THE FLOW TRADER

On Thursday, near the market close, I was on the phone with a trading colleague. We were talking through the current market environment, and I made the argument that all of this has stopped making sense. While I heard myself saying it, something clicked. “I need to short this.” And I did. The divergence had simply become too wide in my head to ignore. On one side, the market was blowing effortlessly through the 7500 level, which is a significant level in my technical analysi

One chart. One daily filter. One clear way to avoid the wrong side of the market. Trading mistakes often do not come from a lack of information. They come from being on the wrong side of the day. You may know this feeling. The market is trending up. You keep fading it. You short again. You get stopped again. You try one more time because it “has to turn soon.” Then the day ends and the obvious question appears: Why didn’t I just go long? Or even simpler: Why did I keep fighti

The one subject that truly impacts almost every life was barely taught in school. Not mathematics. Not history. Not grammar. Principles of abundance. How to create it. How to protect it. How to grow it. How to avoid destroying it through poor decisions. In times of uncertainty, most human struggle falls into three large areas: Health. Relationships. Finance. Out of these three, finance is often the easiest to improve, because it follows clear principles. Not always easy emoti

No matter what stage of trading you find yourself in, one problem keeps returning: You break your own rules. Beginners do it. Experienced traders do it. Even traders who have been around for years still do it. Why? Not because they do not have enough information. Most traders have too much information already. More indicators. More opinions. More market commentary. More noise. More reasons to hesitate. The real problem is usually deeper. They do not yet have enough confidence

When people ask me how I am doing, or what I am doing right now, my answer is simple. I am in a transition phase. The reason I currently provide only a slim Telegram channel, with one daily call for one instrument, and a few blog entries on the website, is because markets have changed. That is not a step back. It is discipline. The great thing about trading is that it is always a path and never an arrival. As such, one is never bored. The market keeps asking new questions. Th

Most investors think about risk in market terms. Stocks go down. Real estate corrects. Bonds lose value. Liquidity dries up.Fear rises. That is normal market risk. A 2008-type event was brutal, but it still happened inside the existing system. Banks opened. Broker accounts functioned. Laws stayed mostly recognizable. The rules were bent, but the game board remained in place. Systemic risk is different. Systemic risk is when the rules themselves become part of the risk. That i

Market history does not give us a clock. It gives us a warning system. When we look at major crash years like 1637, 1797, 1819, 1837, 1857, 1884, 1901, 1907, 1929, 1937, 1974, 1987, 1992, 1997, 2000 and 2008, the first temptation is to search for a perfect cycle. That is usually the wrong approach. Markets are not mechanical clocks.They are living systems. They move through credit, liquidity, leverage, valuation, concentration, belief and fear. The dates do not repeat perfect

Trading is not like most professions. One major difference is the assignment of tasks across different states and different times of the day. It is a clear principle violation to do system development and execution at the same time. You cannot be engaged in finding edges through backtesting and forward testing, analyzing data, and evaluating probabilities while also observing live markets and managing execution. These are different modes of the mind. System development is ana

How to identify meaningful principles At the center of all this is a very simple but far-reaching idea: most of us confuse our concepts with reality. We mistake the word for the thing, the map for the territory, the label for the living process. And once we do that, we begin to live inside a mental construction while calling it reality. This matters greatly in trading. The market is not really a fixed “thing” in the way most people think of it. It is a process. It is interact

today, 3/31/26 (end of the 1st quarter) is a good example on how the daily call can protect you from risk looking at a daily chart with a strong push up one could easily assume that one missed out on a seemingly directional day: A classical error made on "after the fact'. yesterday we rightfully assumed a possible bounce due to a four legged down-move of the S&P500: in conjunction to support and resistance and other principles: with our sideways call for that day we wer