On Permanent Revolution
Avoid creative decay. Make It New. That’s what sets you apart—and lays the foundation to become an eight-figure trader.
Dec 17, 2024
11 min read
Good God man!
Are you co-opting a phrase from the Communists—nay—Trotsky himself, in a publication that is deep-in-the-bones trading and financial markets—Capital C Capitalism? Yes, yes! Because there is no better phrase to encapsulate the prime directive for the trader of the future, the ones that survive the gauntlet of time: the New Professional. That is, the discretionary human trader of the future is not in crisis. They are crisis. They have embraced an attitude or mentality of permeant revolution so deeply as if it were culture. And one cannot deny the Reds had great copywriters—Peace, Bread and Land—need I say more?
In a world where change is the only constant, and where that rate of change is amplified in the pressure cooker of financial markets, to say ‘go forth and permanent revolution’ is the only instruction worth saving.
Consider that in many domains, re-creation through disruptive, creative, visionary processes is the exception. It is rare because we live in a world that, by its nature, consolidates, stabilises and endeavours to reach equilibrium. Later: process, best practices, optimisation, automation, how-to’s, ‘career paths’, bureaucracy, societal norms, dogma, tradition and so on, follow and root so deeply that only unimaginable crisis—to the linear thinker—can break them. Look at a VIX chart. For all the crimes of the totalitarians—the C’s and F’s—they committed a trader’s most egregious mistake: to be systematically short volatility. In that world, embracing risk becomes a revolutionary act. And that is what makes you exceptional. Therefore, of extreme value.
That is what makes a successful, multi-decade, seven-to-eight-figure trader. And that is where the successful trader of the future will go. To embody Permanent Revolution—a relentless capacity for reinvention and risk-taking—avoiding the creative decay that dooms systems and individuals alike. They are a die-hard revolutionary, in more ways than one.
On a long enough timeline, each domain suffers creative decay; heat death. Consider what you are reading right now—an essay. An essay? But where is The Format? Where is your Point, Evidence, Analyse (PEA)? Where is your… well, reader, the vitality of the essay died in the way of most other things—standardisation, ja?
One realises that all is optimised when there are acronyms for everything—so speaks the 20th century. Grind generations of students to regurgitate the same answers to the same questions, who are no more interested in the essay than they are ticking a box and attaining a made-up score. Quotas, da?
Put them on the mental conveyor belt with the pre-made levers and presses, to churn out the same widgets and cogs; for these workers to never look beyond—more meta—and realise that the essay has its own exciting history of change and forms; prototypes, dead-ends and circuitous routes.
That is, the essay was full of life some time ago: it was full of risk. And the history of the essay form is tied to one of its greatest practitioners: Michel de Montaigne. Indeed, his essais is the inflection point where the upstream etymology of Old French—“essay, essai... to trial, attempt, endeavor” [1] found new meaning through his literary innovation in the 1580s, transforming these words of testing and trying into a "tentative attempt" to writing about himself and the world around him, as translator M.A. Screech puts it.[2]