The Elegant Geometry of Panic and Greed

A new mental model for navigating risk, in the market and in life.

What if the chaos of the financial markets and the chaos of your own mind were governed by the same elegant rules?

It's a question that sits at the heart of everything we do here. For those of you joining me from my previous home on Beehiiv, welcome. And for those who are new to this space, I'm thrilled you're here. You've all arrived at a pivotal moment.

This is more than just a newsletter about finance. This is a place where we study the map of the market to better understand the territory of ourselves. And the master key to that map is the idea of the fractal.

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Look at a chart of the S&P 500.

See the jagged, unpredictable rhythm of its daily price action? Now, zoom in. Look at a one-hour chart.

You'll see the same kind of jagged, unpredictable rhythm. Zoom in again to a one-minute chart. The pattern remains. It's not identical, but it's self-similar. The character of the chaos is the same at almost every scale.

This is the discovery that mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot brought to markets. He saw that the forces driving price—the tug-of-war between fear and greed, hope and despair—don't change just because you change the timeframe. The market's behavior is fractal. Its complexity is built from repeating a simple pattern of human emotion over and over, at every magnitude.

• “If you have a hammer, use it everywhere you can, but I do not claim that everything is fractal.”
  — Benoît Mandelbrot, via Greg Phelan, Yale Economic Review (2005)

Now, turn that lens inward.

Think about the flash of irritation you feel when someone cuts you off in traffic. That sharp, reactive anger. Is it not, in miniature, the same pattern of emotion you feel when you face a much larger injustice in your career?

Think about the discipline it takes to do one more rep in the gym when your muscles are burning. Is that not a small-scale echo of the resilience required to hold a valuable asset through a terrifying market drawdown?

Your character is a fractal. The way you handle the smallest of moments is a repeating pattern that defines how you navigate the largest of life's challenges. Your habits, your reactions, your virtues, and your vices are self-similar across the different timeframes of your life. We are walking, breathing patterns of our own making.

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This is the central mission of this blog. We don't just study an options strategy like an Iron Condor to learn about risk management in a portfolio. We study it to understand how to set healthy boundaries in our own lives—defining a range where we can thrive and protecting ourselves from the chaos outside of it.

We don't just learn about Theta (Θ) decay to understand the time value of a contract. We learn about it to viscerally feel the unstoppable, non-negotiable passage of time in our own lives, and the cost of indecision.

The market is the greatest laboratory for human psychology ever created. It's a real-time, high-stakes record of our collective decision-making under pressure. By decoding its patterns with the clear language of finance, we gain a powerful lens for decoding ourselves.

We're here to make complexity beautiful. To see the universal in the specific. To use the art of trading not just to build wealth, but to build a more considered life.

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Not financial advice. For insight and amusement only. When it’s time to place real bets, let your financial adviser deal the cards.