Suffering Is the Teacher: Nietzsche on Trading
How failure forged a process built on trends and relative strength.
“That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
When I first stepped into the markets, I thought I was ready. I had the passion, the time, and the drive to succeed. What I didn’t have was perspective. Every instinct I had was wrong. When stocks were surging, I wanted to short them. When they were collapsing, I thought it was a dip worth buying. I was consistently on the wrong side of the tide.
In hindsight, it wasn’t just bad luck — it was inevitable. Like Nietzsche wrote, suffering is not a mistake but a teacher. The market humbled me in every possible way, and through that humility came the foundation of how I trade today.
The School of Suffering
Nietzsche believed suffering was essential to growth. He called it the forge where strength is born. “To live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in the suffering,” he wrote.
For me, trading was exactly that. Every loss wasn’t just money — it was ego burning away. Every failed setup chipped at the illusion that I could predict, control, or outsmart the market.
Over time, I realized the only way forward was to let go of opinions and focus on reality.
And reality, in markets, is price.
The Simplicity of Strength
What failure taught me is simple: markets reward alignment, not cleverness. Fighting the tide because you “feel” it should turn is the surest path to ruin. Surfing the tide, however, is how you survive.
That’s why our process today is built around two pillars: trends and relative strength. We don’t try to outguess the market. We measure it. We align with it. We follow the tide.
“The primary trend is the tide, the secondary trend is the waves, and the minor trend is the ripples. Wise investors stay with the tide.” — Charles Dow
Relative strength is how we separate leaders from laggards. Trends are how we stay in alignment. When you combine the two, you stop playing a prediction game and start playing a probability game.
Leading/Sensitive ETF Groups Dashboard
This scan shows what happens when you measure relative strength across sectors. Metals & Mining, Homebuilders, Industrials — these are your leaders. They’re in clear primary uptrends. Compare them to areas like Biotech or Retail, which lag behind. The lesson is obvious: we want to own leaders, not stragglers.
The Philosophy of Alignment
Nietzsche warned about chasing illusions. He called it the eternal recurrence of human folly — repeating mistakes because we refuse to accept reality as it is. Traders fall into the same trap. They cling to old narratives or fight what the tape is showing.
But strength doesn’t lie. Leadership is visible. And weakness is equally visible. That’s why our scans matter. They strip out the narrative and expose what is actually working.
International Leadership Dashboard
This second scan proves the point globally. Japan, Greece, Vietnam, and Poland are outperforming. These aren’t whispers or stories — they’re charts pressing higher while others stall. Relative strength is the simplest, most powerful filter for global rotation.
Six Months of Truth
The most powerful way to internalize Nietzsche’s lesson is to look at winners and losers side by side. Pain is the teacher, strength the outcome.
Macro Trendfinder 6M Winners/Losers
On the left: Sibanye Stillwater, MP Materials, TMC. Pure leadership, driven by real demand and structural flows. On the right: UnitedHealth, Teck Resources, FedEx. Relative weakness, caught in downtrends.
What do we learn? The tide is always shifting. Leaders emerge. Laggards decay. But clinging to weakness out of habit or hope is the trader’s fatal mistake. The Nietzschean approach is to embrace the churn — suffer through the mistakes, yes, but eventually learn to let go of weakness and commit to strength.
Why This Matters
It’s tempting to think the market is about clever predictions. I used to think that way. But cleverness failed me, again and again.
What finally worked was simplicity:
Stay long primary uptrends.
Stay long assets showing relative strength.
Sell or avoid assets showing relative weakness.
That’s it. No need for constant reinvention. No need for tortured predictions. Just alignment with what is already in motion.
Nietzsche would call this an embrace of reality. “My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity.”
Trading is the same. The winners are the ones who stop wishing for the market to be different and start aligning with what it is.
Closing Thought
The scans you see each week aren’t bells and whistles. They’re discipline. They’re reminders that markets are brutal but simple. And they’re proof that suffering has meaning, if you’re willing to learn from it.
The market burned my early mistakes into memory. But that’s why I can teach. Because I know the cost of fighting the tide. And I know the reward of following it.
Nietzsche gave us the words. The market gave us the scars. Together, they give us the playbook:
Respect the trend.
Trust relative strength.
Abandon weakness.
Everything else is noise.
🚀 Our Biggest Winners, Across Every Portfolio
Transparency isn’t just a tagline — it’s baked into everything we do at AAO Research. That’s why every week, we break down performance across all three portfolios — Futures, Thematic ETFs, and Stock Picks.
And the results speak for themselves:
Futures Portfolio(Pictured without leverage): Cattle +37%, Silver +42%, and Germany +33% have led the charge.
ETF Portfolio: Gold Miners $GDX +93%, Poland $EPOL +53%, and Silver Trust $SLV +41% have been standouts.
Stock Picks: Sibanye Stillwater +102%, MAG Silver +91%, and Wheaton Precious Metals +84% continue to crush expectations.
👉 This is why we run the scans, post the charts, and share our positioning. So you can see exactly how we manage risk, rotate with strength, and let the primary trends do the heavy lifting.
If you’re not yet a premium subscriber, now’s the time to join us to get all of our trades. Don’t just watch the winners from the sidelines — be part of the process that finds them.
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Excellent article!! However, there's not just one way to make money investing. My strategy here, for example, is exactly the opposite: I increase what's falling, reduce what's rising, and always review valuations. My CAGR over the last 10 years is >50%. However, this strategy only works if you operate in cyclical businesses.
This is pure gold:
"What failure taught me is simple: markets reward alignment, not cleverness. Fighting the tide because you “feel” it should turn is the surest path to ruin. Surfing the tide, however, is how you survive.
That’s why our process today is built around two pillars: trends and relative strength. We don’t try to outguess the market. We measure it. We align with it. We follow the tide."