Make Something Happen

You hear it often. It’s well intentioned, of course. It can even serve as a motivator at times too.

But it’s often used when impatience and frustration are capitulating. Coherent plans be damned. Forget long-term ramifications. Just make something happen!

The pressure to perform is real, but it’s often self-induced by spending more than you make, setting unrealistic expectations, working with unreasonable clients and even operating under false premises such as believing you have more control than you do.

I remember feeling pressure early on when I started Melissinos Trading. I just wanted to get off to a good start, show everyone that I knew what I was doing and deliver strong returns to my initial few investors. I was bringing something new to them, trend-following, so I wanted it to kick off with a bang and avoid the doubt and disappointment.

This was an unhealthy state to operate in. I was more prone to outside pressure; to making changes to my strategy (that I knew deep down I shouldn’t) and allowing my emotions to be influenced by short-term results. I was lucky enough to catch this early. My habits were healthy enough to bend but not break.

After some time, I realized I was trying to please others, not myself; that just because I had a strong trading system, the markets weren’t obliged to reward us in the short run. These lessons grounded me and kept me focused on the things I could control — namely, my costs, executing efficiency and who I did business with.

One mistake can cost you a lot in this business. Hell, any business. But allow your market opinions inhibit you from capitalizing on a trend, you’re in trouble. Hold a losing investment, and maybe even add to it, because you think the bottom is in? You’re dead. Take money from high-strung investors? Everything suffers.

Investors or employees who demand to make something happen causes more harm than good. The staff meeting feels good. So does the motivational speech and the heart-to-heart. But it often nudges people down the wrong path — to taking more risk than the manager normally would, taking that profit too early or holding that loss too long.

All counterproductive decisions under the feel-good guise of “I was just trying to make something happen to help our company.”

The markets are effective in teaching us that we cannot extract profits from them at will. That we’re not in control. That we must flow with them, not grind against the grain. That the best thing to do for the long-term is right decision to make always.

In the markets, it’s far better to let it happen than to make it happen. This is the key to survival and sanity.

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