You Can’t Approach Trading Like a Business

📈 TRADER PSYCHOLOGY

You Can’t Approach Trading Like a Business

When trading gurus tell you that you should treat trading as a business, they couldn’t be more wrong. Trading is a business the way screenwriting is a business, the way painting is a business, the way poetry is a business. 🎨✍️📜

Trading is nothing like making donuts 🍩 or cars 🚗 or even planning weddings 💍. There is no set formula. There is no physical certainty of food chemistry, metallurgy, or any other science whose laws are inviolable and repeatable. There is not even the general certainty of sociology, which operates under the premise that people want status, thus making the business of planning weddings relatively predictable.

Speculation is observation, and while human nature may be broadly the same from Homer to Shakespeare to Balzac to Roth, it is just different enough that we need new literature to capture the uniqueness of each generation. 📚✨

That’s why writing a trading plan is much more like writing a novel than it is like writing a business plan. There is no “addressable market.” There is no “demand.” There is no “supply.” One day it’s massive, the next day it disappears altogether. And certainly, there is absolutely no “value proposition.” 📈❓

The market is perhaps the purest commercial expression of every flawed human impulse that art has struggled to understand ever since man could record his ideas. There is no measured reason. There is only pain, pleasure, braggadocio, despair, deception, and power plays. And all of it happens every single day. 😨😃🎭

Furthermore, in trading more than any other daily activity, there is a perpetual feeling of uncertainty. The knowledge that no matter how many times you’ve taken the step before, you never quite know if the ground below you will crumble on the very next move you make. 🌪️❓

That’s why approaching trading with all the imagination of a bookkeeper is absolutely wrong. Bookkeeping is vital to understanding the basic mechanics of money management, but in and of itself, it is of little value in mastering the skill. Trading is an art, and like all art, it is driven by curiosity, discovery, and most importantly, the process of trial and error. 🎨🔍🔄

How many sketches did Picasso make? How many drafts of “Catch-22” did Joseph Heller write? Don’t bother looking that up. These are rhetorical questions. 🤔🖌️

It is amusing that newbie traders try a strategy for a week, attempt a few tentative trades, and the moment it incurs losses, they quit. If every writer, every painter, every inventor had that attitude, where would we be as a civilization? 🚀🌍

The statement: “treat your trading like a business,” doesn’t even begin to explain the true nature of the activity. "Treat your trading as a lifelong art project and use your business skills to stay in the game" is not nearly as pithy but is certainly more accurate. 🎨💼