I Contain Multitudes, Part II: The Trader You Must Be, the Person You Need Not Become
Giving yourself permission to become what you must
Dear Practitioners,
Last week’s I Contain Multitudes, Part I: Trading in the Future Perfect concerned the trader thinking forward: acting before the day’s facts are complete, then allowing the position to grow—or refusing to let it grow—as those facts arrive.
This second part turns, as promised, towards the self. The professional personae trading calls forward. The private person who must live across them. And what happens when a version of the trader which once made money becomes increasingly difficult to leave behind.
Taken together, these two pieces are, really, the spiritual successor to The Answer to a Trade Is Another Trade, or: 46 Mid-Year Field Notes from the Trading Desk. They grew from the same cross-section of AXIA’s Cyprus floor: conversations with traders across the career curve, fragments gathered between sessions, and older questions returning under new market conditions. Part I asked how the trader’s reasoning must change as the market reveals itself. Part II asks how the trader himself must change and how far that change should be permitted to travel.
Much of this I’ve been pondering in the background while sitting in the cradle of an olive tree, reading in a well-watered grove with shady walks. Ha! I can only wish. Yours truly remains among the trading desks, but one can travel some distance in the mind’s eye.
You will therefore find the Greeks and Romans wandering through what follows. They gave me language for a problem still visible on the floor: the trader one must sometimes become, and the person one does not have to remain.
Good trading to you all,
Bogdan
There is a lack of inner peace that I have come across in many traders across the career curve: they are in conflict with themselves before they are in conflict with the market. Trading calls forth qualities which may appear incompatible with the rest of one’s life, or at least with the person one understood oneself to be before the demands of this domain became known. Modern performance culture offers the easy answer—create an alter ego, flip the switch, wear the mask. How do I become someone else when I compete? All of which contain the suggestion that the difficulty lies in becoming, temporarily and by some act of will, another person.
Much danger comes with success. The market rewards the person the trader has called forward. Slowly, that person becomes harder to leave at the desk. One could see something like this on the trading floor across February and March, and then in what followed. The Iran War trading environment rewarded impatience, aggression, speed, the willingness to hit first and ask questions later. Traders had to bring sheer fury to the desk. A mere two months later, some of those same traits and qualities were loss-making. The trader had not necessarily become worse. The environment which had called that trader forward had changed.
Asymmetrist has gestated some version of this question for a long time. Crossed now with my work as writer-in-residence at AXIA Cyprus this summer, and with a ravenous reading of various Roman and Greek writings, the question can be reformulated more exactly: how do I become fully myself by learning which part of me belongs in each situation?
Cicero, the Roman statesman and orator, gives us somewhere to begin. In On Duties he describes four personae—four roles or aspects of a person—carried simultaneously: our common human nature; our particular temperament; the position imposed by chance and circumstance; and the role chosen deliberately as a way of life. Of the last, he writes: “what role we ourselves may choose to sustain is decided by our own free choice.” So it begins as an act of choice, and becomes one of cultivation. One decides, Cicero continues, “who and what manner of men we wish to be and what calling in life we would follow.”
Cicero’s fourth persona is close to a role consciously accepted, together with the conduct and obligations proper to it. That is to say trading requires a professional identity that is not identical to your ordinary personality. Or, more importantly, to give yourself permission to create a separate one, and to recognise the advantage if you do. ‘Trading’ and ‘personality’ are difficult subjects because they are clichés. But traders nonetheless are wrapped up in them. They beat themselves up that they need to become more confident. Rather than saying, ‘I need to become more confident’, my trader persona, instead, must become capable of confidence when the situation requires it.
One cannot simply declare themselves a profitable, successful trader, as though the outcome can be produced by assertion. Profitability remains answerable to skill, opportunity, time, randomness and the market itself. But I can declare the conduct I am willing to cultivate. I will act decisively when the evidence warrants it. I will abandon a view when it is invalidated. I will tolerate embarrassment. I will not confuse waiting with weakness, nor aggression with courage. I will become capable of behaving as the trading domain requires, even where my private personality would not naturally permit it. The professional persona accepts the demands which may make that result possible.
The private self may take more work to move. The professional persona, instead, can be deliberately formed. It can develop capacities which the vocation requires but ordinary life does not. More than this, it can become a finely tuned instrument for a particular environment, held at a distance when it no longer fits, reshaped, perhaps retired, and then readapted for the next.
To do so is part of moving from a minimum viable trader to an always viable trader—from surviving one environment towards surviving change itself. When the professional and personal personae mix, a way of trading becomes personal identity. It then acquires the stubbornness of any identity under attack. Ego, pride, vanity—to name but a few. The trader does not wish to discard it and shift into another. Held separately enough from the private self, however, the professional persona can contain different sub-personae: The Warrior for fast, headline-hitting markets; The Engineer when flows become intentional, positional and devoid of news catalysts.
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