Coronavirus makes me ‘high’…

The last few weeks I was pretty ‘high’.

Not because I was smoking something. Or because of the Coronavirus. And no, I am not a masochist, finding pleasure in collapsing markets and worldwide panic. Not at all. Sure I feel compassion for everyone directly or indirectly hit by the recent events.

But there is always MORE to what we perceive, or to what the situation looks like.

A long time ago I realized that turbulence, uncertainty and chaos can often be an amazing catalyst for high levels of creativity, out-of-the-box thinking and never-before-considered ideas.

And these times are not any different.

In the last two weeks, our hedge fund had an amazing flow of new ideas and solutions: We invented a completely new mechanism to stress-test trading strategies against a completely unknown future. Then we implemented a brand new Genetic intelligence, to control our entire development server swarm in an intelligent way. We also implemented a new way to improve the speed of execution by up to 700% and on top of that, discussed with our key institutional investor a sudden opportunity to buy a bank, that would very nicely fit into our long-term growth strategy.

So, yes, I do feel pretty high. And quite honestly, I barely had a chance to stop and think about all the current chaos in recent days. (Btw. if you want to know more about the measurements we took in our hedge fund, listen to this recent podcast).

And it wasn’t for the first time either.

In the wild times of 2008, I developed a unique Market Internals solution – thanks to the inspiration that came out of the market pressure. (Which you should definitely check out, if you feel uncertain about current market dynamics).

In pretty boring and choppy times a few years later, when there was one false entry signal after another, I developed the Smashing False Breakouts solutions. Yes, out of frustration again. And I could go on and on.

But the point is…

…most of my best breakthroughs happened in challenging markets and times of chaos.

So, I just don’t see these times as challenging anymore.

I see them as opportunities. Chances to improve. Insanely positive catalysts that can bring major breakthroughs.

And I recommend you think about it like this too.

Sure, the frustration and stress of markets like this can be challenging, but thinking about it as an opportunity is how you’ll come out of this market madness stronger and more ready than ever.

And you’ll feel pretty ‘high’ about that too.

Happy trading,

Tomas