Hidden in Plain Sight
A working trader’s case for seeing relationships, constraints and process
Next: Episode 1, What Bohm Saw
A forester returns to a familiar stand and notices that the undergrowth, birds and soil no longer seem to respond to one another as they used to. A clinician hears several ordinary symptoms in a combination that troubles her. At a trading desk, I watch a trend continue even as the markets that travelled with it begin to part company. The parts remain familiar; their arrangement has changed.
Each impression may be wrong. The forester must return and measure, the clinician must examine and test, and I must check the complete trading record. Yet each has noticed a relationship that an inventory of separate parts would struggle to describe. That is where this series begins.
I have spent decades trading systematic trends. I use data, code, fixed entries and exits, and a documented approach to position size. Those tools are indispensable. They have also made me aware of their boundary. A market history records the prices that emerged from decisions made under particular conditions. It cannot contain all the decisions that might have been made under another set of expectations. As participants learn, lose money, gain capital and respond to one another, the relationships my models measure may change.
A forester, clinician and trader face comparable puzzles about changing relationships, though each has to find the cause in their own domain. The claim deserves more than a handsome metaphor between a market and a landscape. Across twelve episodes I will ask where the architecture really recurs, identify what makes each domain distinct, and show what changes for a trader who acts from within rather than imagining a position outside. A river and a market are different kinds of systems. Water does not revise its expectations after reading a forecast. But the river can teach us to ask how visible structure records the constraints it has encountered, and a market can answer that question in its own terms.
Three movements
The first five episodes concern the structure of complex reality. David Bohm’s language of explicate and implicate order gives us a way to ask what visible things conceal about their relationships. We then move through reflexive forecasts, survival and filtration, recurring architecture across domains, and the trained reading of configuration. The argument grows from the observation that a flock cannot be explained by one bird to the question of how an embedded practitioner reads a changing system.
Episodes 6 to 10 concern the practitioner’s discipline. A meeting with a Gubbi Gubbi elder beside a flowering tree and a stream taught me something I could not have learned from a chart. His account connected blossom, insect, water and fish in a particular place. It is an example of relational attention within a cultural relationship to Country that my trading language cannot encompass. From there I examine what quantitative models can miss, why process is the ground of a decision, how the return path tests the person running a strategy, and why the discomfort of seeking rare large trends persists.
The last two episodes move between the inside view of a live decision and the wider reconstruction we make from records. They gather the series around two meanings of process: the unfolding that produces the results we measure, and the deliberate way a practitioner takes part in it. The distinction matters because the word process can otherwise become a consolation offered after a loss. I mean something more demanding. Results count, and they must be allowed to test the method that produced them.
This is not a trading guide, a technical paper or a memoir. It is an argument made by someone whose own decisions and capital have to meet the market. I will describe my rules and their limits plainly. I will also draw from research in complexity, ecology, psychology and market structure. Where a comparison suggests a question but cannot establish an answer, I will say so once and do the work of finding the mechanism.
Why the distinction matters now
We live among systems whose participants learn. Investors respond to public models. Ecological interventions change the relationships they were designed to manage. Organisations optimise a measure and thereby alter what that measure describes. In each case, a method that treats the measured parts as permanently separable can be exact in its calculations and still miss the changing conditions that give those calculations meaning.
Reduction is often how we find an error. If my trading results disappoint, I inspect the data, the contract, the entry, the size, the fill and the exit. But I must also ask whether a collection of individually sensible positions created one common exposure, or whether a rule that worked in a small market altered its own opportunity as it grew. Precision at the level of parts does not absolve me from examining their interaction.
Across twelve episodes, I will follow puzzling outcomes back through the actions and constraints that produced them. The relationships may make a result intelligible after investigation, while the exact path that led there remains contingent. When several positions draw on the same capital and face the same exit, a joint loss is no accident; change that arrangement and the result may differ. That distinction matters most before the next outcome arrives, when I have to decide without its explanation in hand.
I have learned this less from a moment of revelation than from the repeated distance between an attractive history and the next trade. The record matters. So does the person who has to act on it. I want to bring those two truths together, with the best evidence I can find and with the honesty that running a strategy over time requires.
Episode 1 begins beneath a flock of birds, where the shape overhead belongs to none of them alone.
Next: Episode 1, What Bohm Saw
Richard Brennan writes on systematic trading, complex adaptive markets, and the philosophical foundations of trend following at atstradingsolutions.com. His books include The Fractals of Finance, Complex Adaptive Markets, Carved by Impossibility and The Aussie Turtles Trend Following Guide.
Want to explore why structure exists at all?
Carved by Impossibility: What Remains When Everything Else Is Eliminated
The book explores the architecture of constraint, emergence, and reality itself, and what it means for how we understand markets, life, and the universe.
Available now on Amazon in paperback, hardcover, and Kindle.
Want the theoretical foundation for why trend following works?
The Fractals of Finance: Determinism, Adaptation and the Geometry of Markets
The book explores the full architecture of feedback, fat tails, and fractal structure in financial markets, and what it means for how we trade, invest, and understand risk.
Available now on Amazon in paperback, hardcover, and Kindle.
Want a practical field manual for trading trends and capturing outliers?
The Aussie Turtles Trend Following Guide: A Field Manual for Hunting Outliers adapts the timeless principles of the original Turtle traders into a systematic, rules-based approach for modern markets. Co-authored with Adam Havryliv.
Available now on Amazon in paperback, hardcover, and Kindle.