Melee Build

"Some of the best traders I know have been trading the same setup, on the same time frame, on the same market for 20 years. They don't care about anything else." That's from John Carter in "Mastering the Trade" and it's probably one of the more underrated messages in the book. We live in a culture that romanticizes variety. New strategies. New markets. New indicators. The idea of doing the same thing for twenty years sounds like a boring proposition to most people. But in trading, depth beats breadth more often than not. I went through a phase where I was trading momentum one week, mean reversion the next, and some other strategy the week after. I was learning a lot and making nothing. Because every time I switched, I reset my pattern recognition back to zero. I never got deep enough into any one approach to develop real feel for it. The turning point was when I committed to masterings 1-2 setups. 1-2 timeframes, which for me is the daily or the weekly. This in combination with 1-2 market conditions where I had an edge. And I just did that. Over and over. Although at first it felt limiting, with time it started feeling like mastery. I could suddenly see setups developing before they fully formed. I knew the failure patterns. I knew when to push and when to pass. That level of intuition only comes from deep repetition, not from knowing a little bit about a lot of things. Master one way of making money. Then, slowly, add a second. Then maybe a third. The traders who last decades tend to be specialists, not generalists.