Chaos Creates the Outlier Trade

Why humility and repetition beat ego and belief every time.

“Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche wasn’t a trader, but he understood markets better than most people who claim to. He understood the danger of conviction — the way certainty becomes a trap, the way the mind confuses belief with truth.

That’s the greatest lesson I’ve learned in my trading life:

You never know where your biggest winners will come from.

The ego wants control. It wants to believe it knows. It wants to crown one position as “the one.” But conviction, for all its emotional comfort, is fragility disguised as strength. Conviction makes you size too big, hold too long, or freeze when the market disagrees.

I learned to stop predicting and start executing.

My job is simple: follow the signal, take the trade, and let time tell me the truth.

I don’t size one position larger than another. Every trade starts equal. The ones that grow are the ones that earn their weight in the portfolio. That’s how you protect yourself from illusion — and how you let randomness work in your favor.

Because the truth is, the market doesn’t reward conviction. It rewards consistency.

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Gold Miners $GDX – The New Leadership

This year, that philosophy led me to gold miners ($GDX) — a group that most investors forgot about years ago.

Look at the chart. GDX has been in a massive decade-long base, capped by resistance around the mid-60s.

After years of compression, the breakout finally came — a move from around $30 to over $78. That’s a +150% rally at the ETF level, and inside it, individual names have gone parabolic. Some are up 5x or more.

People ask me how I knew gold miners would lead this year. I didn’t. I just saw the signals. Price action, breadth, and intermarket strength all aligned. So I put on the trade.

That’s the essence of Nietzsche’s “will to truth.” You don’t act because you believe — you act because you see.

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Crude Oil Futures $CL_F – The 2020 Collapse

If you’ve been following me for a while, you know this one. The oil short in 2020.

Crude collapsed faster than most traders could process. Prices went negative for the first time in history. On my chart, it looks like a cliff. My return was even larger than what you see here — but I’ll never forget that day my broker closed my position at $0 because the exchange couldn’t handle negative prices.

A trade like that humbles you. You realize how much of this game is out of your control.

Nietzsche wrote,

“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”

For me, the why is process — the discipline that allows you to keep taking swings even when the world is chaos. The how is the uncertainty, the randomness, the pain that comes with it.

That oil short was one of the best trades of my life — and I didn’t make it because I “knew.” I made it because I followed the signal.

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Lumber Futures $LB_F – Quick Doubles, Fast Cycles

After oil, it was lumber.
Two explosive moves. Two doubles. Each lasted just a few months.

You can see it on the chart — massive vertical rallies that seemed to come out of nowhere. That’s how the best trades often look in real time: random, uncomfortable, almost unbelievable.

And that’s the point. You don’t get those trades by searching for comfort. You get them by exposing yourself to uncertainty repeatedly until randomness finally tips in your favor.

Nietzsche would call it Amor Fati — the love of fate. Loving the grind, the chop, the pain, because it’s the price of creation.

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Cocoa Futures $CC_F – The Long Grind Before the Reward

If there’s one market that tested my patience, it’s cocoa.

I traded this thing for almost eight years — sideways, choppy, frustrating. I’d buy strength, get stopped out, and repeat.

It was a long, exhausting loop of doing the right thing and getting punished for it.

Then came 2022–2024. Cocoa exploded +250% in less than two years.

That one winner paid for every failed attempt before it plus another 200+ percent gain.(Not to mention leverage)

You can see all my entries and exits on the chart — each little red and blue line a reminder of years of frustration that finally made sense in one clean move.

This is Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence in real time. Facing the same pattern, the same pain, over and over — and still choosing to engage. Still choosing to trade.

That’s what separates traders from storytellers. The storyteller needs a reason to act. The trader acts without one.

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Cameco $CCJ – The Quiet Compounder

Then there’s Cameco ($CCJ) — my uranium play that never really stopped working.

Bought it in 2020 on a breakout from a massive multi year base. Just a simple 52 week high signal. No secret insight, no conviction story.

Fast forward to today — it’s up nearly 700%. It’s been in my personal portfolio for years now, quietly compounding while everyone chases new narratives.

Nietzsche said,

“Become who you are.”

That’s what this trade represents for me. A reflection of discipline, patience, and clarity — not prediction.

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Sibanye-Stillwater $SBSW – The New Rotation

This year, SBSW has quietly started to turn. You won’t see it on CNBC. But beneath the surface, strength is emerging — another early signal that this next leg in metals might not be done yet.

I don’t know if it will be the next big trade. And that’s the point — I don’t have to know.

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Shorting Bonds – The Trade Everyone Underestimated

The best trade of the decade so far…

It was shorting U.S. Treasuries in 2020.

I went short across the curve — 2-year through 30-year futures, plus German bunds.
Visually, it doesn’t look dramatic. But with leverage, a 30% move in bonds becomes a 300-500% return depending on the duration.

The lesson?

You don’t need wild volatility to make huge returns. You need asymmetry — small risk, large exposure, clean structure.

And when you’re shorting the lowest-volatility asset on earth, you can size it big.
To use the technical term: a fuck ton.

That trade reminded me that quiet markets often hold the biggest opportunities. They move slow, but when they move — they move.

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The Next Outliers: Copper and Latin America

So where could the next major outliers come from?

Two charts catch my eye right now:

Copper Miners ($COPX) and Latin America ($ILF).

Copper miners are pressing right up against multi-year resistance. Historically, copper tends to follow gold. If gold slows down here, copper — and the stocks tied to it — could be next to break out.

Latin America, meanwhile, has been dead money for over a decade.
But this region holds the world’s richest reserves in lithium, copper, oil, and rare earths. It’s resource heaven sitting under a layer of apathy.

And that’s exactly how every major cycle begins — with disinterest.

Nietzsche wrote,

“You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.”

That’s how I think about these setups. Chaos is potential energy. Boredom is the silence before movement. The trader’s job is to sit in that silence long enough for the star to emerge.

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The Discipline of Uncertainty

If there’s a thread running through all these trades — from gold miners to oil shorts, cocoa to bonds — it’s this:
You can’t predict the next big winner. You can only position yourself to receive it.

Most traders don’t fail because they’re wrong. They fail because they can’t sit with uncertainty long enough to be right.
They size up their favorites, tell stories about “conviction,” and forget that the market owes them nothing.

My best trades came from neutrality — not conviction.

Nietzsche’s entire philosophy can be summarized as a war against self-deception. Against the comfort of false certainty.

And that’s what trading really is — a mirror that reflects how honest you’re willing to be with yourself.

“No price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.” — Nietzsche

That’s what this game gives you, if you let it. It strips away ego, illusion, identity — until all that’s left is process.

The charts don’t care what you believe. The signals don’t ask for your conviction. They just ask for your participation.

You never know where your biggest winners will come from — and that’s the beauty of it.

Because if you did, you’d stop learning.

And once you stop learning, the market will teach you the hard way.

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