The Discipline of Doing Nothing
Markets breathe. So should you. Mastering patience may be the most profitable trade you ever make.
[Note: This was originally published in 2014 on the PretzelCharts website.]
My greatest strength as a trader — and my greatest weakness — is the same trait: I’m ambitious.
Ambitious people want to be in the action. Constantly. We crave motion, challenge, expansion. But nothing expands forever — not markets, not accounts, not even people.
Everything breathes.
In trading, respecting that rhythm is the difference between building wealth and blowing up.
You can’t force markets. The market moves on its own schedule, not yours.
The best trades come not from constant effort, but from patient recognition. That means knowing when to step back, consolidate, and wait. It means being okay with not doing — which, for the ambitious, can be its own form of agony.
After a winning trade, the impulse is often to push harder. To ride the momentum. To go again.
That’s exactly when many traders lose it all.
Because they never learned to stop.
I've written before that it's a fool's errand to try to expand an account endlessly. Attempting the impossible only leads to ruin.
A farmer doesn’t plant in winter. He waits. He watches.
He knows the season will change.
Trading is the same. You don’t harvest forever — you harvest in the Fall, then wait out the Winter, then plant again. And after that, you don’t rip the crops out immediately. You allow them to mature.
That rhythm — expansion and contraction — is the difference between lasting success and fast flameout.
Many traders fail because they never learned to breathe with the market.
They force trades they shouldn’t.
They exit good trades too early.
They conflate activity with productivity.
In essence: Many traders ultimately consume themselves under the compulsions of their own raw ambition.
So if you can simply master the tendency to overtrade, and the tendency to over-manage once you're in, then — combined with sound risk management — your account is likely to grow by leaps and bounds.
You’ll still face setbacks, but they’ll be smaller and rarer. The upward drift will become clearer.
A friend once told me:
“You’ll get more done in six days than in seven.”
Meaning: sometimes, the most productive thing you can do is… nothing.
Nothing, as in: Don’t force trades.
Nothing, as in: Leave your winning position alone.
Nothing, as in: Wait until the season is right. Let the market come to you.
Because the market will come to you — if you let it.
Decades ago, before I was even a serious trader, I read Reminiscences of a Stock Operator. What stuck with me was this:
"It never was my thinking that made the big money for me. It always was my sitting. Got that? My sitting tight!
Men who can both be right and sit tight are uncommon."
— Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Edwin Lefèvre [Jesse Livermore]
It stuck with me because the worst position to be in is to finally get exactly the setup you wanted — but to have your capital already tied up in trades you took too early.
Because then all you can do is watch. And “hope,” which is never where you want to be.
There’s an old trader expression:
“It’s better to be out of the market wishing you were in than in wishing you were out.”
In the end, this isn’t just about trading. It's about becoming someone who can tell the difference between movement and progress — and then act (or not) based on that wisdom.
The litmus test for future success is not confidence.
It’s not ambition.
It’s adaptation.
“The people who fancy they are sure of themselves are the ones who are truly unsure... In the long run, it is the better-adapted man who triumphs, not the wrongly self-confident, who is at the mercy of dangers from without and within.”
— Carl Jung, Depth Psychology and Self-Knowledge
There is no lasting success without discipline.
There is no discipline without restraint.
And there is no restraint without wisdom.
Let your ambition get you into trading.
Let your discipline keep you there.