On The Importance of Sitzfleisch: Or, What It Takes.

Across the AXIA trading desks.
Sunday 2nd – Sunday 9th February 2025.
London, England, and Limassol, Cyprus.

You are sitting in a peculiar airport terminal waiting for your delayed aeroplane. Being, of course, the most unlucky trader in the world, both announcer and airline are in the mood to play a most perverse game with you and all the other most unlucky traders in the world anxiously pacing in front of the boarding gate, looking down at the plane from the window or slouching in those metal chairs. 

But! At any time, day or night, the aeroplane will suddenly commence boarding—with mere moments to run through the gate before it shuts. Did you risk a brief toilet break or vaguely doze off? Better luck next time! No refunds. Buy another ticket tomorrow; please fly again.

And those who did catch the flight… well… the powers that be who run the airport for their connecting flight have whimsical moods too…

Yet you must continue doing this the next day and the next day, regardless of your success in catching the plane. This is what the environment demands. You can’t lie down there with headphones and a movie on because the boarding comes and goes but in a flash. Letting yourself be distracted on the eleventh hour of waiting just wasted the past ten of arduous, unending, grinding alert.

Such was the experience of last week’s trading; not a test of going 0 to 60 but going from 60 to 0—waiting for “our main man” to drop the T word. Action! Action!—but then understanding how to wind down to the baseline marathon pace of the rest of the week. It is not a lone injection of instant volatility but a continuous state, a stormy sea with enough cumulative opportunities to move the needle of your P&L in either direction. Well, old boy, this was a test of what the Germans beautifully call Sitzfleisch. And may you be blessed with an iron arse.

Sitzfleisch—sitting flesh. The ability to endure. To toil. To grind without distraction or respite. It’s not just stamina. It’s an iron arse welded to the chair. And it’s everything in trading.