Cryptococcus

People who succeed in trading usually do so by leaning on skills developed in other areas: General curiosity about games, systems, and mental frameworks, a strong sense of integrity, etc. Trading amplifies, exposes and teaches those interests and habits, but it rarely creates them from scratch. For me, this is mainly about first-principles thinking. It’s stripping away assumptions, inherited narratives, and surface-level trends to ask: What’s irreducible here? Markets teach this ruthlessly: any unjustified complexity gets you rekt. They demand simplicity. But simplicity is not the avoidance of complexity. It’s the product of deliberate refinement. By stripping away layers, you identify not just the actors, but the levers. Markets are a masterclass in this. But every domain (careers, art, politics, love, etc.) has its own “physics”. This abstraction leads to agency. When you understand the forces at play, you stop reacting to symptoms and start engaging with systems. Similarly, life’s ambiguities become navigable when you’ve rigorously defined your own terms: what matters, what’s negotiable, and what’s foundational. Markets teach you to think in tensions and trade-offs; life rewards you for applying that same rigor. Yet, this lens works both ways: the same rigor that grants agency also exposes the fragility of your assumptions. It humbles as much as it empowers.