You’ve probably heard this phrase tossed around in trading circles:
“Trading is an art, not a science.”
But what does that actually mean? After eight years in the trenches, finding some success, and sitting alongside traders who’ve made hundreds of millions, here’s my interpretation.
Why Trading Isn’t Pure Science
If trading were a science, there’d be a formula. Follow a set of rules, plug in the numbers, and you’d have guaranteed profits. But anyone who’s traded knows it doesn’t work that way. Markets are dynamic, unpredictable, and often irrational.
This means your approach needs to be fluid, adaptable, and rooted in judgment and not rigid rules.
Risk Management: Why Hard Stops Aren’t Everything
A common mantra is:
“Always use hard stops.”
Sounds great in theory. In reality? The best traders I’ve been around, the ones with $50M+ in profits rarely use fixed, to-the-penny stops.
Instead, they operate with flexibility:
- They give positions room when the trade thesis is still valid.
- They scale out early when the tape feels wrong.
- They exit fast when something changes even before a stop is hit.
It’s not about automation. It’s about feel. Your ability to read the situation in real time matters more than an arbitrary line on a chart.
Position Sizing: Forget Being Perfect
New traders often obsess over exact dollar risk.
“I’ll risk $100 on this trade… let me size it to the penny.”
Here’s the truth:
Whether you risk $100 or $130, it doesn’t matter. The goal is consistency and comfort and not overthinking the small things. Trading is messy. Your size should make sense logically and feel manageable emotionally. That’s it.
Strategy vs. Intuition
Maybe you focus on overnight momentum or higher-time-frame mean reversion. Great. Stick to your playbook.
But when a truly asymmetric opportunity comes along elsewhere (a setup that just feels right), you need to trust yourself and take the shot. It’s going to be okay!
With experience, those gut instincts are often your edge. Don’t ignore them.
The Bottom Line
Trading isn’t a rigid formula. It’s judgment, adaptation, and intuition and it’s all built on a foundation of experience.
If this were pure science, the game would’ve been solved long ago. But it hasn’t. That’s why trading is an art and why mastering it is both so challenging and so rewarding.
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