They Said the Human Trader Was Dead. This Book Disagrees.

1st April 2025.

It’s out. It’s done. After three years and seven months, Yours Truly has finally published Traders of Our Time: Navigating the Market’s Impossible Landscape with co-author Alex Haywood of AXIA Futures.

Suppose you want the power of Asymmetrist at 500 pages, with the canon packed, primed and pointed at ten very special seven-to-eight-figure proprietary traders at AXIA. In that case, I hope this news will greet you with much celebration.

I’ll let the book’s blurb do the talking:

From AXIA’s trading floors emerged the news trading savant Warrior—the precision-perfect Razor—the technically driven Engineer, alongside The Adventurer, The Collector, The Student, The Godfather, The Hero, The Voyager, and The Sphinx. All seven to eight-figure traders whose journeys reveal the power and permanence of the human market navigator

Distilled from eighty hours of conversations with these traders, this work uncovers the hidden forces that forge or break careers: the counterintuitive pitfalls, the antagonisms of learning and performing, the profound impact of debriefing and journaling, the unstoppable power of the slow-brew trader. Within lies their tactical arsenal: macroeconomic news and technical trading, the Market Profile—all converging at the trader’s true north: order flow, navigated through the price ladder.

Asymmetrist emerged from the process of creating this book. Now, we can merge both worlds explicitly. Longtime readers will already know these traders. You’ve met them before; you didn’t know their names yet:

Remember the “Immortal Cypriot” from Stamina? He is The Warrior in the book Chapters Five and Six. Eighty pages—just him. An eight-figure, news-trading, savant-like bloody spectacle. He’s all there.

How about Trading With Your Body or the multi-POV, action-packed A Tale of Two Truths? The Godfather from Chapter Eight appears in both. That also includes The Collector and The Student.

Want to explore the book and its traders more deeply? You can watch the complete 11-part podcast series that Alex Haywood and I recorded—one episode for each trader and chapter. We wrapped it up this Sunday.

Remember the energy on the trading floor during the 2024 U.S. Election? That trader we caught outside on the terrace at 1 a.m.? That was The Sphinx—Chapter 13. Or perhaps the atmosphere captured during an FOMC meeting night? That’s all there, too. Chapter 1 gives you a complete walkthrough of the AXIA London and Wrocław offices and so much more.

You can get Chapter 1 for Free right now to read while the book is on its way or to see if it's for you.

But this book is a companion, a reflection, a time capsule, and, I hope, a rallying cry—a planting of the flag.

We’ve heard the same tired chorus for years: the human discretionary trader is changing, dying, and becoming irrelevant. But Traders of Our Time tells another story. Consider an extract from its Introduction:

“The rise of the machine and the human demise was the obvious surface-level effect of a deep change in the environment, a product of that time. That ‘new,’ difficult, low-volatility environment raised the bar and decimated all but the exceptional. This was not the end of the human, but the demise of the average. Because the latter never survives change. The best just get better. The game, then, is the same as ever—only more so.
The trader is dead. Long live the trader!”

The world misunderstands what we do—both inside and outside finance. This book is our way of standing up and saying: We Are Here. And by all that is good and worthwhile in this world, we will fight for our little rock, inch by inch. Would we really want it any other way?

It’s written for market navigators at every stage, from those placing their first trades to those questioning whether the material questions still matter. It’s for anyone asking: What next? How do I reinvent myself? Is there still a place for me here?

We also wrote it so you can hand it to your family, partner, and best friend—anyone who’s ever asked what it is you do all day. They’ll find their answers here.

The writing, re-writing, tearing down and rebuilding took nearly four years. The nights were long, the doubts louder than I’d care to admit. But all that now belongs to the deep recesses of memory.

Today, it lives in print.

It’s your companion now—blood-foiled, hardbound—crafted to last. Built to be reread, underlined, borrowed, and never returned.

Early momentum matters—more than I wish it did. If this work speaks to you, consider buying a copy. Please share it, gift it, and pass it on.

If nothing else, this book can be a cultural statement—that we’re better than “How to Be a Millionaire Trader in 5 Minutes.” If that resonates with you—as it does with everything Asymmetrist stands for—then I hope that alone justifies picking up a copy.

For the price of a few Bund or ES ticks, I believe it will give you—and those around you—many more ticks in return.

Good trading to you all,

Bogdan Stoichescu

P.S. Here’s your elated editor, encountering the first physical copy for the very first time: