Trimming the Fat

Dimming the din. Nixing the noise. Flipping off the fluff. There is no shortage of indicators to try,
patterns to learn, data to track, but there is a capacity limit of our brain. Whether a side income,
for long term investing, or trading as a business, in addition to making goals, we also need to
make sure that our habits are supporting those goals in a healthy way. What instead happens,
is we get derailed, sidetracked, and lured into thinking we’re doing things, but instead we’re just
engaging in “busy work”. Busy work would be defined as things that make us think we are
progressing, but stand in our way taking up precious mental and physical energy. In
order to make sure we are doing the right tasks to reach our goals, we must prioritize our time
and our tasks to make sure that the things we are doing help us, rather than the ones
that only make us think they’re helping.

One of the best ways to do this is to ask ourselves a series of questions which will sort through
the fluff of everything we bombard ourselves with. As with all exercises, I’m going to ask you to
be truly honest with yourself about what is working vs what is not.

The exercise goes like this. Spend a day in observation mode. When you come to each task,
(You could do this outside the markets too, but let’s stick to trading) ask yourself what purpose
does this task serve. Is it helping me to come closer to my goal (make sure you have one!) or is
it realistically busy work. Social media is a great example of this, many traders will scroll social
media for stocks, trade setup, news etc. But do you gain anything from it day to day? Is
it helpful, could you spend less time? I found when my twitter settings got changed to
“recommended” rather than “following” it made my trading worse. Why? I got recommended SO
many traders’ ideas my brain was getting overwhelmed with the number of theories on
the markets. When I choose to follow someone, I have a winnowing process, I must see a track
record that makes sense, and I must get lost reading their page for 10 minutes. If I do that, it
means I find them interesting, and useful enough to make it worth glancing. When I get
recommended follows, there is no cut out the fluff process. It’s frankly too much.

Sometimes you will come to a task you really enjoy, and discover it’s more useful as a hobby of
information rather than useful to your trading. This is okay. The goal is not to take out joy, it’s
simply to recognize what is helping us, and in what way, and what is hurting us. But the goal is
also not to fool ourselves into thinking that the things we are doing, even if we love them, are
also helping us reach our goals. Perhaps you love watching the volatility of CPI/News driven
reaction in the markets, but you try to trade it and always end up losing when you get lost in the
short term chart. This might be an example of something that you simply need to watch in
observation mode, without playing it just yet.

Sometimes you’ll come to tasks that you think you must do, don’t enjoy, but think they must be
helping - only to find they are not. Data tracking is one of the trickiest ones for this. Data tracking
is possibly the most double-edged sword out there. The reason is simple. Many times people
track data, without knowing how to use it. If you are spending 2 hours reviewing your trades,
don’t enjoy doing it, and don’t know how to compile the data to make sure you are making your
trading better, it is busy work. Trade reviews are an excellent way to make yourself a better
trader, but they must come with the same intention as everything else. If you are tracking your
trades, and then never look at the data, never using the data to cut out trade setups that don’t
work for you, never learning from the mistakes, or never learning to manage the emotions that
come up - this is busy work.

After your day in observation mode, you can start to sort out the things you need to reach your
goals, the things you love and make you happy, and the things that are just not serving you.
Implement some of the changes, track them, and then rinse and repeat in a week, a month or
three months time.

- Chart Gal Dinzy