I sat in the dark of my office last night, screens flickering like cheap neon in a rain-soaked alley, and watched the same trade repeat for the 47th time that week.
Buy the dip.
Sell the rip.
Post the chart with the arrow that looks like a toddler drew it.
Caption: “Markets never lie.”
Emoji: rocket, diamond hands, folded hands.
We are a cult of copy-paste prophets, each convinced the algorithm anointed us with the one true edge.
We screenshot the same Wyckoff schematic, color it in slightly different crayons, and call it alpha.
We pay $2,999 for a Discord where the guru’s “live trade” is just a Bloomberg terminal with the labels turned off.
We are so unoriginal that even our plagiarism lacks flair.
The irony tastes like burnt coffee at 3 a.m.:
the only way to beat the market is to think differently,
yet the market rewards the herd until it suddenly doesn’t,
and then it eats the stragglers with the same teeth it used to feed them.
I once knew a guy—let’s call him MoonShotMike—who swore by a 34-EMA crossover on the 7-minute chart.
He backtested it to 2017, posted the equity curve (smoothed, naturally), and sold the signal bot for $197 a month.
Six figures in ARR before the first drawdown.
Then the Fed sneezed, vol exploded, and the EMA turned into a jump rope.
Mike pivoted to “macro overlay” and now sells a newsletter titled “Quantitative Intuition.”
Same charts. New font. Higher price.
We lack the originality to lack originality,
so we dress conformity in contrarian drag.
We short the crowd while standing in the crowd,
yelling “bubble” from inside the foam party.
Here’s the secret nobody screenshots:
the edge isn’t in the setup.
It’s in the moment you don’t take the setup everyone else is salivating over.
The asymmetry lives in the trade you leave on the table because the narrative smells like 2021 meme euphoria.
That restraint?
That’s the only originality left.
But restraint doesn’t screenshot well.
It doesn’t pump the Discord.
It doesn’t get retweeted by the finfluencer with the Lambo lease.
So we keep swinging the same hammer,
nailing ourselves to the same cross,
and calling it martyrdom.
Zappa was right.
We can’t even copy badly in a fresh way.
Image to pair with the post
A hyper-realistic, moody photograph:
A lone trader in a glass-walled high-rise at 4 a.m., city lights smeared across the window like wet paint.
His desk is a battlefield of Red Bull cans and crumpled printouts of the exact same bull flag pattern—each annotated in a different Sharpie color, as if variety equals insight.
On the largest monitor: a green candle exploding upward.
On the smallest monitor, tucked in the corner: a single sticky note that reads,
“Maybe don’t.”
The trader’s reflection in the glass shows him staring not at the charts,
but at the sticky note—frozen, finger hovering over the BUY button.
Cinematic rim lighting, desaturated blues, one warm desk lamp.
Shot on a Leica M10-R, 50mm Noctilux, f/0.95, ISO 6400.
Real enough to feel the caffeine jitters.
El Mundo del Trading en los Mercados Financieros 