Committing to the here and now as a full-time trader and investor

It’s easy to fantasize about a future time in your life where future you will get to enjoy all the things you could ever want. This current phase is the inevitable step to getting to where you actually want to be. The version in front of you today that is a work-in-progress matters because of what you’ll become one day become—right?

No. This is a fantasy. We’ve all been told to live in the present moment and to fully engage with what is happening right here, right now. I am one those people who has always appreciated this sentiment—in theory. I have found that it is quite challenging to put into practice in real time. If you are someone who at all identifies with Sylvia Plath’s fig tree metaphor in The Bell Jar, then you already know how easy it is to get swept up in all the glorious versions of future you. It’s much harder to be honest about the current version of who you are and how this person may or may not be doing the things needed to reach one of those many fantasy versions of you. And by you, I mean, me—I have been perpetually discounting the current stage of my life, always waiting for something better in the future.

Just last year, I took a leap of faith and decided to pursue trading and investing full-time, saying goodbye to a W2 job where I would be forced to work on stuff I didn’t care about. However, shortly after that decision, I took on a part-time role working for an early-stage startup. This job ended up taking over the hours and energy I would spend on work. I found it challenging both from a scheduling perspective, as well as a mental bandwidth perspective to really commit to both fully—even though in theory, I should have been able to make it work better. What I had deemed to be a leap of faith into the unknown was more of a half step, with one foot still stuck in the past. I ended up working for that startup for nine months and it’s been about a month and a half since that role ended and I’m fully back to the trading and investing gig.

If I’m being honest with myself, I used that part-time role as training wheels to ease myself into being fully immersed in the world of trading. In some ways, it was helpful because it enabled a smoother transition from having spent my entire adult existence relying on an employer to learning how to become responsible for myself. This applies financially, but also mentally in terms of creating my own sense of work identity, satisfaction, and sense of achievement.

But at the same time, it means I didn’t really give trading and investing the full attention and time that was needed to grow. I consider myself to be a newbie trader. I frequently have to remind myself that I only started trading in 2022 after I got laid off, which means it’s been less than three years ago that I even began this journey. Just like any other skill, technical analysis requires time and energy investment. It is both an art and a science. You do need to invest real capital, in real time (paper trading is good but not the same) to build not only your skillset, but also your ability to recognize patterns and over time to develop your intuition. It’s the same thing with pottery. I’ve only been working with clay for about four years and yet I compare myself to masters who have spent decades, full-time honing their craft. I need to take a step back and recognize where I am in this journey and that it’s okay to be at the stage that I am at—not because of where I might be one day, but because I’ve decided that this is how I want to spend my energy today.

So, I’m really excited about this chapter focused on trading. I’ve always seen trading as a stepping stone to something else that is my “real passion.” It would be the means to build up capital to deploy elsewhere—like real estate and/or a small business. However, I decided this is not the approach I want to take this time. In reflecting on my corporate career, I always saw whatever job I was in as a stepping stone to the next great career opportunity. It’s why I switched jobs four times over a decade that also included two years of graduate school. I was never really committed to any of the things I was doing because I was looking for something better and I didn’t want to be contained in a specific role. Seeing this pattern play out again when I am 100% in control of what I take on or not, made me realize, I need to do something different to make trading work.

Even if I decide to do something else later on, for the foreseeable future I am invested in being a trader and investor. This means that I will not be taking on any high-commitment advisory roles that distract me. I’m reminding myself that I am beginner and need to be perpetually hungry when it comes to learning. This means reading, researching, taking courses, watching videos—putting in the time and work to actually learn. I’m also honing in on doing things right. I’ve gotten lazy when it comes to tracking and journaling trades. I’m going back to the basics to build discipline and accountability into my workflow.

Lastly, I’m setting bigger goals for myself and thinking bigger. One of the things I’m most excited about right now is a new project I’m working on to build an algorithmic trading platform that generates buy and sell signals, eventually automating the buying and selling, too. This is what the best funds do and if I’m going to take this seriously, then I need to incorporate more rigor and data into my practice. In a world with AI tools like ChatGPT, this has never been more accessible to the individual investor. In a couple of weeks, I've put together a v1 and v2 of a BTC strategy that I’m currently A/B testing to see how they perform. I’m now working on putting together strategies for 4-6 different categories of stocks and ETFs. My goal is to finish all of the manual stuff within the next 3.5 months or so to deploy automated paper trading before moving to automated actual trading next year. It’s been fun to work on this project and to have more structure and concrete goals. And I also feel gratified, because it’s all the stuff I learned in my W2 career that is enabling me to build this platform from scratch.

So rather than fantasizing about the future, let’s put in the time and energy now to really enjoy whatever phase we’re in. We have a lot to learn from Esther in The Bell Jar. We must choose to be dedicated to whatever we’ve chosen, otherwise, we’re just wasting away. The figs will continue to fall. But, for those us who continue to harvest enough figs — knowing that when we want more, they will be there —we give ourselves the best chance of enjoying them while we can.