Trade Journaling

Ted's journaling practice is built around a stoic principle he adapted specifically for trading: accept that the market will do whatever it wants, and only fear abnormal action. He repurposed the serenity prayer — grant me serenity to accept that markets will do what they want regardless of what I want — and recites it before each session. The journal includes quotes from market wizards he rereads when struggling: Bruce Kovner's 'undertrade, undertrade, undertrade,' Livermore on patience, and the cheetah analogy from Mark Weinstein. The principle from Annie Duke's Thinking in Bets is also woven in: judge decisions on process, not results. His focus list constraint prevents FOMO and overtrading by design — he simply never sees stocks he's not already tracking while markets are open.

Tito covers two additional multi-week trades: CORE, which he held along the 10-day SMA as a sector swing, and RLB, where he bought August $40 calls on a pullback expecting a move to the mid-40s. He also discusses journaling in a private Discord channel as an accountability mechanism — writing the thesis publicly before a trade helps him commit to a plan, prevents impulse decisions, and creates a searchable review record for his weekly post-mortems.

"I write out my trade ideas in a Discord channel just for myself. It forces me to articulate the thesis before I trade it."

Munger opens by saying the golden era of investing is not gone permanently, but it is genuinely harder now: valuations have risen and competition has become more intelligent, more aggressive, and more numerous. The fabulous track records of his generation were built on a rare post-war window when roughly 90% of natural stock buyers grew so discouraged that equities were left deeply undervalued — a generational opportunity that rarely repeats. He acknowledges 2008 may have been another such generational low, and notes that the Daily Journal's well-timed bank stock purchases around that period were partly accidental. He then turns to QE: the central bank interventions were necessary — without them, the world risked a revisitation of the conditions that brought Hitler to power — but they had the ironic accidental effect of bailing out the asset-rich while supposedly helping the poor.

"The opportunities that my generation had came from a period where about 90% of natural stock buyers got very discouraged about stocks. That's what created those fabulous records. It was a rare opportunity — and the inequality that came from QE wasn't malevolence, it was an accident."

When going through a losing period, Pradeep applies a four-factor diagnostic: is the setup itself flawed? Is there a process error — like accidentally entering 30,000 shares instead of 3,000? Is the market environment simply not suited to the current strategy? Or is the trader's own motivation the bottleneck — the fourth factor that can silently undermine everything else? He observes that motivation becomes harder to sustain after financial success, when the original urgency is gone and life offers other distractions. Trade journaling is essential in the early years to identify what is working and what is not; experienced traders develop intuitive awareness over time, but any major market shift or extended losing streak should trigger a return to structured trade journaling as a corrective tool.

"You can have a setup, you can have a process, you can have everything — but your own motivation goes through flows depending on your personal circumstances. If you don't have the motivation, money doesn't come automatically."

Williams describes his end-of-day routine: reviewing trades in a physical notebook — recording what he did right and wrong — placing orders for the next session, then deliberately walking away. He finds that the more he watches intraday price action, the more he second-guesses and the worse he does. The weekly version is more deliberate: every Saturday morning he reviews weekly charts, seasonality, the Commitment of Traders report, and longer-term fundamentals to set a directional framework for the coming week. On health: Williams ran over 70 marathons, still competes in 5K races and track events, and treats physical fitness as directly connected to longevity in the markets. He cites the Framingham study's finding that lung function is the single strongest predictor of how long you will live, and uses high-intensity interval training to maintain it — reasoning that a longer career means more years of compounding.

"The more I watch it, the more I screw it up."