The Uber-Trader

"YOU WILL LEARN (in less than 30 minutes each)
- How to prevent fat gain while bingeing (X-mas, holidays, weekends)
- How to increase fat-loss 300% with a few bags of ice
- How Tim gained 34 pounds of muscle in 28 days, without steroids, and in four hours of total gym time
- How to sleep 2 hours per day and feel fully rested
- How to produce 15-minute female orgasms
- How to triple testosterone and double sperm count
- How to go from running 5 kilometers to 50 kilometers in 12 weeks
- How to reverse "permanent" injuries
- How to add 150+ pounds to your lifts in 6 months"

-- Tim Ferris - The 4-Hour Body


The more I trade and gain experience as a speculator, the higher are my expectations and I've come to the point that I'm now convinced that "supra-human" returns are achievable by day traders using the appropriate leverage and trading system. I don't want to discuss here too much my own trading performance and targets but let's say that I consider multifold profits starting circa 100x (+9,900 percent) as "supra-human" but achievable (as in possible, I don't say that's easy). As a benchmark, we can use the case of Sylvain Duport, a French swing trader on stocks who achieved "live" (paper) perfomances of respectively 34x and 87x times his initial stake in 2 subsequent 6-month trading contests.Now, let's make a point clear: this may seem paradoxical but for me Soros or Buffet's performances (roughly 30 percent in average per year for decades) are much more difficult to achieve and unlike most of guys, I even don't even think about replicating their strategies and their trading/investment style.

Last year, I launched the Operation "Absolute Trader" aiming to improve my level of fitness and my health along with my technical and mental skills in order to become a better trader as I found out that these are directly correlated to my trading performance. To push the same idea one step further, in order to achieve the kind of supra-human trading returns I mentioned above, being an "absolute trader" may not be enough. I've been trying lately to take the Operation to the next level : the "Uber-Trader" level. In order to become an Uber-Trader and achieve uber-profits, I tend to believe that one has to become also some kind of Superman and that's been precisely my new goal for a little while. All the human skills and abilities, both intellectual and physical, have been crunched and crunched again for 250,000 years. Techniques and practices to enhance them and push them to a level one can consider "suprahuman" have been found here and there, either they were revealed or kept secret for thousands of years. The good news is nowadays, apart of the secret of making money - if you had that secret I'm pretty sure you'd keep it for you- for any given skill, there's a guy, a so-called "expert", who has crunched it and knows how to bring it to an extraordinary level and who, most importantly, is happy to reveal it and this precisely in order to make money. Consequently the name of the game is to find the right guy(s), one who knows and learn the techniques from him or her then experiment them on oneself and practice/adapt/improve/customize them. Tim Ferris the author of The 4-Hour Work Week and of The 4-Hour Body seems to be a Master in that art. I've not read the former book because I already work much less than 4 hours per week :-))) but I found the latter, which is precisely a guide to become a kind of superman and is "the result of an obsessive quest, spanning more than a decade, to hack the human body. It contains the collective wisdom of hundreds of elite athletes, dozens of MDs, and thousands of hours of jaw-dropping personal experimentation." quite inspirational. The book, even if I found that most of techniques and tricks described somehow haven't suited me, has been a good starting point in my Quest and is the source for most of the topics I will discuss today in this post.

As trading lets me a lot of available time, I spend most of it on my Quest to develop and improve myself in as many areas as possible I believe to make me a better trader. I'm grinding on a lot of different topics at the same time. Notably, I read a lot about the History of the world, try to improve my chess game and I read the Economist from cover to cover every week, but for these I don't consider my skills and knowledge to be anything like suprahuman (yet...). I will just discuss in this post a few skills I've beem working out and consider I've done not too badly.

- How to become immortal ?

As discussed in a previous post, the Infinite Trader Theorem, I do believe that on the long run, the probability I make a zillion from trading is massive (as in close to 100%) and both the fact I guess the Expectancy of my trading system is positive and the fact that my risk of ruin is virtually zero (as long as I manage to find a few hundred quids, I could manage to build a significant trading stake, I target something like 100x remember) should speed this up and I should be able to make it before Eternity. The longer I live (physically) the higher is the probability I end the trading game (and the longer I enjoy a zilllionaire's life once it's achieved...). In other words, if I manage to be immortal, I will be a quadrillionaire (or whatever-lionnare) for sure : it's really worth trying!!! The Immortality Institute, a web community for life extension advocacy and research, is crunching (seriously) the question of immortality. For instance, they came up with a vitamin they believe to be "perfect".

Personally, in order to extend my lifespan at the maximum (and make a zillion!), I try to optimize my supplements intake, exercice and diet:

Firstly, regarding vitamins and supplements, I take daily (and I guess it replicates more or less the formulation shown above) a multivitamin (Wellman sports), Acai capsules, garlic extracts, ginger capsules, green tea, Gingko baloba, creatine (2-month cycles), Cod liver oil, flaxseed oil and 75mg of aspirin.

Secondly in terms of exercice, I try to workout 1-2 hours daily 6 days a week. As I posted previously (Shaolin Trader), I've been integrating in addition  to my standard workout (weight training mainly) some "Shaolin workouts", both what is called external (Kung Fu) and internal (Qigong). I believe those monks, though a mix of cardio and breathing exercices they had crunched for 1,500 years, caught something about longetivity and suprahuman powers. A thought I had is with the "standard" workouts and competitive sports, the older you get the less you perfrom well (except for Rocky Balboa...) but it seems not to be true with these Chinese martial arts. Finally in terms of diet, I've been on constant diet for years looking carefully at whatever enters my body. The main principles of both exercice and nutrition, with an analogy to trading, were discussed in a post titled TradersHealth.

- How to sleep 2 hours a day ?

Because the markets are 24-5, the dream of many traders is to be able to trade all day : Asia overnight, Europe during the day and US in the evening. The thing it is almost possible thanks to what is called polyphasic sleep. Changing the sleeping patterns, some guys managed to reduce the time of sleep needed using different sleeping patterns The charts below show different ones.

To find out more, I've been reading forums on guys who had tried the "Uberman" pattern, only 2 hours of sleep per 24 jours with 6 20-minute naps every 4 hours. Unfortunately it looks like it doesn't work so well (guys have some deficiencies, too few guys managed to do it to be relevant and no one managed to do it for years) and it is impossible in practice if you want to live a "normal" life with "normal" social constraints. I personally tried the biphasic (1 power nap, a caffeine one actually) and Everyman (2 power naps) patterns. It was cool but unfortunately unlike a Fellow Trader of mine who falls asleep as soon as he lies down, I don't manage to sleep in the middle of the afternoon, even if I only slept a few hours the night before. So what I've been doing instead, in line with my other Shaolin stuffs, is a daily 20-minute standing meditation (half an hour after Wall Street opens). Unfortunately I still need to sleep during the night, so for now, it's a failure. To be continued...

- How to memorize a 1944-digit number ?

Jesse Livermore attributed in the Holy Reminiscences his trading skills partially to his very good memory of figures. Actually after I read Maximize Your Memory Power by Nishant Kasibhatla, I found out that with the right techniques and efforts, a really outstanding memory is achievable. The author himself "memorised a 400-digit binary number and recalled all the digits in the forward and reverse orders with an amazing 100 % accuracy, a 1944 digit random number, a shuffled pack of 52 playing cards in 2 minutes 32 seconds and recalled the sequence in forward, reverse and random order" and the best is all comes from simple techniques he discloses, he used to have a "normal" memory before he practiced them.

- Zen and the Art of mental computation

As I wrote in the Infinite Trader Theorem, I spend about one hour a day playing with an Android app Math Workout and making simple computations 35+57, 12x9, 106-58,... and since that post, I've improved my best score of 2 seconds and I answer the 20 questions in less than 26 seconds (which is so far still human, wait a bit more and see :-)))). The trick to be faster and faster is not to compute consciously but manage to be totally detached and let the unconscious mind play. That's the idea of Zen (well my understanding of it), if a Master Zen is able to shoot 3 arrows at the very same point in the darkness, I believe I'll probably be able to make the winning streak of trades I need to end the trading game if I work long enough on that aspect...

- How to end the trading game ?

Well, easy one : just keep on following this blog :-)


---------------------------------------------------------------------
Discuss this post at the Hand of Scalpuman, our trading forums
Tweet
As this post is published: SPX 1254 // SX5E 2275 // NKY 8463 // DAX : 5934 // EURUSD 1.3522 // USDJPY 76.97 // XAUUSD : 1769