The Party You Think You’re Missing
The hardest part of this market is not financial. It is the feeling that everyone else is getting rich, and you are doing something wrong.
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There is a particular kind of misery in the current market, and it has nothing to do with losing money.
Most of us are not losing money. We are doing fine, or close to it, and yet we feel like we are failing. We are disappointed with our trading. The feeling is that we should be making more, that everyone else has found the trade we missed, and that our caution is costing us the kind of money that changes a life.
That gap between doing fine and feeling like a failure is worth contemplating, because the feeling is not the truth. It will weigh on you emotionally and drive you to do things you shouldn’t if you let it.
The Market in the Media Is Not the Market You Are Trading
The financial media and the social media feeds that surround it are showing you a market that barely exists for anyone. The giant moves, the screenshots of accounts up tenfold, the stories of life-changing money made in two hot names, all of it is true in the narrow sense that it happened to someone, but it is a small and unrepresentative slice of what is actually going on.
You are comparing your own results, spread across a sensibly built portfolio, against a highlight reel assembled from the luckiest and most successful outcomes in the entire market. Of course, you feel behind. The comparison isn’t valid. It is like comparing your efforts to someone who won the lottery.
Even the bears that are constantly railing about the irrationality of the action feed the feeling that you are missing out. Maybe they are right about the stupidity of chasing this market but who doesn’t want some of those stupid gains?
Euphoria Has a Texture
The party that is currently taking place is mostly a media construction. I have been trading for 30 years, and I have lived through more than one true mania.
In 1999 and early 2000 the euphoria was everywhere, and you did not need a screen to find it. Every dinner, every round of golf, every conversation with someone who had no business talking about stocks turned into chatter about some random name that had doubled. There was a crowd that was in it and giddy about it. This market does not have that feel. The chatter is on screens, performed by accounts you do not know, about moves you did not catch.
The absence of giddiness in the room is the reality. If this were the kind of mania the headlines describe, you would feel it in your daily life, and you do not.
The Feeling Drives You to Do the Wrong Thing
The danger is not the feeling of disappointment itself. The danger is what the feeling makes you do. It pushes you to abandon a process that works, to chase, to throw caution aside at the exact moment caution has the most value. I know this because I have fallen for it more than once.
One of the more recent euphoric runs was the post-Covid SPAC mania, when every shell company on the market was supposedly working on a deal to acquire the next Tesla (TSLA), and the shares would run before any deal was announced and sometimes before any deal existed. I watched it build, and the watching is what got me.
I caught a few for some good gains but then I took several of those trades late in the cycle, and they collapsed almost immediately. Nothing had changed when they did. There was no bad news and no broken fundamentals. The euphoria had simply exhausted itself, and once it did, there was nothing underneath, because there had never been anything underneath. I chased the feeling rather than the company, and the feeling was the first thing to go.
The Labels Make It Worse
Part of why the feeling has such a grip is that we have been handed a vocabulary that cannot describe reality.
“Bull market” and “bear market” are single labels for something that is never one thing. The market is dozens of overlapping markets, each driven by its own catalyst and its own rotation, and at any given moment, some are thriving while others are being quietly destroyed.
When the headline label says bull and your own portfolio does not feel like a bull, the label leaves you only one conclusion to draw, which is that the problem must be you. The problem is not you but the fact that you are measuring yourself against a word that was never really accurate.
The Only Scorecard That Was Ever Real
The way out is to stop keeping score against the highlight reel and the labels. Keep score against the things that you control.
Is your methodology sound? Are you managing risk? Are your results moving you toward your goals on your own timeline? That is not a consolation prize for those who missed the big trade. It is the only scorecard that matters, and the traders who last 30 years are the ones who learned to read it instead of the headlines.
The party you think you are missing is mostly a story. Your investing process is the foundation for great success, so stay with it while the financial media works itself into a frenzy.
At the time of publication, Rev Shark had no positions in any securities mentioned.
