My YouTube feed recently picked up a news item on the British Indoor Rowing Championships – my major point of surprise was that there was such a thing and this surprise was compounded by the fact that many were using it as a warm up event for the 2020 Summer Games. That’s right indoor rowing which as the name suggests takes place indoors and not on water is an Olympic event. Undoubtedly these are extremely fit individuals as I have always found the rowing machine to be very challenging but each time the Olympics rolls around there is yet another dim sport inclusion. I thought this had reached its zenith with synchronised swimming and later synchronised diving but apparently I was wrong. I look forward to the inclusion of darts because nothing says athlete more than a bunch of fat blokes with a pint in hand lobbing darts at a board.
However, the point of this is not to catch aspersions on the Olympic movement because that is akin to shooting fish in a barrel but rather to comment on something I saw whilst watching aforesaid rowing championships. One of the competitors was Sir Bradley Wiggens, for those who don’t know the name Wiggens is a former Tour De France winner, and winner of multiple Olympic and World cycling gold medals. He even holds the record to most kilometres cycled in an hour – a staggering 54.526 kilometres. Wiggens is clearly a serious individual with an extraordinary aerobic capacity.
Watching him attempt to transition to another sport is interesting. His result in the elite mens 2000 metre rowing time trial was a respectable but not brilliant 21st and this result got me thinking. In trading tn has been my observation that everyone has a methodology that suits them – I know this is true of myself. Yet traders seem to want to shy away from this innate methodology which grants them the best possible approach for them and take up something that is not suited to them either psychologically, emotionally or intellectually. This movement away from playing their own game has predictable consequences as method and individual dont match. This is a particularly salient point for me at present as I have been going back and looking at the way I see markets and what seems to work best for me – this has been particularity true since coming back from London and letting my systems have a break. My observation of having an innate rhythm that suits a particular way of trading now seems to be more obvious to me. This is also coupled with a desire to markedly change the number of markets I trade down to the low single figures. To put this plan in motion I have been progressively shutting down those systems that I dont think suit me and collapsing the number of markets I trade. What is interesting from this is that to date my profitability doesn’t seem to have been affected.
So this raises the question for all traders – are you laying your game or the game you think you should play?
