The Talented Mister X

It’s not a great day.

Everything that could have gone wrong went wrong. Traded from 4am to 4pm, millions of shares, 20 different instruments… and nothing worked. You forced the issue and tried to get back to break even all day and it just kept getting worse. Wasn’t even one horrible loss that got you–that would’ve been better honestly, maybe one larger loss could’ve just brought you to the brink of a personal stop out. Instead, it was just death by a hundred paper cuts–millions of small little decisions in your head, that you kept convincing yourself would turn around your day.

It’s just *one day*. How bad can *one day* be?

One bad day feels like the end of the world. It’s the daytrader’s curse.

What do I even do with my day now? I feel like absolute fuckin’ shit.

No executive function at this point. All out of gas. Whole body feels awful after 12 hours of sitting and staring. We just start clicking around our monitors–letting all these unwanted inputs crash into our head.

Your local trading chatroom that someone recommended a few months ago but hasn’t yet helped you at all, sitting in the top right corner of your fifth monitor–you take a look, maybe there was some value you missed.

Maybe someone made a nice call and I could learn from it.

UGH. Fuck off.

You take out a notebook. Your mind is still in full stimulation mode and rambling faster than you can journal down anything constructively.

“Should’ve done this should’ve done that, should’ve never done that, I am such an idiot, I am the biggest idiot to ever grace the computer screen, I’m gonna blow up anytime soon, I should just quit before that, or better yet just go all-in randomly so at least I have a 50-50 chance, it’s all over anyway, we’re all going to die and the Earth will explode, nothing matters.”

Oh fuck journaling. Fuck “reviewing the work”–you’ve done that for 30 straight days and you’re still stuck in loser land today. Let’s just feed the beast and scroll twitter. Let’s look at pics of hot pornbot babes, funny sport clips from the 80s, and irony-poisoned tweets from anon accounts.

Except you forgot to switch from the “For You” tab–which is all clogged up with day trading bullshit given 99% of the accounts you follow are day-trading FinTwit accounts.

The first thing you scroll into–NO. NOT THAT GUY!!!!!

Unbelievable. You shake your head.

Like… really? It’s just in my face like that? On today of all days, the worst day ever, where it seemed like I couldn’t get anything going? You’re telling me Talented Mister X just has life so easy for him and he’s banking on everything I couldn’t??

How is this guy real!?

Like bro… there’s no way right? It’s obviously fake. You feel yourself morally grandstanding to no one in particular.

At least I’m a real trader who doesn’t post fake fucking bullshit PnL to make everyone feel bad about themselves. I’m flawed and I accept it and I keep it to myself. LIKE A REAL MAN. I have to tell someone.

Except deep down inside… the biggest fear isn’t that he’s a fake trader who’s using his manufactured trading results on twitter to lure in other retail suckers to a paid course or a substack or some fraudulent scheme. You never gave a shit about other people getting scammed, to be honest.

The real fear is that he’s real. Very real. Because if those seemingly impossible results are real, what does it say about you? What does it say about your beliefs about the world? Is it that you’re not good enough? Why didn’t God chose you to have “the gift of markets”? Why him? Why is it that no matter what hard work or research you put in, you’ll never reach *that level*?

That’s my version of hell for the last 15 years of trading.

Sorry to put you through that.

The Happy Wanderer¹allusion is from The Sopranos–Tony is at his therapist complaining about this made guy who’s always happy and how he wants to wring this guy’s neck for being so fucking happy. It’s this foil I created in my head. It’s this happy-go-lucky idiot who has savant-level market-reading talent and seemingly never gets emotional over trading. Life isn’t fair precisely because this guy exists.

In my world view, trading is suffering. To get results you have to suffer. I can live knowing there are much better traders than me, as long as it seemed like they suffered for their results. They blew up accounts, had terrifying drawdowns, and had to learn all the tough lessons a dozen times over. The Happy Wanderer who can make 10x what I do without suffering? I cannot tolerate the idea of that. It is simply not fair.

There’s this trader on twitter who I involuntarily learned about back during the lucrative Covid markets, around 2021. I was doing good in those markets. Some of my prop trader friends did better. We all made money. But this guy was something else. And his posts would be shared among the real ones because we weren’t going to share the obviously fake ones.

What we saw were these perfect results while trading a dozen different names end to end with constant execution.

His charts looked like this.

Like, you look at this chart–what the fuck? It’s not trend following. It’s not mean reversion. It’s not a particularly volatile day, as the top and bottom price represent a 3.56% move on MU, a stock that has in the past moved up to 10-15% in a day. It’s just incoherent patterns of scalping that are impossible to reverse-engineer. How the fuck can anyone scalp a megacap stock like Micron, full of modern-day Jane Street super-shark terminator algos, with size, to make $200,000 in a day? It doesn’t seem possible.

It’s like God created a day trading riddle to torture me.

What human being even has the headspace and executive control to execute all day like this? What could the secret alpha possibly be to generate the signals for so many different decisions in suich a tiny timeframe? No amount of studying charts, or watching and rewatching videos on Level II order flow, or mastering fundamentals and digging through filings, or reading yet another book on trading psychology, none of it could duplicate those kinds of results. I couldn’t wrap my head around it. If this was real, it would be 1/1,000,000,000 level skill. That chart above–that’s a human algorithm.

Every day he’d post like this. Not selling anything, not posting his face or anything gaudy… just his PnL and the impeccable execution charts.

Is this dude just trading in the matrix? Seeing liquidity come in and out and pushing buttons effortlessly to be lockstep with every micro movement?!

If true, it defies everything one ever learned about edges and the boundaries of trading.

I had to block this account. It made my blood boil to think about it. Even if this person is real and he’s chosen to gift us his edge, whether for charitable or vain reasons, there is absolutely nothing (positive) to learn from it. You will never be the 1 in a billion talent.

Talented Mister X’s

There are maybe 3 versions of The Talented Mister X type that I will randomly think about, unprovoked, while trying to sleep at night. None of them sell anything. They don’t post pics of nice cars or watches. Given that I’ve been trading for fifteen+ years, I’d like to think I can properly filter them out versus all the knuckleheads with fake or manicured PnL, who are clearly trying to hawk a product or an agenda. They’re just in my brain rent-free as I try to explain how it is even possible to attain those results. I cannot 100% confirm they are real but I cannot totally dismiss them out of hand either. I think one of them even made the latest Market Wizards book.

They always make me feel the same. I feel like Gerard Lambeau in Good Will Hunting. He’s a Fields-Medalist mathematician at MIT who gets totally IQ-mogged by a janitor.

“Most days I wish I never met you because then I could sleep at night and I wouldn’t have to walk around with the knowledge there was someone like you out there.”

I wish I could tell you the Talented Mister X is obviously fake and you could easily dismiss it. But I see it on some level myself. My friend Clockwork was a tape reading savant in his own right who had exceptional timing that couldn’t be taught. I have other friends on the same or greater level. If there exists a spectrum where some great traders clearly have intangible gifts, then we cannot totally dismiss the extreme outlier who’s entire makeup is the intangible gift. Not everything in trading can be taught. Talent and giftedness will always be a thing, in every industry/field/sport you ever witness. Life isn’t fair.

Now you have this uncomfortable truth in your head, and you must suffer too.