wave8777

2025/05/10
When I realized the pain of giving up was far greater than the pain of pressing on, I knew there was no looking back.

[Adam Shuaib @adamshuaib]

Across 5000+ founder meetings, the rarest success trait we saw was pathological determination (<1% of founders). These individuals have a borderline-delusional ability to run through any wall and don’t have an off-switch. It’s not easy to screen for and most investors don’t ask the right questions to uncover it.

We have 12 proxy signals that we use to measure determination, such as a desperate desire to prove someone/something wrong, multiple previous failed businesses, early-life adversity and irrational optimism when most others would quit.

Our findings showed that founders with a high determination index were much more likely to build bigger companies, even if it took them longer. Determination wasn’t correlated with confidence or charisma; the most determined founders were more introverted and did not light up rooms. Most investors incorrectly ignore the power of persistence.

[scar @imfat]

every successful person I know is the same

slightly autistic
obsessed
insane
made tons of sacrifices
110% confident
relentless
delusional

there's no easy way to achieve shit and become someone....

[Julio Diaz @diazjulio0071]

@AnthropicAI I switched to Claude Max specifically so I could use this model this month, and now it looks like access is being taken away. Is there any chance I can get my money back?

[Dean Thomas @DThomasStealth]

If you ever destroy one of your accounts, the last thing you want to do is immediately fund it w even more money. Market is telling you that whatever strategy you've been doing is not working.

Take what's left of it and force yourself to compound that small account w tiny R back up over time.

Every trader I know who did this in a disciplined manner went on to become monsters later in their career. Every trader who just immediately reloaded without changing behavior ended up blowing that account again not long after.

[Stat Arb @quant_arb]

@PtrPomorski It’s the cheapest place tax wise that isn’t a dump or a tiny island or in Asia. HK/SG are far, Malta/Cayman/Bermuda are tiny islands, and Dubai/UAE are a dump. You can also go to Romania for low tax but also not so nice.

Zug is about as low as it gets if you want smth nice.

[Christian Flanders @CFlanders7]

You can really take a lot of poor trades. You can over trade. You can force trades. You can make so many mistakes.

I’ve had months where at the end I’d look back and say wow, what were you doing. Look at all these trades you should never have taken.

You can take good trades and lose. You can lose 5 in a row, 10 in a row.

You can do almost anything as long as you never lose more than a small fraction of your account per month.

That is the one non negotiable constant in my trading.

Lose a few %. Reset, new month, start fresh.

[EchoesOfEarth🌍 @naturalbeautyi7]

This kind of peace...🌿

[Christian Flanders @CFlanders7]

Trusting the process

In January 2024, I took a trade that made my year and changed the trajectory of my trading forever. I pyramided aggressively into NVDA as it broke out. It was my largest position as a % of my account ever.

At the time, Stanley Druckenmiller was reducing his position (he was likely the seller at $500). He would later go on to say in interviews that he made a mistake selling it then.

If I had known at the time that Druck was selling it to me, would I have still bought it?

The rally in April was one of the most powerful ever as stocks went vertical. I was slow to adjust and missed the most powerful movers off the lows (moves that I usually miss). I trusted that come earnings season I would get a shot at my best set up.

A few days ago on May 4th I finally had enough winning positions on to be on margin for this rally. Many traders, some of whom are excellent and I highly respect have been reducing into the rally (they caught the super movers off the lows) and shying away from new positions. I followed my process and continued to buy break outs.

Livermore in his amazing book wrote about the dangers of listening to others. He took some of his greatest losses listening to highly intelligent speculators and betrayed his own process and rules.

"For Jesse Livermore, the greatest danger in being influenced by others was the loss of independent judgment and the contamination of a proven trading plan with "tips" or "herd mentality."

The Core Danger: Social Contamination Livermore believed the stock market is a battle against human nature, specifically the instinct to follow the crowd.

The Crowd is Usually Wrong: He argued that by the time "the majority" is excited about a stock, the smart money is already exiting.

The Folly of Tips: He explicitly warned to "never trust tips" because they bypass your own logic and stop you from thinking for yourself.

Gossip as a Distraction: Livermore eventually moved to private offices because the "demoralizing hubbub" of brokerage rooms made concentration impossible.

Why Being Influenced is Fatal to a Trader
According to Livermore’s principles, external influence destroys the temperament needed to succeed

Erosion of Rules: A single outside opinion can cause a trader to betray their own stop-loss or entry rules, leading to "trauma" for the trading psyche.

Outcome Bias: Influences often focus on the "win," but Livermore focused on flawless execution. Listening to others makes you focus on profits rather than following your process.

Internal Enemies: He noted that "the speculator's chief enemies are always boring from within," but these are often triggered by social pressure and hope/fear shared by others."

My point is, it doesn't matter who is doing what. If you have a process, follow it. Let the chips fall where they may.

[Atal @Atalburhani]

Nobody talks about what trading actually costs you.

Not the money. The money is the easy part to measure. I'm talking about the stuff that doesn't show up on a P&L.

Trading cost me my mental health.

Not in one dramatic moment. Slowly. Over years. The kind of slow where you don't notice it's happening until you're standing in the middle of your life wondering why nothing feels good anymore.

I stopped enjoying things that used to make me happy. Music didn't hit the same. Hanging out with friends felt like a distraction from what I should be doing. Weekends weren't weekends. They were just days the market was closed and I couldn't prove myself.

Everything that wasn't trading started feeling pointless. Not because it was. Because I'd tied my entire sense of self to something that kept telling me I wasn't good enough. And when you hear that message every day for years, it doesn't stay in the charts. It bleeds into everything.

I didn't notice the shift because it was so gradual. One month I was a normal kid with interests and energy and people around me. A year later I was someone who sat in his room, stared at screens, and measured his worth by whether the day was green or red.

The worst part wasn't the losing. It was realizing that even on the days I won, I didn't feel anything. The wins stopped registering because the baseline had dropped so low. I wasn't celebrating green days. I was just temporarily not hating myself.

That's what years of failure does. Not to your account. To your identity. You start the journey believing you're someone who can figure this out. Three years in, you're not sure you're someone who can figure anything out.

I pushed through it. Not gracefully. Not with some method or framework. I pushed through it the way you push through a wall in the dark. No visibility. No guarantee there's anything on the other side. Just the refusal to stop moving.

Every day was a problem to solve. Every week was another loss to process. Every month was another stretch of wondering if this was all a waste. And the only person keeping me going was me. No mentor. No coach. No one in my life who understood what I was carrying.

That builds you. I won't pretend it doesn't. The person I am today was forged in those years. My ability to sit with discomfort, to question my own beliefs, to keep showing up when everything says stop. None of that existed before trading broke me down and forced me to rebuild.

But I wouldn't trade the lessons. I just wish the tuition was cheaper.

If you're in the thick of it right now. If the things you used to love don't feel the same. If you're measuring your worth by your P&L and everything outside of trading feels grey.

That's not permanent. That's the cost of a journey most people will never have the courage to take. And the person you're becoming on the other side of it is worth every dark day you're sitting in right now.

But please. Don't lose yourself completely in the process. The charts will be there tomorrow. The person you are outside of them needs attention too.

[EchoesOfEarth🌍 @naturalbeautyi7]

People argue about the Maldives vs Greece. Meanwhile Italy built a fjord inside a cliff.

[Marios Stamatoudis @stamatoudism]

10-15 good trades are more than enough for a spectacular year. And we had a few already
$SNDK, $MU , $AXTI , $WDC , $STX, $LWLG , $INTC $NOK and way more.
As I always say all our effort should be in placing ourselves in places where these outlier trades can emerge easier and naturally.

[rubicon59 @rubicon59]

Not overthinking or over-researching is an underrated investment skil.

[Christian Flanders @CFlanders7]

Bought and added 2x to EVC, stopped out today. Above my entry price now.
Tried RXT 3x yesterday, stopped out all 3x. Up 60% today.
Bought INTC on the gap to 85. Stopped out same day.
Bought NBIS around 140. Couldn't hold above 21ema. Exited. Took my eyes off it watching something else. Rallies to 190 in 4 days.
Bought FLY on the earnings gap on 3/20. My buy stop triggers around $25.50, I see the price start going vertical. I can't cancel the order in time. $1.30 of slippage on 50k shares, 20 cents of slippage on the same day stop out. I watch it go to $45 over the next few weeks without me.
Bought CRWV above the HVE day on 4/13. Rallies 18%, pulls back to entry. Takes out LOD and stops me out by 80 cents. Rallies 31% straight up over the next 6 days.

Everyone who trades goes through this. I've lost 75% of my trades this year and most of them go like that. Stop out, round trip, etc. There's no secret, there's no magic. Just execution. Trusting the few winners will be enough to make up for all the losers.

[Naruto @NarutoNolimits]

Jensen Huang when asked whether he would rather relive his 20s or be 20 years old today.

[Seth Bannon @sethbannon]

Busby Berkeley-style geometric formation choreography is a style where the main dance is the collective visual pattern made by many bodies moving in sync. This is one of the best examples you'll find.

[Lance Breitstein 🇺🇸🌎 @TheOneLanceB]

THE "CONSISTENTLY PROFITABLE" SKILL GAP & THE MYTH OF SUPPLEMENTAL INCOME FROM TRADING

For many new traders or part-time traders, there is this pervasive belief that with some time and effort, they'll be able to make "just" a few grand per month to supplement their income. Or they "don't want to aim big, they just want to replace their current salary via trading so they can have more freedom."

This is because people mistakenly believe that trading is like most other jobs, rather than it being a winner-take-all performance endeavor more akin to becoming a professional athlete.

99.9% of athletes will never make a dime professionally. There is no market demand for your average high school or college player. To even make league minimum in the NBA, you are still in the .0001% of basketball players. There is no such thing as just deciding to casually make a few grand as a pro athlete.

Think about what it takes for someone to make $50k/yr as a golfer? The skill gap to earn an income or make the league minimum is crazy to comprehend. The analogy I gave with @AT09_Trader was the story of Brian Scalabrine.

Even though Brian Scalabrine “sucked” in the NBA, he would absolutely annihilate 99.9% of the people calling him trash. He once said the famous line that he’s closer in skill to LeBron James than his haters are to him, and that line perfectly explains trading. The gap between unprofitable and elite looks massive from the outside, but the real canyon is between unprofitable and making any amount of money consistently.

People look at a trader making $1M a year and think that’s a different species. They assume someone doing $100k a year is basically the same as the guy still blowing accounts, just with better luck. That’s like saying Scalabrine and your friend who plays pickup on Tuesdays are basically equal because neither is LeBron.

Going from $0 to consistently profitable is the hardest jump in trading. You CANNOT just casually make a few grand per month or supplement income part-time. The skill level needed to consistently make ANY AMOUNT trading is the equivalent of being in the league.

A trader who can pull $100k a year out of the market is not “kind of good.” They have competency in finding edge, executing trades, handling their psychology and risk management, and are competing in the league. From there, scaling to $300k, $500k, even $1M is usually a function of size, capital, and refinement, not a complete identity shift.

But the trader still stuck at breakeven or red? They’re not one tweak away from $100k. They’re not “basically there.” They’re still trying to prove they belong on the court at all.

The uncomfortable truth is this: the distance between $0 and $100k is far greater than the distance between $100k and $1M. One requires becoming a professional. The other simply just requires becoming a more refined one.

My confidence in taking a trader from $100k to $1m is probably 10x higher than my confidence in taking a trader from $0 to $100k.

[Tito A @GnT_Trades]

"Some of the best traders I know have been trading the same setup, on the same time frame, on the same market for 20 years. They don't care about anything else."

That's from John Carter in "Mastering the Trade" and it's probably one of the more underrated messages in the book.

We live in a culture that romanticizes variety. New strategies. New markets. New indicators. The idea of doing the same thing for twenty years sounds like a boring proposition to most people. But in trading, depth beats breadth more often than not.

I went through a phase where I was trading momentum one week, mean reversion the next, and some other strategy the week after. I was learning a lot and making nothing. Because every time I switched, I reset my pattern recognition back to zero. I never got deep enough into any one approach to develop real feel for it.

The turning point was when I committed to masterings 1-2 setups. 1-2 timeframes, which for me is the daily or the weekly. This in combination with 1-2 market conditions where I had an edge. And I just did that. Over and over.

Although at first it felt limiting, with time it started feeling like mastery. I could suddenly see setups developing before they fully formed. I knew the failure patterns. I knew when to push and when to pass. That level of intuition only comes from deep repetition, not from knowing a little bit about a lot of things.

Master one way of making money. Then, slowly, add a second. Then maybe a third. The traders who last decades tend to be specialists, not generalists.

[JNS @_devJNS]

me and Claude building an app at 3AM

[Theo Gustincic (Sila) @TheoGustincic]

Hard truth most traders still ignore:

Skill alone won’t cut it anymore.
Your nationality and place of residence will matter as much — if not more — than your edge.

Taxes, security, rule of law, stability.
Switzerland remains one of the very best anchors in an unstable world.

[Financial Times @FT]

Switzerland’s Zug becomes bolt-hole for Gulf-based wealth https://t.co/L6xwCODFY4