About Wait Then Trade
I’ve been trying to figure out trading for a long time.
Long enough to have tried a lot of things, abandoned a lot of things, and become increasingly suspicious of anyone who tells you this business is easy.
There will be no Lamborghinis here.
No rented jets. No screenshots implying that three winning trades have unlocked the secret to financial freedom. And probably no photograph of me staring thoughtfully at six monitors.
What I can offer is a pretty honest account of trying to develop a trading edge.
I Took the Long Way Around
I spent years studying discretionary price action.
I read Al Brooks repeatedly. I spent years working with Mack’s Price Action Trading approach. I learned a great deal from both.
I also never managed to turn either approach into consistent profitability.
That isn’t a criticism of either methodology. Plenty of traders may have very different experiences. It’s simply what happened to me, and eventually I had to take that result seriously.
For a long time, my response to struggling was to learn more.
Another pattern. Another nuance. Another way of reading the chart.
Eventually I began to wonder whether knowing more was actually making trading harder.
If you know enough price action, there is almost always something happening. A second entry. A wedge. A trendline break. A failed breakout. Support. Resistance. An EMA interaction. A reversal pattern.
Given enough possibilities, I could almost always find a reason to trade.
And that turned out to be a problem.
The question I needed to ask was not:
“Can I find a reason to take a trade?”
It was:
“Is my trade here?”
Fewer Decisions, Better Decisions
That realization changed the direction of my trading.
Instead of adding more things to interpret in real time, I’ve increasingly tried to remove decisions.
What exactly constitutes a setup?
What conditions must be present?
What would disqualify it?
Can I define those things before the opportunity appears rather than deciding afterward that the chart looked close enough?
That has led me to a principle that captures much of what I’m trying to do:
Creativity belongs in research. Objectivity belongs in execution.
Research is where I want to experiment, test ideas, challenge assumptions and occasionally discover that my brilliant new theory isn’t particularly brilliant.
Execution should be boring.
If the conditions are there, trade.
If they aren’t, wait.
Where I Am Now
After years of struggling, my trading has recently begun to look different.
I’ve been developing a much more objective approach to identifying market conditions, setups, participation, entries and trade management. I’ve also been deliberately getting rid of ideas that give me too much room to talk myself into a trade.
The results so far are encouraging.
And that’s where the claim ends.
A good week doesn’t prove anything. Neither does a good month. Backtests can mislead you. Forward tests can flatter you. Markets are particularly good at teaching humility immediately after you’ve decided you’ve finally figured them out.
So I’m not launching Wait Then Trade because I’ve solved trading.
I’m launching it because, after taking the long way around, I think I may finally be heading in the right direction.
Now I want to find out.
What This Site Is About
Wait Then Trade is where I’ll document that process and write about the things I’ve learned along the way.
That includes testing trading ideas, expectancy, MAE and MFE, execution, discretion, overtrading, market environment, trade management, trading psychology, and the surprisingly difficult question of how you determine whether something actually works.
I’ll also write about things that didn’t work for me.
That’s important.
Trading education naturally gravitates toward success stories. But discovering that an idea doesn’t work can be valuable information too—especially if it saves someone else from spending years trying to force an approach that doesn’t fit them.
I won’t necessarily publish every rule or tool I use. The purpose of the site isn’t to give away a trading system or tell anyone when to buy or sell.
The larger subject interests me more:
How do serious traders figure out what’s actually true?
There should be room here to say:
I don’t know.
I thought this worked. The data changed my mind.
This seems promising, but I don’t have enough evidence yet.
Those aren’t weaknesses. In trading, they’re often the beginning of useful research.
That’s what I want Wait Then Trade to be about.
Wait for the setup.
Wait for the evidence.
And when the conditions are actually there—
then trade.