Calm and boring days

A list keeps going around online. According to society, it says, luxury is cars, expensive clothes and a lavish lifestyle. The real luxuries in life are different: slow mornings, freedom to choose, a good night’s sleep, peace of mind, calm and boring days, being present, people you love and people who love you back. Nobody seems to know who wrote the list. I keep coming back to the list anyway, because for a while my investing took several items off it.

The emperor who took luxury apart

Marcus Aurelius had every luxury from the first half of the list. He was emperor of Rome. In his Meditations, the private notebook he never meant anyone to read, he practises taking that luxury apart. Roast meat is the dead body of a fish, a bird or a pig. Fine wine is a little grape juice. The imperial purple robe is sheep’s wool dyed with the blood of a shellfish.

Marcus wasn’t sneering at dinner. Marcus was training himself to see things as they are, before the story he told about them took over. Ryan Holiday builds The Obstacle Is the Way on that habit. Holiday calls the habit perception, the first of three disciplines, followed by action and will.

The book’s title comes from another line in the same notebook: “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” The thing that blocks you is also the material you work with.

Nights of what-if

I read the book a few years ago. I’d like to say it stuck straight away. It didn’t.

I’ve had my share of nights lying awake on what-if questions. What if the influencer was right, and the coin I aped into that day goes to the moon in the coming weeks? What if the coin goes to zero? Did I do my research? Did I buy too much, too little, too soon?

None of those questions has an answer at one in the morning. The price doesn’t care that I’m awake, and checking the price again doesn’t make the next hour any clearer. I’m not special in this. Who has held a volatile coin and never had that night?

Apply Marcus’s exercise to that night and the picture shrinks. A coin I hold is a number on an exchange. A red candle is that number going down for four hours. The influencer is a person with a camera and no stake in my sleep. The weight came from the story I told about the number.

Sort the questions

Seeing clearly helps, but Holiday doesn’t stop at perception. The second discipline is action: do the work in front of you, the part that is actually yours.

So sort the what-if questions. Moon or zero is not mine to decide. Did I do my research, how much do I buy, how fast, and what do I do after a drop or a rise: those questions are all mine. And every one of those questions can be answered in daylight, before the market tests me, instead of in bed after the market already has.

That is where the obstacle becomes the way. A sharp drop is exactly what keeps an investor awake. A sharp drop is also exactly the moment a buy-the-dip rule is written for. If I decided in advance that a drop of a certain size means one small, fixed buy, the drop stops being a question. The drop becomes the moment the plan was made for.

What I hand over

Looking back, that is what I built Aurono to do for me. Aurono can’t tell me whether the influencer was right. Aurono carries out the answers I already gave on a calm morning: how much per buy, after which drop, when to take profit, and never to sell below what I paid on average. At three in the morning the rule does its job, and I don’t have to be there for it.

Holiday’s third discipline, will, is the honest part. A rule doesn’t prevent losses. A coin can still go to zero, and my rule will have bought some of the coin on the way down, in small steps I agreed to beforehand. What the rule does prevent is the other cost: the decision made in panic, and the night spent making the decision.

Back to the list

The list ends by saying these luxuries are not things to be acquired, but the results of a purposeful and fulfilling existence. I agree. No app gives you slow mornings. But I can remove one reason my slow mornings were missing.

I still look at the charts in the morning. The difference is what I look for: I check the chart against what Aurono did during the night. A dip that was bought, or a local top that was sold into, is now a small celebration. As a great philosopher of the eighties, Hannibal Smith of The A-Team, used to say: I love it when a plan comes together.

The rest of the day is calmer and more boring than it used to be. Of everything on that list, calm and boring days were the luxury I didn’t know I was missing.

→ Tie yourself to the mast · Try your own rules in shadow mode