Long-form pieces on markets, money and the craft of trading.
A starting guide with your first full-time job.
What to do with your first savings, what you are buying when you buy a fund, the four risks every asset trades between, how currencies and purchasing power actually work, the same arithmetic run through the United States and India, and where trading sits on top of all of it.
The difference is who makes the decisions, and how often.
Picks up where Foundations of Investing ends. An index investor buys, holds and sells like any trader, on a horizon of decades, and hands every decision to a published rule. A trader shortens the horizon and takes the decisions back. Why trading still comes fourth, what a ten-session horizon cannot use, why the opponent can win with a smaller edge, a year of NVDA in which five ten-session moves carried the stock through a lot of chop, and how to build the skill years before you fund it.
Leverage is how a trading account grows faster than its owner's savings. It is also how a good trade becomes a ruined account.
Three $100,000 accounts replayed through Cerebras's 2026 run-up and fall on one-minute prices: one with no margin, one that borrowed once and held, one that kept borrowing as the stock rose. Why the last one ended with the least, how forced selling feeds a falling stock, what it takes to climb back, and rules for borrowing.
The cash in your account is what pulls the boat upright after a gust. Size the sail to it, and decide before you leave the dock where you turn back.
A sailboat stays upright because of the lead under the hull. A trading account survives a losing streak because of the cash in it. How often losing streaks of a given length arrive, how account size, the risk on each trade and a hard drawdown limit fix one another, why the limit is tracked at every close, and the three things a San Francisco Bay sailor checks before heading out under the Golden Gate.
Every trading decision sits where the market, your system and you meet. The skill is getting all three to hold at the same moment.
The skill of trading, through the three domains Dr. Ken Long and Owl Group Trading teach: the market you do not control, the system of written rules you bring to it, and the self that has to carry the rules out under pressure. What each domain asks of a trader, what fails when one is missing, why a system needs about two hundred trades before its record means anything, and how deliberate practice builds all three.
Every trading word you use can mean three things. Say which one, because clarity of action depends on clarity of thought.
A newcomer carries a dozen trading words that mean two or three things at once: market, trend, risk, stop, edge, being right. Reading never forces the choice; a live trade does, at the worst moment. Ronald Howard's clarity test, the three questions that split every fuzzy word, what Owl Group Trading's Learn page settles and what it leaves to your own rules, and a year in which "the market was up" was false for NVDA one session in seven.
So you are biased. So is everyone who has ever traded, including the man who mapped the biases. The counters that work are the ones that do not need you to notice.
Daniel Kahneman spent fifty years cataloguing the ways a mind misjudges, and wrote that the study had not cured his own. Professional advisers, active traders and Nobel laureates all show the same errors, because the errors are how a brain works. Where each one gets a vote in a single trade, why knowing about them is not a defense, and the structures that hold when the brain does not.
Grief has no fixed stages, whatever the poster says. A large trading loss does, and each stage has a price you can look up.
Kübler-Ross's five stages were drawn from the dying, never held up as a sequence by their author, and in the one large test acceptance was the most common state from the first month. Yet the five words fit what a trader says after a large loss uncannily well, because in an account each one is a decision with a date and a dollar figure. The account from Leverage Works Both Ways, replayed as the stages, what each cost, and why acceptance is the only one you can schedule.