Amor Fati: Embrace the Trend and Block Out the Distractions
May 29, 2025
“A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them.” — Carl Jung
“Whatever may happen to thee, it was prepared for thee from all eternity.” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Introduction
Markets are not machines to be commanded. They are oceans, stormy and sublime, indifferent to your wishes. You don’t direct the tides. You sail with them or you drown. The idea behind amor fati — Latin for “love of fate” — is not romantic fatalism; it’s hardened realism. It’s a doctrine of weaponised acceptance. In both markets and life, it means: accept reality as it is, not as you wish it to be. Better yet, love it. Thrive in it.
When the trend turns, those who refuse to adapt are chewed up and spat out like driftwood in a typhoon. Investors who fight the tape, traders who deny the trend, thinkers who refuse to evolve — they are the nails that get hammered. And history remembers them as cautionary footnotes, not victors.
1. Amor Fati: The Stoic Weapon of Tactical Endurance
In The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon didn’t just document events. He showed how civilisations collapse not from one cataclysm but from a refusal to adapt, from self-inflicted rot. That applies to empires and portfolios alike.
Amor fati is not passivity; it’s trained responsiveness. It’s looking at the facts and seeing not your fears, but your frame of opportunity. When the market sells off, the fearful see blood. The practitioner of Amor Fati sees clarity. It’s a moment to reposition, reallocate, and reassess. Fate has shifted — and that’s not a problem. That’s a signal.
Marcus Aurelius wrote during the plague, war, and betrayal. Yet he taught, “A blazing fire makes flame and brightness out of everything that is thrown into it.” That’s how a stoic trader operates. Whether it’s a meme frenzy, a Federal Reserve rate shock, or geopolitical chaos, they convert the fuel of fate into forward momentum.
2. Mass Illusions: The Mob as Market Virus
Markets are emotional ecosystems. You can pretend they run on logic, but that fiction is reserved for textbooks. In practice, they run on mood swings, contagion, and delusion. Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds documented it in 1841. Crypto pumpers on TikTok proved it again in 2021.
Greed and fear don’t just move prices. They possess people. A 2020 study by the CFA Institute showed that during market panics, institutional investors reduced risk exposure more rapidly than retail. But retail investors re-entered sooner during euphoric rebounds. Why? Crowd mimicry. They don’t analyse; they imitate.
The investor with amor fati isn’t immune to this madness, but they observe it like a zoologist studying a stampede. When irrational exuberance peaks, they scale down risk. When terror grips CNBC headlines, they sharpen their buy list. Trends are not to be fought but followed — until the signs say otherwise.
3. Technical Tools: The Stoic’s Tactical Kit
Price action is the language of the crowd. Technical analysis is how you translate it.
The MACD doesn’t lie to spare your feelings. The RSI doesn’t care if you love Tesla. Candlestick formations don’t apologise for being inconvenient. These tools are brutally indifferent mirrors, reflecting the crowd’s intent. A Stoic welcomes that.
Use them like armour. MACD crossover? It’s not just a line on a chart. It’s a signal that sentiment is pivoting. RSI above 80 in a parabolic uptrend? Caution. That’s not a victory lap; it’s a setup for slaughter. Bearish divergence forming as volume dries up? Prepare to exit. Love fate. Adapt to its changes.
Sun Tzu wrote, “Water shapes its course according to the nature of the ground over which it flows.” The technical trader does the same. They flow with momentum, adjusting position size and stop levels in tune with the market’s rhythm. It’s not surrender. It’s a superior positioning.
4. Blood and Thunder: Learning from Crashes
History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes in warning bells.
2008: Subprime rot metastasised while most traders clung to narratives. Bear Stearns collapsed in March. By September, Lehman was gone. The trend had changed long before the talking heads admitted it. Those who accepted reality pivoted. Others were pulverised.
2020: Covid panic crushed global indices. But within weeks, new trends emerged. Remote work, cloud computing, and telehealth. Those with amor fati didn’t demand a return to pre-pandemic norms. They adapted fast, bought Zoom and Shopify, and rode the new wave. The rest mourned the past and missed the present.
The key insight: the market owes you nothing. If you try to argue with it, it won’t even hear you. It just keeps moving either with you or through you.
5. Emotion is the Enemy
Behavioural finance confirms what philosophy already knew: the average person is a slave to impulse.
Loss aversion, confirmation bias, and overconfidence — they dominate. Kahneman and Tversky proved it empirically. But the stoic investor has protocols, not moods. You don’t trade because you “feel good” or the stock is “popular.” You enter because the trend is confirmed, the risk defined, and the signal aligned.
Discipline in trading is like discipline in battle. You don’t let adrenaline call your plays. You let data shape your plan. You don’t panic when wrong; you cut the position. Amor fati isn’t about loving pain. It’s about respecting consequences. It’s about accepting that every loss is a form of tuition.
6. Common Sense: The Underrated Asset
Despite all this, some forget the basics. A stock with horrible fundamentals is a grenade, no matter how good the chart looks. A company on fire can still break new highs, but you don’t park your entire portfolio in one rocket and pray it doesn’t explode.
Common sense matters. Balance sheets matter. Debt ratios matter. Insiders dumping shares? That’s not a coincidence; it’s a warning. You don’t need a Ph.D. in economics to trade like a killer. You need the guts to say, “What am I missing here?”
Most market ruin comes not from bad tools but from ignoring the obvious. The stoic doesn’t just look at the chart. They look at the context.
7. The Contrarian Paradox
The market rewards the contrarian—until it doesn’t. The difference between a visionary and a lunatic is timing. A contrarian who fights the trend blindly is a martyr. One who observes, waits, and times their move is a tactician.
Jesse Livermore once said, “It was never my thinking that made the big money. It was my sitting.” Sitting with patience, sitting with preparation. The contrarian doesn’t short bubbles in their first inning. They wait for parabolic exhaustion, volume climax, divergence. Then they strike.
Amor fati gives you the discipline to wait. It tells you: the herd is often wrong eventually, but they’re rarely wrong immediately. Don’t short euphoria until the foundation cracks. Don’t buy despair until the bleeding slows.
8. Illusions of Control
The market doesn’t read your newsletter. It doesn’t care what you think it “should” do.
The Stoic trader recognises that the idea of control is an illusion. You manage exposure, not outcomes. You shape your risk, not the result. Once you submit your order, fate takes over. The rest is reaction.
Marcus Aurelius again: “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” If the market moves against you, that’s not unfair — it’s training. It’s the battlefield shaping your edge.
9. Final Lesson: The Nail That Refused to Bend
Every cycle leaves behind bodies. From dot-com zealots in 2000 to crypto maximalists in 2022, the pattern is the same: they bet everything on a single narrative, refused to adapt, and got nailed to the wall.
Don’t be the nail. Be the blade.
Let others rage at volatility, scream at CNBC, and argue on forums. You? You observe. You align. You execute.
That is amor fati in the market: total immersion in what is, coupled with ruthless action in response.
Love fate. Read the chart. Cut the noise.
And ride the trend until it tells you otherwise.
