I’ve noticed a shift in how people engage with substantial analysis. Decades of hard-won experience and thousands of hours of research get dismissed as “too long” when the actual reading time is minimal. We’re talking about insights that took years to develop, distilled into something digestible in minutes, yet the immediate reaction is often tl;dr rather than genuine engagement with the ideas presented.
I know there are people who genuinely value this work. The thoughtful responses and follow-up questions make that clear. But there’s a cohort that seems to want investment insights delivered in soundbites, preferably with rocket emojis and price predictions they can act on without thinking. That’s not how any of this actually works, but the expectation persists.
From time to time I wonder whether continuing to share detailed analysis is actually worth the effort. It’s genuinely difficult to measure impact when the metrics available are mostly noise. Likes and comments don’t tell you whether anyone actually changed their behavior, adjusted their thinking, or made better decisions based on what you’ve shared. The signal-to-noise ratio in feedback is terrible, which makes it nearly impossible to know if you’re reaching the intended audience or just contributing to the content noise that everyone scrolls past.
The core question keeps surfacing: will people actually heed advice from a stranger on the internet, regardless of the expertise and reasoning behind it? Does demonstrating deep understanding of market mechanics, showing your work, and providing actionable frameworks actually change anyone’s behavior? Or does it just become one more data point that gets filed away mentally as “interesting” before they go right back to whatever they were already doing?
I suspect the honest answer is uncomfortable. Most people aren’t looking for insights that challenge their existing beliefs or require them to think differently. They’re looking for confirmation that what they already planned to do is correct, or they’re looking for someone to tell them exactly what to buy and when. Neither of those needs is something I’m interested in serving, which creates an inherent mismatch between what I’m offering and what much of the audience actually wants.
The gap between sharing actionable intelligence and people actually taking action is probably wider than I’d like to admit. You can lay out a complete investment thesis with supporting evidence, explain the risk-reward dynamics, identify the mispricing, and provide the entire framework for evaluating the opportunity. But if the reader doesn’t have the capital, the conviction, the risk tolerance, or the temperament to actually execute, then all that analysis just becomes intellectual entertainment rather than something that generates real results.
Maybe that’s fine. Maybe the value is in the small percentage who do engage deeply, who do adjust their thinking, who do take action based on rigorous analysis rather than momentum or narrative. Maybe the impact doesn’t need to be universal to be worthwhile. But it’s hard not to feel the friction between the effort invested in developing these insights and the sometimes muted response that suggests most people would rather have a three-sentence summary with a ticker and a price target than actually understand what they’re investing in or why.
Here’s what most retail investors get wrong about speculative manias. They picture some dramatic headline event where reality suddenly intrudes and everything collapses overnight. The fantasy goes like this: the market wakes up one morning, collectively realizes the emperor has no clothes, and stocks crater before anyone can react. Clean. Decisive. Easy to identify in hindsight as “obvious” once it’s over.
That’s not how any of this works.
Bubbles don’t pop. They leak. Slowly. Painfully. With just enough false hope sprinkled throughout to maximize the psychological damage to everyone involved. The institutions and sophisticated players who understand market mechanics don’t want instant collapse. Why would they? There’s vastly more money to extract from orchestrating a controlled demolition than simply letting everything fall apart at once. Think about the actual incentive structure here. If you’re sitting on massive positions in overvalued assets, your goal isn’t to trigger panic selling where you can’t exit at reasonable prices. Your goal is managing the descent in ways that allow you to distribute your holdings across multiple price levels while retail keeps buying every bounce thinking they’re getting a deal.
Every fake rally serves a specific purpose in this process. Those violent moves higher shake out shorts who had the direction right but lacked the capital or conviction to withstand being early. They create expensive options markets where institutions happily sell premium to retail traders convinced they can time the volatility. They generate transaction fees as momentum chasers flip in and out of positions. Most importantly, they provide multiple exit points at elevated prices rather than forcing everyone through the same narrow door simultaneously.
The playbook repeats across every bubble throughout history. Let retail pile in near the top based purely on narrative momentum. Let them load up on call options and leverage. Then systematically break their conviction through repeated failures of what should be bullish catalysts. A positive earnings report that gaps the stock up at open only to close red by afternoon. A partnership announcement that generates initial excitement before fading into selling pressure. Every failed rally reinforces the lesson that maybe this time really is different, maybe the top really is in, maybe they should just cut losses and move on.
The timeline problem destroys most people trying to profit from recognizing overvaluation. Being correct about fundamentals means nothing if you can’t survive the period where markets stay disconnected from reality. Major bubbles took years to form and years to fully deflate. Perceptive observers identified structural problems long before peaks, but early shorts got obliterated by squeeze after squeeze despite being directionally correct about terminal valuations. The famous investors who profited from identifying bubbles didn’t just see the problem early. They positioned with enough capital and patience to withstand extended periods of looking wrong while everyone else was making money on the way up.
Markets stay irrational longer than most participants can stay solvent. That’s not just a clever saying. It’s the core dynamic that makes bubble trades so treacherous even when you’re right about the fundamental analysis. The people who successfully navigated major bubbles either stayed completely out, or sized positions small enough to survive the pain of being early by years.
Why do bubbles persist through mounting evidence? Because the narrative remains seductive and greater fools keep appearing. As long as new money flows in, as long as retail believes this time truly is different, as long as momentum begets more momentum, the bubble can inflate well beyond what any rational analysis suggests is sustainable. Speculative sectors today exhibit every classic characteristic of late-stage manias. Companies with minimal revenue trade at valuations that assume decades of perfect execution on unproven technology. Pre-revenue startups command market capitalizations exceeding established competitors that actually generate cash. The market prices best-case scenarios as base cases and ignores every historical precedent about how these cycles end.
Nobody knows when the turn happens. That uncertainty is what makes the timing so dangerous. Sophisticated players recognize there’s more profit in managing the deflation than trying to time some mythical peak. The strategy becomes controlled demolition rather than sudden implosion. First, establish dense supply by letting retail buy at elevated prices. They’re accumulating positions at levels that will generate pain on any sustained decline. Second, harvest volatility by selling expensive options to people convinced they can trade the swings. Third, engineer maximum confusion through violent two-way action that exhausts both bulls and bears.
Eventually momentum exhausts itself. New money stops flowing in. Rallies get weaker while selloffs intensify. Insiders accelerate their selling. Analysts who were cheerleaders start hedging their recommendations. Some catalyst emerges that breaks the narrative, though the specific trigger matters far less than the exhaustion that preceded it. Markets don’t actually need catalysts to fall. They need exhaustion. When buyers finally disappear, when the last optimists capitulate, when nobody wants to catch the falling knife anymore, that’s when prices collapse violently. By that point, institutions have already distributed most of their holdings across the entire descent.
The process is designed to hurt everyone who tries to trade it. Bulls who bought the top watch their positions melt. Bears who shorted early get carried out on margin calls. Retail traders who thought they could profit from volatility discover that trading costs, slippage, and timing errors destroyed them even when their directional bias was correct. The only consistent winners are those orchestrating the extraction, selling premium, and managing risk across multiple scenarios rather than making binary bets on direction or timing.
The bear thesis on speculative sectors is fundamentally sound despite impossible timing. Valuations are mathematically indefensible when companies trade at multiples that require assuming away competition, technological risk, regulatory hurdles, and basic economic gravity. Markets are pricing outcomes that would need everything to go perfectly for extended periods. Technology constraints don’t vanish because retail is excited. Competitive dynamics don’t disappear because current leaders have momentum. These are real limitations requiring real time and facing real competition from established players with deeper resources.
The endgame is inevitable. When these companies are still burning cash years from now with the same promises they’re making today, markets will reprice violently. The question isn’t whether it happens. The question is whether you can survive being right long enough to profit from it, and that’s where most people fail catastrophically.
Consider the asymmetry carefully. For bulls buying at peak valuations, upside is maybe another multiple or two if mania continues, which becomes less probable with each passing month. Downside is destruction when reality intrudes, which becomes more certain over time. For bears with proper sizing and realistic timelines, upside is substantial when collapse finally arrives. Downside is unlimited if you’re wrong about timing, which is precisely why timing kills most bears and why position sizing matters infinitely more than being directionally correct.
The practical question becomes how to position if you believe the thesis. Don’t short outright unless you have unlimited capital and emotional fortitude to withstand years of pain. Borrow costs and unlimited downside make this terrible risk-reward for almost everyone. Don’t buy near-term put options either. Theta decay and volatility crush destroy most option buyers even when they’re eventually proven right about direction. Instead, watch for exhaustion signals. Failed rallies. Insider selling accelerating. Downgrades from former cheerleaders. Momentum weakening. When cracks become undeniable and even bulls start getting nervous, that’s when you position aggressively. Not before.
Or, the smartest play for most people is simply not participating at all. Watch from the sidelines. Let others learn expensive lessons about the difference between exciting technology and profitable businesses. The best trade is sometimes no trade, especially when the entire setup is engineered to extract maximum value from maximum participants before the inevitable collapse.
The real insight isn’t that speculative sectors are overvalued. Anyone can see that. The insight is understanding how bubbles actually deflate and why trying to profit from that knowledge is vastly harder than it appears. The path from mania to capitulation is designed to inflict maximum pain on everyone who tries to trade it. The people who profit most aren’t the ones trying to predict direction or time the turn. They’re the ones engineering the volatility, harvesting premium, and managing risk across scenarios.
When speculative bubbles finally collapse, and they always collapse, it won’t be clean. It will be messy and painful and drawn out in ways that bankrupt confident bears while devastating hopeful bulls. The only winners will be those who understood the game from the beginning and positioned accordingly, with realistic timelines measured in years, proper sizing that allows survival through extended irrationality, and recognition that markets are wealth transfer mechanisms disguised as investment opportunities. Understanding that distinction matters infinitely more than any specific prediction about when reality intrudes.
I’ve had people come to me over the years asking for mentorship about trading. While I like the idea in theory, there are some significant complications that make it harder to implement than it might seem. Limited availability and selection. If I were to do formal mentorship, it would need to be incredibly small, maybe 3-5 people maximum to be effective. But how do I choose who’s best suited? What criteria would even make sense? Trading skill is partly innate pattern recognition, partly learned discipline, partly psychological resilience. You can’t assess that from an application or a conversation. The people who seem most promising often aren’t, and vice versa. Knowledge baseline and resource utilization. There are abundant resources available, including extensive materials I’ve already shared publicly. Before I invest time in direct mentorship, I’d need to see clear demonstration that someone has actually engaged with what’s already available. But that creates a chicken-and-egg problem: the people who need mentorship most are often the ones least able to effectively self-direct through existing resources. The ones who can already extract value from written frameworks might not need mentorship at all. The pricing problem. I wouldn’t charge for mentorship, which actually muddies the water significantly. Without financial commitment, there’s no forcing function for seriousness. People ghost, lose interest, or treat it casually because there’s no skin in the game. But charging for it feels wrong too. It creates perverse incentives where I’d be profiting from people who might lose money following my approach. And it attracts the wrong crowd: people looking for a shortcut rather than putting in the work. Time commitment and active engagement. Real mentorship in momentum trading can’t be passive. It requires being available during market hours, reviewing actual trades in real-time or shortly after, providing feedback on execution decisions while they’re still fresh. This isn’t “watch my videos and ask questions in a Discord.” It’s active coaching that demands significant time investment from both parties. Anyone unable to commit to that level of engagement would need to be filtered out, but that eliminates most people who have other jobs or obligations. Skill transferability questions. My trading style is highly systematic but also deeply intuitive after years of pattern recognition. I can explain the framework, the indicators, the decision rules. But can I actually teach the pattern recognition that happens in the moment? The ability to read order flow, to sense when momentum is real versus when it’s about to fail, to execute with conviction under pressure: how much of that is teachable versus just experience accumulated over thousands of trades? Psychological mismatch risks. What works for my psychology might not work for someone else’s. I can handle high-frequency decision-making and the emotional volatility of momentum trading because of how my brain is wired. But pushing someone into that style who’s better suited for longer timeframes or fundamental analysis could be actively harmful. How do I assess psychological fit before committing to mentorship? The success metric problem. How would I even measure if mentorship is working? Short-term P&L is noisy and often misleading. Long-term results take years to validate. Process adherence is important but doesn’t guarantee success. And if someone follows my framework and still loses money, is that a failure of the framework, the mentorship, or just the reality that trading is hard and most people lose regardless of instruction? Liability and responsibility concerns. If I mentor someone and they blow up their account following my approach, how much responsibility do I bear for that? Even with disclaimers, there’s a moral weight to influencing someone’s financial decisions. The closer the mentorship relationship, the heavier that weight becomes. I could teach them everything I know and they could still make catastrophic mistakes because trading under real pressure is different from trading under observation. Scale and impact limitations. Even if I solve all these problems and successfully mentor a handful of people, what’s the actual impact? If I mentor 5 people and 2 become consistently profitable, is that a success? What about the 3 who don’t make it? And at that scale, is mentorship even the highest-value use of time compared to other ways I could contribute: better documentation, improved frameworks, research into decision-making systems that help more people indirectly? I don’t have good answers to these questions, which is why mentorship remains an open problem for me. The demand is real, the theoretical value is clear, but the practical implementation is complicated in ways that simple “I’ll teach you to trade” programs don’t acknowledge. Maybe there’s a model that threads these needles, some combination of screening, structure, commitment mechanisms, and clear boundaries that makes it work. But I haven’t figured it out yet. If anyone has thoughts on how to approach this effectively, I’m genuinely interested. It feels like there should be a way to transfer this knowledge without the pitfalls, but the path isn’t obvious to me.
20251207
“I’m not reading all that.”
This is now a flex. Somewhere along the way, announcing that you refused to engage with something became a display of confidence rather than an admission of limitation. The person who didn’t read the thing speaks with more authority than the person who wrote it. Length itself became the problem, as if the act of developing a thought past 280 characters is an imposition on the audience rather than a gift to them.
I’ve watched this accelerate. Several years ago, “tldr” was a request for a summary. Now it’s a dismissal. The summary isn’t wanted either. What’s wanted is a reaction without the inconvenience of comprehension. An opinion without the burden of information. A take without the context that would complicate it.
Reading comprehension has collapsed, and we’re not supposed to notice. Studies keep confirming what anyone paying attention already sees: adults struggle with texts that would have been considered baseline literacy a generation ago. But the collapse isn’t just mechanical. It’s volitional. People aren’t failing to understand complex material. They’re refusing to attempt it. The muscle has atrophied because we stopped asking it to work.
The proudly ignorant have always existed. What’s new is the social reward structure. Admitting you didn’t read something used to carry a small cost. Now it signals that your time is too valuable, your attention too precious, your status too high to engage with whatever someone else labored to produce. The writer is reframed as inconsiderate for asking anything of the reader. Brevity becomes a moral virtue rather than a stylistic choice.
This is how anti-intellectualism scales. Not through book burnings or state censorship but through the quiet normalization of not engaging. Through the elevation of hot takes over developed arguments. Through a culture that treats complexity as elitism and nuance as weakness. The person who says “just get to the point” isn’t asking for clarity. They’re asking to be spared the reasoning that supports the point. They want conclusions without the logic that produced them, which is another way of saying they want to be told what to think without understanding why.
We’ve trained ourselves to skim. To extract keywords and pattern-match to familiar templates. To decide within seconds whether something confirms or threatens our existing positions and engage accordingly. The text itself becomes irrelevant. It’s just a trigger for a response we were already prepared to give.
What gets lost is everything that requires space. An argument that unfolds over paragraphs, each building on the last, cannot survive in an environment optimized for extraction. Qualification gets read as hedging. Nuance gets read as weakness. The acknowledgment of counterarguments that separates analysis from propaganda looks like concession to an audience that only recognizes victory or defeat. Sustained reasoning demands a reader willing to hold multiple ideas simultaneously, to tolerate ambiguity before resolution, to follow a thread that doesn’t deliver its payoff in the first sentence. That reader is not being cultivated. They’re being selected against.
So we get shorter. Punchier. We pre-surrender to the assumption that no one will stay with us, and we write accordingly. What was once considered accessible becomes “too long.” What was once considered simplified becomes “dense.” The range of acceptable cognitive demand narrows until anything requiring sustained attention feels like an unreasonable ask. A thousand words is now a commitment. Three paragraphs is a wall of text. The people who write for a living learn to accommodate this, and in accommodating it, we accelerate it.
And the people who can’t or won’t meet even that lowered bar announce it with pride. “I’m not reading all that.” As if the limitation is ours for having something to say.
I’m writing a book about trading psychology. It will be free.
The premise: knowing about cognitive biases doesn’t fix them. Every trader who’s read Kahneman can explain loss aversion. Most of them still hold losers too long and cut winners too short. The knowledge sits there, inert, while the behavior continues unchanged. Somewhere between 70% and 90% of retail traders lose money, and that number hasn’t budged despite an explosion in educational content about behavioral finance. More books than ever. Same failure rate.
Something else is happening.
The book explains the mechanism. Not the familiar catalog of biases, which you can find in dozens of trading books already. The reason those biases operate despite awareness. The evolutionary architecture that produces them. And the structural approaches that actually work, precisely because they don’t rely on willpower or self-knowledge.
The core reframe: you’re not fighting urges you need to resist. You’re being argued with by a part of your own mind that has access to all your beliefs and preferences and can construct persuasive cases in real time. It knows what you find plausible. It knows your vulnerabilities. And it’s building arguments that serve its objectives, not yours. You won’t win that argument by arguing better. You win by building systems that make the argument irrelevant.
The book walks through each major bias as a mechanism, not a definition. How loss aversion reframes a losing position before you even begin to deliberate. How overconfidence spirals through small samples and inflated sizing until the inevitable reversal. How confirmation bias operates at the attention layer, filtering information before conscious analysis begins. How FOMO and herding produce the classic retail pattern of buying high and selling low through a series of decisions that each feel rational in the moment.
Then it walks through the structural solutions. Pre-commitment. Automation. Friction. External accountability. Environment design. Not as a list of tips, but as an integrated system for containing a machine you can’t reprogram.
The process of writing this has clarified things I’ve felt for years but never fully articulated. Putting mechanism to pattern, finding the words for dynamics I’ve lived through repeatedly. I’m genuinely proud of how it’s coming together.
This isn’t a book about how to trade. It’s a book about why you don’t do what you know you should do, and what to build so that the knowing finally matters.
I’ll share it when it’s ready. If this is something that would be useful to you, I’m glad it’ll find you.