I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Sunday Planning, I plan for the week ahead.
Today is a week for making magic, ordinary kinds of magic, magic in hosting a graduation, magic in getting immersed in a great novel, magic in creating a trading plan for all seasons and markets.
Top priority magic: this Friday, my younger daughter graduates with her master’s of social work degree. We’re having a party at my house to celebrate, so I’ll be shopping, cleaning, fixing up the garden, and cooking in preparation. I used to love to entertain, but haven’t done it in a while, and I’m excited. I love the creativity of developing a menu and making my house beautiful; it is the practice of ordinary magic, queenly magic.
Slow reading Anna Karenina
Besides that, I’m continuing with my program of slow reading of novels, to create a foundation for approaching my own life as literature. I finished Iris Murdoch’s The Bell last week and started Anna Karenina yesterday. My Kindle estimates it will take me 15 hours to finish it, so it will likely be a multi-week reading, especially given the graduation commitments for this week.
Here are suggestions from ChatGPT, paraphrased, about what to watch for as I read AK:
- Don’t ask “Who is right?” ask “How does each person make a life? Almost every major character is trying to answer the question “What makes a life feel meaningful from the inside?” As you read, notice what each character values, what they sacrifice, what they refuse to see, and whether their self-understanding matches reality.
- Watch for self-deception. Ask “What story is this person telling themselves?” One of Tolstoy’s recurring insights is that people rarely lie most effectively to others. They lie most effectively to themselves.
- Notice how attention works. Characters differ not only in what they believe but in what they notice. Ask “What occupies this person’s consciousness from day to day?” For Tolstoy, a life is partly made out of what receive’s one’s attention. This connects to Murdoch’s idea that moral life depends heavily on just and loving attention.
- Compare Anna and Levin as rival artistic projects. Many readers notice that these two characters seem to inhabit different novels. Ask “what kind of beauty is each pursuing?” and “What kind of freedom?” You might think of them as conducting two different experiments in living. Ask “What does each character believe will finally make life complete?” then track whether fulfillment arrives when expected.
- Examine the relation between authenticity and society. A modern reading often assumes that authenticity means resisting social conventions, but Tolstoy complicates this. Sometimes convention is deadening and sometimes convention preserves genuine goods. Ask “When does society corrupt people, and when does it protect them?”
- Pay attention to ordinary happiness: farming, meals, conversations, work, family routines, small moments of satisfaction. Ask “What activities seem capable of sustaining a life over decades?” A Nehamas-style question might be “Which parts of life could be woven into a coherent personal style?”
- Notice the gap between experience and explanation. Characters frequently experience something before they understand it [like real people!] Then later they construct explanations. Tolstoy often suggests that lived reality is richer than the theories we use to describe it [that’s one reason why it’s often better to express meaning through fiction than discourse]. Whenever a character reaches a grand conclusion, ask “Is this insight, rationalization, or both?”
Finally at the very end of Chat’s overly verbose response, it gave me a five question list to use, so I’ll include it here as a quick reference for myself to review before I sit down to read:
- What does this person think will make life worth living?
- What are they refusing to see?
- What receives their attention day after day?
- What kind of self is being produced by their choices?
- Which moments in the novel actually feel alive, and why?
My goal is to turn the novel from a story about 19th-century Russia to an investigation of the raw materials from which any life is composed, in individual attempts to make life meaningful.
An overall trading plan, inspired by The Magician
Last week, I realized I need to plan my trading across all possible trading types, not just stick with the options wheel, which only works in neutral to bullish markets. I am using the Magician Tarot card as an archetype to guide me — I am developing my magical trading plan. On his table, the Magician has objects representing all four suits of the Tarot (pentacles – money and material resources, cups – emotions, swords – logic and words, and wands – ambition, creativity and passion). These suggest to me using all resources at my command including all trading types but also managing my trading with emotions (cups), my existing financial resources (my portfolio, my options and futures trading privileges, my margin availability, my tax situation), logic and analysis (swords), and, most important, my ambition and creativity (wands). An infinity sign above his head, to me, represents decisions and events reverberating into eternity. And the lush greenery and flowers surrounding him represent the analog of trading with gardening as well as suggesting the abundance that life (sometimes) gives.
The Magician, writes Rachel Pollack in Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom, is a symbol of creative energy and manifestation:
Most modern images of the trump follow Waite’s wizard, raising a magic wand to bring into reality the spirit force – the energy of life in its most creative form. He holds the wand carefully, aware of that psychic power the Fool carried so lightly on his shoulder. Thus, the Magician, as the beginning of the Major Arcana proper, represents consciousness, action and creation. He symbolizes the idea of manifestation, that is making something real out of the possibilities in life.
And she continues:
We function best as a channel for energy. Unless we follow the path of the High Priestess in withdrawing from the world, we live our lives most fully when we create or are active. ‘Create’ does not mean simply art, but any activity that produces something real and valuable outside of ourselves.
While I continue to paint and I also spend time cultivating my garden, my main mode of creative channeling these days is through trading, not just the actual activity of trading, but the meta-activity of creating an overall approach and refining it.
The core of my approach is structure in the following stages, each with a sheet in my spreadsheet tracking the necessary data for that stage:
- Watchlist: Watching tickers (stock or ETF symbols) and analyzing charts, to get an idea of the trend of a particular stock or ETF and what I think might happen next.
- Trade Planning: Considering trades I might place based on an expected bullish, bearish, or neutral upcoming trend as well as how durable I expect such a trend to be. This consideration includes evaluation of what type of trade might make sense – sell a put, place a vertical credit or debit spread with puts or calls, buy a call or put, sell a covered call? Or simply go long or short a particular ticker?
- Open Trades: Once a trade is decided upon, decide on when I might exit given a specific profit or loss, or is it a trade I will let run so long as the chart is going in the direction I expect? Setting up alerts and good-til-cancelled trades based on my planned exit points. Tracking profit and loss for these open trades as well as any signals that would indicate I need to exit, in absence of an automatic closure.
- Closed Trades: Move data from the open trades sheet into closed trades. Record close date, realized P&L, time to closure, ROI and annualized ROI.
- Ticker Tracking: Tracking P&L over time for each individual ticker. This allows me to both see which tickers are doing well or poorly over time and to make sure I achieve positive P&L for a specific ticker, if possible. This is not necessarily something that I feel is critical, but one trader I follow uses this as an emotional management tool.
The magic lies in taking abstruse, abstract ideas about the market and making them real in this world. With the options wheel, I have followed other people’s systems. Now my goal is to create my own magic, to make something real out of everything I’ve learned theoretically.
To use Pollack’s language, I need to open myself up to spirit and then drive that energy into reality:
Look at Waite’s picture of the Magician. He is not casting spells, or conjuring up demons. He simply stands with one hand raised to heavey and the other pointed to the green earth. He is a lightning rod. By opening himself up to the spirit he draws it down into himself, and then that downward hand, like a lightning rod buried in the ground, runs the energy into earth. Into reality.
The Magician directs his strength, and that’s what I need to do, by coming up with a more comprehensive trading plan. I’ve learned so much from trading the wheel in a systematic fashion. And I’ve learned so much by trading based on instincts (not successful!) Next is to expand so that I’m ready for any kind of market trends, so that I’m protected against large drawdowns, and so that I can succeed in different kinds of settings.
Pollack writes that the Magician means “will-power; the will unified and directed towards goals”:
It means having great strength because all your energy is channelled in a specific direction. People who seem always to get what they want in life are often people who simply know what they want and can direct their energy. The magician teaches us that both will-power and success derive from being conscious of the power available to everyone. Most people rarely act; instead they react, being knocked from one experience to the next. To act is to direct your strength, through the will, to the places where you want it to go.
This inspires me as I move forward with my new identity as a trader. I know what I want to do, and now I need to channel my energy in that direction. The next step in this evolution is to expand my trading powers and systems. To make some magic.
and some painting too
I find myself inspired to paint again by thinking about the irises that didn’t bloom this year. I’m imagining a fairly minimalist piece with colors of burgundy red, warm yellow, and light olive green as a background. I know that’s not the normal colors of irises, but it’s the colors of mine.
I have a 36″ x 36″ canvas I’m working with so, if this works, I will have produced a real showpiece.
Living life in the affirmative
Such a wonderful week coming up, but I imagine if the stock market continues to do poorly I will be feeling a bit woeful and self-pitying.
Here’s the question to keep in mind: How can the main protagonist of my life story (that is, me) show up in the most creative, curious, open, and affirming way she can? How can this week show an unfolding of her possibility, beyond where she’s been before? How can her emerging identity as a trader lead her to welcome big market pullbacks, as they create new opportunity?
How can I take what’s happening and make some magic?
Wishing a wonderful, magical week for all.