitioners,
Thank you to all who joined me last night. It was a joy to take the time and explore freely. To move, somewhat experimentally, through whatever crosses or links in a circular (recursive!) fashion. I feel it’s the start of something special.
This post contains the full recording of Stream One, aired Thursday, 6 November 2025.
Further down, you’ll find the show notes, but first, the links for the next session.
Stream Two will cover:
Chapter 2 — “The Razor”
Thursday 20 November · 6 p.m. GMT
As we read together, please read Chapter 2 in advance and bring your marginalia, thoughts, ideas, and reactions to the live stream. Participate in the chat—or, if you prefer, subscribers can discuss and add asynchronously to the long-term threads via Substack’s Chat feature.
» Join the book club’s discussion of Preface, Introduction and Chapter One here.
What We Covered In Stream One:
• Preface (“Thinking Upstream”)
• Introduction (including “Beyond the Disclaimer”)
• Chapter 1: The Trading Desks
Explored:
The cover art — hidden price ladders, skyscraper vertigo, and the crises of design.
Escher’s reflective globe — the trader’s interior world and bounded perspective.
Consciousness & recursion — from Hofstadter and Hamlet to marginalia and rereading.
Deep observation → decisive action — Napoleon, conviction, execution (Asymmetrist article: Start Narrow, Grow Wide).
Beyond the disclaimer — why trading is not “just a game.”
Story as technology — Fletcher’s Wonderworks, Tarkovsky’s Sculpting in Time, and creativity as discipline.
Bounded complexity / perpetual change — the markets to navigate, not solve (Asymmetrist articles: Original Sin, Constraints, The Markets Can Only Be Navigated, Not Solved).
Chapter markers:
(Substack does not yet support clickable timestamps.)
03:00 – Opening & setup | What this series is about
06:05 – The cover as “price ladder” & design stories
13:30 – Escher’s reflective sphere; you as the unshakeable focus of your world
18:50 – Hofstadter, recursion, and consciousness as a trader’s practice
24:00 – “Navigate, don’t solve” the market → bounded complexity
28:10 – How to read this book: marginalia, deep observation → decisive action
36:01 – Beyond the disclaimer: trading isn’t “just a game”
41:00 – Thinking Upstream: story as technology (Angus Fletcher)
46:35 – Tarkovsky’s “a world in a drop of water” & creative practice
1:08:55 – Why think meta: shifting games, creativity as prerequisite
1:17:35 – Chapter 1 begins: The Trading Desks
1:29:20 – Process, slowness, and dictation (Napoleon riff)
1:38:10 – Floor → risk room → “it’s always halftime”; body & stress notes
1:45:07 – “Extreme sport” mindset → backing yourself (The Engineer)
1:48:40 – Open trade / “going for the jugular” → end of Chapter 1 arc
1:56:25 – Sebald & The Rings of Saturn: recursion & genre dissolution
2:03:27 – Closing reflections → what’s ahead (Chapter 2 ‘The Razor’ tease)
Mentioned Works & References
For those who want to explore the writers, ideas, and influences mentioned throughout the stream, here’s a concise list of books, figures, and Asymmetrist connections that shaped the Stream-of-Consciousness.
Books & Thinkers
Traders of Our Time — Bogdan Stoichescu & Alex Haywood
M.C. Escher — Hand with Reflecting Sphere
Douglas Hofstadter — Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
Harold Bloom — Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
Julian Jaynes — The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
Andrew Roberts — Napoleon: A Life
Angus Fletcher — Wonderworks: The Science of Stories
Andrei Tarkovsky — Sculpting in Time
Jesse Livermore / Edwin Lefèvre — Reminiscences of a Stock Operator
Ezra Pound & T.S. Eliot — the Modernists’ search for meaning after the Great War
John Keats — “Negative Capability”
John Coates — The Hour Between Dog and Wolf (trader physiology and risk). Asymmetrist’s exploration of Coates’ book.
W.G. Sebald — The Rings of Saturn
Cultural & Historical Touchpoints:
Labyrinth (1986, dir. Jim Henson) — the uncanny maze of markets
Tron (1982) — the trader as a figure straddling real and digital worlds
Jun Huh — Fields Medalist mathematician, for creativity within logic-bound systems
Winston Churchill — On Napoleon: “No greater man of action since Julius Caesar” (via Roberts on Napoleon)
Asymmetrist Cross-References:
The Trader’s Original Sin Is Attempting To Make An Infinite Process Finite
Start Narrow, Grow Wide (The Counterintuitive Shape of Trader Development)
