I’m 3 months into my braces journey, 17 months go to. While they are doing their job of fixing my teeth alignment to prevent jaw injuries like the one I had back in January, that just addresses the bones.
There’s a whole other side – the muscles – which requires physical therapy to address. I had my first appointment recently and was NOT looking forward to it. But my literal pain and suffering lend a really important lesson to your trading.
The Problem Source
When I showed up at the physical therapist’s office, she naturally started asking me all kinds of questions about my health, not just my jaw sprain or braces.
The craziest thing was when Sophia asked me about my neck.
I said, “Wait, I’m here for my jaw.”
She replied, “Tell me about your neck.”
“Hmmm..How much time do you have?”
I’ve joked for years that I have what I call a “delicate neck.” Ever since I was a teenager, my movement has been limited. I need a perfectly ergonomic setup to get real computer work done, and I used to get tension headaches all the time.
After examining me, she explained that while the braces are helping correct the bone alignment, some of the muscle issues in my jaw could actually be coming from my NECK misalignment. In fact, things are off enough that she wants me working with a chiropractor too!
It made me wonder what things in trading we may be experiencing as symptoms but aren’t the sole root issue.
For example, maybe you’re trading ES futures and you’ve convinced yourself you need to trade more than one market to get any action. So you hop from ES to GC, or from GC to the NQ, thinking that’s the answer.
But what if the real culprit isn’t the number of securities you’re trading after all?
What if you can get opportunities from the ES futures, but your time frame is too large. Maybe if you drop down from say a 30-minute chart to a 5-minute chart you’d get more of the setups you’re looking for, and more frequently, setting aside all those other markets.
It’s the kind of thing you’ll only discover if you’re paying attention to your notes and noticing where these patterns keep bubbling up.
Timing Is Everything
Back to my jaw therapy, the next time I went to see Sophia was my first full session, and she went right to work. She put needles into my jaw muscles. It sounds crazy, but think of it as really intense acupuncture. I could actually feel her helping release the muscle spasms, even though there were sharp pains while she was doing it.
Then she massaged on the muscles along the side of my neck, my sternocleidomastoid, which I’ve known has been kind of jacked up for a long time. When I got home, I had a headache for about THREE hours.
This can happen when tight muscles get stimulated. But I was like a zombie in a few Zoom meetings.
So I changed my schedule with her to meet in afternoons instead of mornings so that I have more time to recover.
That made me think about another area we sometimes overlook in trading. Maybe it isn’t the activity itself that’s making things harder. Maybe it’s WHEN you’re doing it.
Coming back to the ES trader scenario, just as an example, even after changing timeframes to go lower there may still be trading struggles. That’s when it becomes critical to look at what times of day you’re trading.
Choosing morning versus late day based on your nature (early bird vs night owl).
Or even choosing the session hours you trade based on your risk profile (quieter pre-market vs volatile opening bell).
It’s amazing how we can assume something should work fine anytime, only to realize that the timing of that activity really does matter. Once you notice it, you can make adjustments that work better with your own natural rhythm.
I’ll keep you posted on my jaw physical therapy journey. In the meantime, I hope you’ll take a close look at your own trading. Just like our bodies are connected in more ways than most of us realize, the different parts of our trading workflow are connected too.
When something feels off, don’t be afraid to pop the hood and take a close look. You may discover that the thing causing the symptoms isn’t the place you needed to fix after all.
🚨 PS — Weekly Trading Show TOMORROW 🚨
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