The Observer Effect

If I were to answer why I started to blog about trading I would begin with where I left off long ago, the desire to write. Through trading I wanted to satiate an appetite that was better left suppressed and hungry, my creativity. I believe being clever and coming up with something novel is a consistent theme in the early stages of trading and instead of pursuing the path to riches, the highway of brilliancy is sped down like the autobahn. I thought for a while I could come up with some unseen nuance to the market that would give me an edge that 10,000 Ph.D.'s monkeys with 10,000 supercomputers had not found. Eventually rationalization set in and I realized this energy was better spent elsewhere and it was time to return to writing.

I thought blogging would be a disciplined process of journaling, something that I could do for enjoyment as well as being a trail of bread crumbs that would lead me to the fruits of my labor: some edible and some rotten. One of the difficulties I've found in penning on paper is the inability to search key words or find key graphs and images that tell a story. I've tried to compensate by using different colored pens and drawings to highlight important sections to return to but I honestly rarely do. In addition to a number of sketch books inked from front to back there are thousands of files on my lap top to peruse as well, but often these documents do not see the light of day. It's too easy to stow these away as if they were a legend of antiquity, only to be opened for ritual or ceremony. By publishing some of my notes and thoughts publicly there would be an audience that at anytime could access them which gave me the sensation of some exposure. I felt that my ideas were no longer under lock and key rattling around my skull but open to rebuttal and feedback.

There were some unintended consequences of all this as well. I began to suffer the observer effect. Besides simply expressing some ideas I started to become those ideas, or felt responsible enough for those ideas that even if I changed my perspective or view a few days later I had an obligation to abide by them regardless. I was becoming self-aware of the process itself and seeking validation in the number of responses or hits for encouragement to continue to post at all and if so, to post what was getting the most views rather than where I was heading as a trader. It was becoming a self-referential cycle that was actually stagnating me somewhat as I was morphing into a composite of my most read pieces, some of which were mostly experimental or merely thought exercises.

What this led to was a decision to stop blogging for a period and take a step back. To stop journaling as much and take another step back. To stop thinking so much and take a further step back until I was a few yards outside myself observing the observer. From this vantage point I started to turn the self-awareness into mindfulness and instead of constantly writing free-flow association of the process of me doing, I merely jotted down a few notes daily of what I observed myself doing and what was most significant to begin changing. Instead of having an essay I simplified into haiku form and posted an index card next to my lap top as a daily reminder of the two to three trading task that were most important for me to instill into habit over a 28 day cycle. Everything else was stripped out and streamlined so that these few task took precedence above all else.

In the end I realize there is little difference between what I observed from what I've been writing down over the past couple of years. The primary distinction is that one is through my eyes and the other the projection upon my eyelids. One vision was trying to tackle everything imaginable and the other is trying to resolve what is manageable. One is who I am in general and the other through cohesion and conciseness. Sometimes moving one step forward requires three steps back.