I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Sunday Planning, I plan for the week ahead.
My number one task this week: Develop entry criteria for my trades
Last week was a difficult one for me in my trading, as I had put on a couple positions that were counter-trend and not very well planned out. The continuing trend slapped me down.
I could have written this Reddit post myself:
Can’t stop trading against the trend
For me it feels like a reversal can happen at any moment so I’m afraid to trade with the trend and it’s blowing me up trying to go for reversals, I just can’t get it through my head that trend is your friend.
Anyone else had this problem or is struggling with this?
This has been a long-standing problem of mine. I’m too contrarian. Generally speaking, the market tends to keep moving in the same direction it’s been moving. Momentum is my friend!
The top suggestion in response to the Reddit post is to “stop trading your feeling. You will always have feeling- thinking the market may go up or down- but stop trading it.”
Instead, use specific entry criteria. I have not done that. So that’s my number one task for this week: develop specific entry criteria for trades, and be more clear about what kind of trades I want to be doing right now. My options wheel trades are doing great. My expansion into other kinds of options trades: credit spreads, debit spreads, and deeply in-the-money calls, not so great. That’s because I approached the options wheel with a much more systematic set of rules and I’ve been winging it on the others.
Alongside that, I’m planning to limit my Twitter scrolling which causes too many feelings, and too many counter-trend impulses.
Expanding my daily routine to include reading great novels
What will I do instead of scrolling Twitter and reading financial news? Slow reading of great novels.
Yesterday, I wrote about Alexander Nehamas’ theory that Nietzsche believed you should live your life as though it were great literature, as though it were a literary text to interpret.
I love this idea. It provides a way of approaching the events of my life in a way that imbues them with meaning, that makes the bad parts of it equally or more important than the good parts (because who wants to read a story where nothing bad happens to the protagonist?), and where not everything has to turn out okay (it could be a tragedy, right? I hope not, but there’s no good reason to assume my life, or various situations within it, will have a happy ending).
To me this textuality of life idea provides a counterpoint to Buddhist ideas of acceptance and mechanical cognitive behavioral therapy style thought disputation and thought reformulation. When you practice amor fati (love of fate) you don’t dispute that terrible, horrible things may have happened or may happen in the future. You don’t cultivate equanimity in the face of grief, terror, joy, ennui. You welcome all parts of life, and seek to act as a protagonist who would be worthy of being in a novel. You seek to be a monumental character, at least in your own story.
Thinking about turning my own life into literature, treating it as a text to interpret, not a set of happenings to reframe (CBT) or let go of (Buddhism), makes me more interested in reading great literature.
I started Iris Murdoch’s novel The Bell yesterday which is not considered one of her best works, but it is an accessible one. After I finish it, I’m planning to read her 1978 Booker Prize-winning novel The Sea, The Sea.
And I’ve requested Anna Karenina from the library. I’ve read it before, but not from the angle I’ll be approaching it now.
I do read a lot, both fiction and nonfiction, but I’ve not done it in a kind of slow, contemplative style like I plan to approach it now. I learned to read very fast when I was in elementary school and I brought that with me through now. It’s time to cultivate a different kind of reading style.
ChatGPT gave me a few ideas about what to pay attention to when reading The Bell:
- Watch for “private stories” vs shared reality.
- Notice how people fail to see each other clearly.
- Pay attention to the moral weight of ordinary perception.
- Observe the “community experiment” structure (The Bell about a lay community forming as an accessory to a nunnery).
- Look for moments of cognitive and moral dislocation — where someone’s story about the world stops working.
- Don’t rush to unify everything into a single interpretive synthesis.
That last one is very important. A great novel can’t be distilled down into one simplistic theme. That’s the very nature of textual interpretation: there should be many interpretations possible, and it’s up to the reader to construct her own.
In The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson writes of how conflict with her partner makes her think of simplistic fiction:
We bantered good-naturedly, yet somehow allowed ourselves to get polarized into a needless binary. That’s what we both hate about fiction, or at least crappy fiction—it purports to provide occasions for thinking through complex issues, but really it has predetermined the positions, stuffed a narrative full of false choices, and hooked you on them, rendering you less able to see out, to get out.
What might be similar to this in treating your life as a text to interpret is if you try to narrate events too neatly along the lines of the idea “everything happens for a reason” or “it’s either a blessing or a lesson” — meaning everything in your life is either a good thing (a blessing) or a lesson (something to learn from).
Ideally great novels will help me see my life in more colors with more ideas and less pat summaries. I could explore this right here with all the black-and-white stories of my life but I don’t want to make this into a tell-all.
Tarot archetype evolution
I like to have a Tarot card in mind to guide my week. This week: King of Wands.
I’ve long resonated with the Nine of Pentacles as an archetype to live by. The card pictures a woman alone in her garden, wearing fancy robes, and surrounded by pentacles (a.k.a. coins). She has a falcon on her arm representing intelligence and discipline.
But lately that archetype feels too focused on the fact of my singlehood and my money.
Yesterday I drew King of Wands in a reading, as guidance for figuring out how I show up in solitude or for belonging — that is, responding to the question of my singlehood and how I embody it, live it, or discard it.
The King of Wands has mastered creative fire. His robe shows salamanders with their tails in their mouths, meaning maturity and completion, according to Rachel Pollack in Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom.
And the King is obviously not a symbol of single womanhood. He is more a representation of what I can be on my own — a king in my own right (and a queen too).
The shadow card of the reading was the Six of Wands, showing a man on horseback with a laurel wreath on his head, riding as though in a parade. It represents victory and triumph, external recognition.
This card represents my need to be seen as winning. Even as I try to live with Nietzsche’s amor fati, loving my fate into eternity, I’m wishing for a comeback, a return to the life where I felt recognized and validated.
This card asks me: what would it mean to affirm my life fully if no one ever witnessed it? If my artwork weren’t exhibited or sold? If I never wrote a book to great acclaim? If I never walked an aisle as a bride again? If my options trading never made so much money I could brag about it?
Combine this with the King of Wands, represented by fire, and I start to think about a burning away of who I was and what I wished for. This is something other than Dabrowski’s positive disintegration: quicker, more violent, probably more painful
In Tarot for Change, Jessica Dore writes of this king:
And so even if the fire is a destructive force in a person’s life, it has the potential within it to be a catalyst for maturing. One of the most often noted features of the King of Wands is his restless energy. As a king is a symbol of something exalted, fire in its highest function always has a job to do. To keep burning away and burning away to vapor what is not true.
This leads back to Nietzsche’s textuality, his amor fati. A story, a life, that includes a burning away of what is not true will be much more compelling than one in which nothing needs burning away — or one in which a person refuses to face the fire, to live through it, to reconstruct and rebuild after, when all is ashes.
I’m thinking of this need of mine to leave Han’s achievement society behind. What I need, instead of burning out is to burn up.