See or Bleed: situational awareness in trading, error audits, and the courage to unlearn fast
Sep 25, 2025
You either see or you bleed. The tape is not kind to the hesitant or the sentimental. It doesn’t care about your thesis, your clever turns of phrase, or how long you stared at a chart. It punishes blindness. It punishes inertia dressed up as conviction. The only defence is attention sharpened to a blade—observation that bites, not observation that flatters. If that sounds dramatic, good. The market is not a book club. It is a moving battlefield where the unobservant get harvested for parts.
Ignorance expands faster than competence because crowds reward certainty over sight. Novices baptise trends as immortal. Veterans fall asleep on routines that worked until the microstructure changed and the margin clerk rang. Life mirrors this pathology: an error rationalised often enough turns into culture. The antidote is not another indicator. It is humility so sharp it slices through your favourite habits, plus a practical programme of watching, testing, and acting with speed when the evidence moves.
The price of not seeing
Jesse Livermore built and lost fortunes because his eyes were better than his patience with his own rules. He read the tape before he let the tape read him—until he didn’t. The lesson isn’t nostalgia; it’s physics. Markets are nonlinear fields; small changes in funding or positioning trigger outsize moves. In May 2010, the Flash Crash exposed algorithms blind to context—liquidity evaporated in minutes because the machines were trained on weather, not storms. In March 2020, even U.S. Treasuries were dumped for cash; models that assumed bonds would catch the fall found gravity had other ideas. If you didn’t see the plumbing, you mistook a systemic margin call for a dip to buy.
Negative oil in April 2020 was not a mythic sign; it was storage, contract expiry, and forced unwinds colliding at a point. The ticker screamed “end times”; the pipes quietly explained the price. In 2022, the LUNA/UST spiral was reflexivity in reverse: a faith-based peg withering under its own logic. Meme cycles in 2021–22 were crowd energy masquerading as fundamentals. If your situational awareness did not include the crowd’s pulse, you read fish as weather and blamed the sea when your boat flipped.
How seeing actually works
Seeing is not raw eyesight. It’s structured attention. The market isn’t a single chart; it’s a multi-dimensional space: rates, spreads, currency, volatility term structure, breadth, leadership, positioning. Each axis tilts the field. A rally with high-yield spreads still wide and a stiff USD is a wick without wax. A sell-off with spreads cooling, a softer dollar, and a re-steepening VIX curve is oxygen returning even if headlines still hiss.
Run a daily scan that fits on one page. Morning: three lines, no prose. Breadth (advancers/decliners, up/down volume, sector dispersion). Credit (CDX/HY trend, cash bond tone, primary issuance). USD trend and real yields (direction and pace). Volatility term structure (is near-term fear cheaper or dearer than the medium term?). Leadership (which groups survive down days?). Evening: three lines on what you missed, why, and the rule that would have closed the gap. That’s situational awareness in trading as ritual, not mood.
Paradoxes that keep you honest
More data can mean less seeing. Drown a mind in screens and it latches onto the brightest pixel. The discipline is subtraction: keep only dials you’ll act on. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Scan slowly so your mind can model the field; once triggers hit, act as if someone friendly is pricing you a favour for thirty seconds and then slamming the door. Humility sharpens conviction; arrogance blurs it. Conviction that precedes evidence is theatre; conviction that follows evidence is a trade.
Observation hurts because it demands unlearning. Unlearning is a betrayal of yesterday’s identity, and egos defend identities like castles. Dump the romance. You are not your model. You are the person who must kill your model a moment after it stops paying rent.
Reflexivity: when perception writes fundamentals
George Soros didn’t discover reflexivity; he gave traders a clean way to say what they already knew: perception moves reality. Funding costs rise because people suspect funding costs will rise. A stock becomes “quality” because the holders refuse to sell, until their refusal is copied and it becomes quality by social fact. Observation here is not just watching price, but watching how belief migrates through the system and alters the plumbing. In bubbles, the story inflates the balance sheet; in panics, the story punctures it. When your attention can map belief as a moving variable, you’re not late to the party; you’re guiding towards the fire exit.
Edge cases are the teacher
Edge cases don’t ask permission to rewrite your rules. They arrive with a crowbar. Negative oil, flash crashes, exchange blow-ups, bonds selling off with equities—these extremes are not black swans; they are stress tests of your model and your nerve. Each forces a question the middle never asks: do your instruments still measure anything or are you reading noise? If you only learn from middles, you will donate heavily at the edges. Study anomalies until you can smell the next one through the wall.
Fieldcraft: drills for hard eyes
Observation without a drill is just a vibe. Build drills.
OODA for traders. Observe: facts only—price, breadth, credit, USD, term structure, leadership. Orient: regime—tightening or easing, risk-on/off, liquidity conditions, calendar catalysts. Decide: prewritten triggers—buy leaders breaking out on rising volume; fade rallies when breadth narrows and credit disagrees; stand down when signals oppose. Act: no dithering once criteria hit; size to survive error.
Hypothesis tickets. One sentence premise; three disconfirmers; a time stop. “Earnings surprise and renewed buybacks drive a re-rate; disconfirmers: margin compression, spread widening, failed retest; 10 trading days.” If you can’t compress it, you don’t understand it; if you won’t name disconfirmers, you don’t deserve capital.
Error audits. Weekly, catalogue two categories: “saw but didn’t act” and “acted but didn’t see.” Force yourself to write what the rule would have been that prevented the error—then add the rule. Tag each trade by signal clarity, execution latency, emotional state. Remove one mistake class per month. It’s crude. It works.
Attention economy. Cap sources. One platform for prices, one for credit, one for news. Mute the dopamine cannon. Your brain is not a landfill for other people’s urgency.
Turning awareness into money (without getting cute)
Seeing must have cash flow. During panic, fear inflates option premiums. When the board shows implied volatility screaming, you can let the crowd rent your patience. Example: a high-quality USA company flushes to $240. One-month $200 puts pay $8–$11. Sell ten cash-secured contracts, reserve $200,000, collect $8,000–$11,000. If price holds, you keep the income; if assigned, your basis is roughly $189–$192 in a business your observation says will survive. That’s observation monetised as positioning, not prediction.
Buy time like it’s oxygen. Reinvest a slice of that premium into 18–36 month calls on the name or on a broad index. This is not bravado. It’s humility—an admission you cannot pick the day of the turn, so you buy enough calendar for reality to catch up with your read. Size strictly: 1–2% per line, 6–8% per theme, maximum daily loss in USD that forces you to stop pressing while your mind is compromised. Situational awareness in trading is not just sight; it is the discipline that protects sight from panic.
Mass psychology: why the room lies to your eyes
Social proof converts whispers into orthodoxy. Heat maps feel like truth; influencer threads feel like research. Mirror neurons fire and the hands move without orders from the head. The remedy isn’t cynicism; it’s calibration. Ask: is this information new, or just louder? Is this move broadening or narrowing? Who must buy or sell because of mandate, not opinion? Herds don’t only stampede; they freeze. Observation sees the freeze coming and prices the break.
Unlearning as a habit, not an event
Unlearning hurts because it kills identity. Keep it mechanical to spare your pride. Monthly purge: which signal stopped paying? Cut size or kill it. Quarterly purge: which belief made you miss the clearest trade? Write its obituary. Annual purge: which part of your process exists to comfort you, not to protect you? Leave it on the floor. Ritualise unlearning so it can’t be procrastinated by self-flattery.
You are not your last win, and you are not your worst loss. You are the average of your audits. You are the rules you obey at 15:42 on a Tuesday when spreads widen and the index fakes a bounce. You are the speed at which you can drop an old map when the road vanishes. The courage to unlearn is not poetic; it’s survival. Your P&L doesn’t pay for beautiful attachments. It pays for clear eyes and quick hands.
Build a room your future self can trust
Put a checklist next to your screen. Morning scan (breadth, credit, USD, vol curve, leadership). Triggers (buy strength with confirmation, sell weakness at predefined lines, stand down when signals cross). Risk limits (position caps, theme caps, daily USD loss). Execution friction (two-step confirms, no after-hours heroics without a rule). Debrief (two mistakes, one rule added). These are not fetishes; they’re handrails for a body that will occasionally want to throw itself down the stairs.
Situational awareness in trading is not clairvoyance. It’s honesty. It’s admitting you can only see a few critical vectors clearly, so you organise your day around them. It’s choosing to be bored when the edge is thin. It’s acting like lightning when the choir of signals finally sings. It’s refusing to be drafted into someone else’s drama. It’s being ruthless with your time, careful with your risk, and generous with your attention—because your attention decides whether you live to fight, or learn to love the taste of blood.
It is only 10th Sept are these events ‘planned’ for the future?
It looks like Shadwell!
KUDOS TO SWEDEN! FINALLY THEY MEN WAKE UP AND FIGHT!
IT IS ABSOLUTELY 100% VITAL THAT SWEEDEN GET EVERY MUSLIM OUT AND KILL THE ACTIVE ASSULTING MUSLIMS
ASAP! TWO TYPES OF MUSLIMS
ACTIVE TERRORIST
AND STAND BY ,AKA MODERATE.
NO SUCH THING AS A MODERATE!
WHEN THEIR NUMBER IS UP,ITS TIME TO RAPE YOUNG GIRLS,STONE SLUTTY WHITE WOMAN,MURDER ATHIESTS,AND ALL THOSE THAT WILL NOT SURRENDER THEIR LIVES TO ISLAM,ONLY THE STUPID LIBERAL
TRAITOR WILL SAY A MODERATE
MUSLIM EXISTS, EXECUTE THE LIBERAL TRAITOR! AND GROW YOUR NUMBERS SWEDS,USA IS PRAYING FOR YOU.
AS FOR THE GERMANS,WHAT A COWARDLY STUPID,WORTHLESS MASS OF PEOPLE,THEY ARE THE RESULT OF LIBERAL AGENDA,AND DENYING CHRIST IN THEIR DAILY LIVES,THEY WILL PAY FOR THEIR ATTITUDES ON BEING SUCH A LOW VULGAR SECULAR PEOPLE,
AND I WILL BE THE FIRST TO OPEN FIRE IF THOSE JEW HATING NAZIS EVER TRY TO COME HERE,INSTEAD OF FIGHTING ISLAM,THE STUPID NAZI SEEMS TO NOT KNOW LIBERALISM AND SECULAR CULTURE WEAKEN A PEOPLE UNTIL THEY PERISH,NO GOD,NO PEACE,NO NATION
VIVA SWEEDEN
VIVA TRUMP
VIVA ISRAEL
GOD BLESS THOSE THAT FIGHT ISLAM,AND WIN,
CURSE THE NATION THAT REJECTS JESUS CHRIST!
RICARDO ALERCON DONAVAN!