Success Psychology · Lesson 4

In April 1983, a sixty-one-year-old potato farmer from Victoria, Australia, turned up at the start line of the Sydney to Melbourne ultramarathon, a race of roughly 875 kilometres, in overalls and work boots. The field was made up of serious endurance athletes, sponsored, coached, and equipped. His name was Cliff Young. He ran with an odd shuffling gait, because that’s how you run across rough farmland after sheep. Most people assumed he’d drop out on the first day.

He didn’t. He won. He won in five days, fifteen hours, and four minutes, and he beat the previous record by nearly two days. Then, told he’d won ten thousand dollars, he said he hadn’t known there was prize money, and gave most of it to the runners who finished behind him.

It’s a true story, and it’s usually told as a feel-good one about grit. I think that misses the interesting part. Cliff Young didn’t win because he wanted it more. He won because he didn’t know the truth, and that set him free.

The truth, as the industry understood it

In 1983, ultramarathon running had a settled body of knowledge. You ran for about eighteen hours and slept for about six, every day, because that was how the human body was known to work. You ran with a proper stride, because that was efficient. You wore purpose-built shoes, because that was obvious. Every serious competitor knew these truths, planned around them, and was coached in them. They weren’t stupid. The truths were reasonable. They were also, it turned out, not the truth.

Cliff didn’t know any of it. He didn’t know you were supposed to sleep six hours, so while the professionals slept, he shuffled on through the night. He didn’t know the stride was wrong, so he ran the way his body had learned to run over sixty years of moving across paddocks in bad weather. By the time the elite field woke up on the second morning, the old man in the gumboots was in front, and he stayed there.

What the story is not saying

Before I map this onto trading, one honest caveat, because the story gets abused. Cliff was not a random person off the street who won through ignorance. He had sixty years of running after sheep in every weather. His body was built for exactly this, and his mind had spent a lifetime doing one thing for a long time without a clock. Ignorance of the rules was not what made him capable. It was what stopped him from capping his capability at the industry’s ceiling.

That distinction is the whole lesson. Knowing less than the experts is not an edge. Not inheriting their limits is.

The truths of the trading industry

Every industry has its 1983 ultramarathon rulebook, and retail trading has a thick one. Some of it is true. A lot of it is a consensus that everyone repeats and nobody has tested. Here are a few of the truths I inherited over twenty-five years, and paid for:

• You need more indicators. More screens, more lines, more confirmation. The professional’s chart looks like a cockpit. Mine did, and I could explain any trade after the fact and almost none before.
• You have to trade every day. A trader trades. Sitting out is losing opportunity. This truth is responsible for more of my no-setup trades than any other single belief.
• Real traders trade the open. The first five minutes are where the money is. For a discretionary system that needs the Initial Balance to form before it can read the condition, the first five minutes are where the losses are.
• You need to be fast. Faster data, faster fills, faster reactions. The VWAP Wave System asks you to name the condition, grade the setup, and wait for it. Slow, on purpose.
• You need the right shoes. The right platform, the right subscription, the right prop firm, the right setup. Every one of them can help. None of them is why anyone wins.
• Losing means you did something wrong. The truth that keeps traders changing systems every quarter. In a probabilistic game, a correctly executed loser is a good trade, and the industry’s reflex to fix it is what breaks people.

None of those is crazy. That’s why they survive. They are the eighteen-hours-and-six-hours-sleep of trading: reasonable, widely held, coached, and the ceiling on almost everyone who believes them.

How the shuffle maps onto the chart

Here’s Cliff, trade by trade.

• He ran through the night. Not faster, just longer, while the field rested. In trading, that’s the boring, repeatable process: the pre-market checklist, the graded journal, the weekly review, done every session including the ones that don’t matter. Nobody wins on a single glorious day. The shuffle wins because it doesn’t stop.
• He ran his own way. The gait the experts laughed at was the gait his body could sustain for five days. Your version of the system, the size, the setups you take and the ones you leave alone, the hours you trade, has to be one you can sustain for years, not the one that looks professional on a screenshot.
• He didn’t know about the prize money. He ran the race, not the payout. Every trader who has blown an account can tell you the moment they started trading the money instead of the setup. Process over P&L is not a slogan on this site; it’s the only reason my execution column has ticks in it.
• He was sixty-one. The industry said endurance was for the young and the trained. He hadn’t heard. If you’re coming to trading late, or from a life that had nothing to do with markets, the standard story says you’re behind. Cliff would say you haven’t been handed the ceiling yet.

Don’t always believe what everyone is saying

There’s a difference between the 1983 running world and the trading world, and it matters. The runners who told each other to sleep six hours were sincere. They were wrong, but nobody was selling them the six hours. In trading, a great many of the truths you’ll be handed come from someone who profits from you believing them. The indicator that finally works, for a monthly fee. The signal room that removes the need to think, for a monthly fee. The guru whose screenshots are always green and whose losing days are never posted. The prop-firm affiliate who has never passed an evaluation. The trading industry has more snake oil salesmen per square mile than any business I’ve been in, and I’ve been in a few.

So the Cliff Young question, which truths did I inherit and from whom, has a second half here: who benefits if I keep believing this? If the answer is the person who told you, treat it as an advertisement until your own journal says otherwise.

I’ll be plain about where that leaves this site, since I sell something too. I promote Chris Drysdale’s system and I earn a commission when you buy it. The test I’d apply to me is the one I’d apply to anyone: does the seller want you dependent on him, or does he teach you to grade your own trades and walk away when they’re wrong? Chris runs an education group, not a signal service, and the only reason I trust the system is that every belief in it can be tested in my own execution column. If that ever stops being true, I’ll say so here. Don’t take my word for it either. Take the free guide, sit in the trial for a week, and check the truths against your journal, the way Cliff checked the experts’ truths against the road.

The hard part: you already know the truth

Cliff’s advantage was that nobody had taught him the rules. You don’t get that. If you’ve been trading for more than a month, you’ve been handed the industry’s belief system, and you can’t un-know it the way he never knew it. I wrote about what that feels like in the backwards-bicycle lesson: you can’t remove a bias, only re-designate it.

So the practical question is not how to be ignorant. It’s how to choose which truths you keep. That’s what a system is for. The VWAP Wave System is a small set of beliefs, deliberately chosen: value is a line, extension is a band, the market is either balanced or discovering, four setups, one condition check, a grade before every entry. It is a replacement belief system, and the reason I chose it is that it’s smaller than the one the industry gave me, and every piece of it can be tested in a journal.

Choosing your rulebook

1. Write down the truths you trade by. All of them, including the embarrassing ones. “I have to be in the first move.” “A quiet day is a wasted day.” Most people have never seen their own rulebook in one place.
2. Mark each one: tested, inherited, or assumed. Tested means the journal says so. Inherited means someone credible said so. Assumed means it just feels true. Be honest about how few are in the first column.
3. Keep only what you can test. Replace the rest with a system small enough to grade. If a belief can’t produce a tick or a cross in the execution column, it isn’t a rule, it’s a superstition.
4. Run through the night. Do the process on the days that don’t count. That’s where the lead is built, while everyone else is resting on their eighteen-and-six.
5. Give the prize money away, at least in your head. Decide before the session that today’s result is not the point. Then trade like a man who didn’t know there was a cheque.

Cliff Young won a race the experts said couldn’t be run that way, in boots the experts said couldn’t be run in, at an age the experts said was too old, because their truths were never his. Yours don’t have to be either. But you’ll have to choose that on purpose, every morning, in the driveway.