When you compare your gut calls to your reasoned ones in your trading journal, the pattern is unavoidable: the trades you rushed into tend to pile up as losses, while the ones you actually thought through stay flat or green.
It was a Friday evening, and I had an hour before dinner. I opened my trading journal for the first time in weeks. The last entry was from Tuesday. I had fifteen trades logged since then, and I decided to run a simple tally: which ones did I take time to think through, and which ones did I just execute because the moment felt right.
I created two columns. The first was "approved calls": trades where I had actually read the reasoning, checked the risk, thought about position size, maybe even slept on it. The second was "gut calls": times I saw a chart moving and just went in. Five trades in the first column. Ten in the second.
Then I added a third column: profit and loss.
The "approved calls" column showed a flat week: up on Monday, down on Wednesday, up again Friday. Nothing spectacular, but nothing wrecked my account either. Small wins, small losses, a net that was survivable. The "gut calls" column was a bloodbath. Red on four of the ten. Down 2.3 percent of my account in a single week because I was trading speed instead of sense.
That's when I thought of the Oakland Athletics in 2002.
When gut instinct lost to the record
Billy Beane was the general manager of the Oakland A's, a team with almost no money compared to the Yankees, Red Sox, and other powerhouses. Scouts had opinions about players: "This guy looks like a baseball player." "That guy has the stuff." "He'll figure it out eventually." The A's, relying on those opinions, kept losing. Every year, the rich teams outbid them for talent. Every year, the gut-feeling approach left them behind.
Beane hired analyst Paul DePodesta and together they rethought how to evaluate players. Instead of trusting what scouts thought when they watched a player at the plate, they looked at the record: the stats that actually mattered. On-base percentage. Slugging percentage. The measurable outcomes of past performance. Suddenly, players that scouts thought were mediocre showed up as undervalued. Players scouts loved looked overpriced. The A's could afford the undervalued ones. They couldn't afford the favorites.
That season, documented in Michael Lewis's book Moneyball, the A's competed with teams that had three times their budget. Not because Beane got lucky. Because when he reviewed the data instead of trusting the narrative, the data told him which approach actually worked.
The A's didn't win the World Series that year. But they did something more important: they proved that the guys on TV saying "you have to trust your gut" were wrong. The record was right.
Your trading journal is your record
A trader reviewing their journal is doing exactly what Beane did. You're looking at the past and asking which approach actually worked. When you separate the gut calls from the ones you took time to think through, you're not being retrospectively judgmental. You're reading the data.
The data, like it did for the A's, usually tells you something uncomfortable: speed and confidence are not the same thing as discipline. The trade that felt absolutely certain when you saw the chart moving usually lost. The trade you questioned, thought through, and almost passed on usually kept your account safer. Not because you got lucky. Because a process beats a hunch.
From observation to action
That Friday evening, I looked at my two columns and the third that showed P&L. The gut column was screaming at me: this is what rushing looks like. The approved column was quiet: this is what discipline looks like.
I didn't close my account. I didn't flip to all-gut or all-process. I just decided that next week, the gut calls would be rarer. A signal would show up. I would pause. I would think about why I actually wanted to take it, what the scenario reminded me of, what could go wrong, and what size made sense for a position that might go against me. And then I would move forward, knowing I had actually considered what I was doing.
That's the real win. Not the money. The shift from speed to sense. From the narrative to the record.
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