The Sobriety of Making Money
A meditation about edge, conviction & the luv of the game
Lately, I’ve found myself overly cautious. Markets like this have a unique way of turning even the highest-conviction bull into a cynic.
Inherently, most participants joined with an expectation of asymmetry, the premise of outsized returns, yet somehow instead found themselves stuck in recursive cycles of volatility & disappointment to a larger extent.
More & more, I hear the refrain that the market is ‘boring’. This really has a way of throwing me off. Is it truly boring? Or has it simply been unrewarding for your bags & we stopped having everything going parabolic & doing a 10-20x? (We did have Aster, Zcash, Plasma & others tokens do silly multiples like this, just fyi).
It’s rather ironic that the more time I spend around markets, the more I view them through the same lens as poker.
The top percentile hones in on optimising the process itself vs fetishising the result & outcomes like many of us succumb to in the space. In markets, this becomes exponentially harder; we largely operate with incomplete information, blurred & often delayed feedback loops & path-dependent outcomes.
It’s with a heavy heart that I say the addiction to volatility has ossified into our culture, in my opinion.
We are in a place where we conflate action with progress, having exposure to developed conviction, randomness & honestly blatant luck with skill.
Inevitably misaligning timeframes.
I.e are you a trader? A bag holder? Or just hoping for the best & slightly high off copium?
The human mind is genuinely rather remarkable in its capacity to rationalise & stomach things (personally guilty of outsized copium) & honestly turns into the most efficient liquidity sink of all.
I think operating under the assumption that most reap what they truly seek from markets is not a bad frame of thought, per se.
Some seek validation or adrenaline or a sense of belonging & I think for all of us universally, if you are playing the game, you seek capital, if we are being honest here.
Capital preservation, yet alone wealth creation, even a semblance of it, demands restraint, a kind of intellectual sobriety.
In the end, making money as an idea is awesome. Objectively, who wouldn’t want to? Although in practise is in most cases it’s rather a boring process that requires the highest level of pedigree & as with everything worthwhile, time.
In my eyes, it is largely dependent on one’s discipline, patience & overall technical acumen.
Same as in poker, where the game will reward those who can detach from trepidation & recency bias, those who are here for the luv of the game over the outcome & will continue no matter the weather, the time of day nor the hand they are dealt.
I’ve had this line stuck in my head & I think it’s only appropriate to close out this spree of thought with it.
“The two hardest tests on the spiritual road are the patience to wait for the right moment & the courage not to be disappointed with what we encounter.”