Trader Series, Cognitive Enhancement and Learning Methodology Series (3)
Patience
Patience is crucial in the market, but it encompasses richer meanings than what appears on the surface.
The traditional view holds that patience is a psychological quality that traders need to cultivate—waiting for the right entry signal, calmly observing market changes, and not rushing to exit.
However, this understanding is too limited. Patience is actually a structural capability that needs to be designed and built into the infrastructure of the trading system.
Patience in the market is not just a psychological quality; it is a key ability, and this ability is not only reflected at the personal level of traders but also needs to be endowed with the systemic attributes of the trading capital structure itself.
The market will never progress along the path we expect; it may drop 50% or even 70% before eventually rising.
During this volatility, a trader may subjectively possess enough psychological patience, but if a high-leverage strategy is employed, the capital structure itself lacks this key attribute of "patience."
At this point, what limits the trader is not psychological quality, but the inherent characteristics of the capital structure design.
When the price drops by 20%, a position with 5x leverage will be forcibly closed; when the price drops by 50%, even 2x leverage will struggle to survive.
It is not that traders lack patience, but rather that the capital structure deprives them of the possibility to wait.
Therefore, low-leverage or zero-leverage strategies are not only risk management tools but also concrete ways to endow the capital structure with "patience," allowing funds to withstand extreme market fluctuations and providing enough time for the market to validate the initial trading hypothesis.
True trading wisdom lies in understanding and accepting the uncertainty of the market, transforming this understanding into specific capital structure design, so that patience shifts from an abstract psychological quality to an intrinsic attribute of the trading system.
