Systems Thinking in the Markets
18 May 2026 · 1 min read
When I was fourteen, I took apart a transistor radio just to understand why it worked. I didn't have the vocabulary yet — I only had three questions: Why? What? How?
Fifteen years later, I point those same three questions at a very different kind of machine: the market.
Markets are systems, not stories
The temptation in trading is to reach for a narrative. "The market fell because of the jobs report." Maybe. But narratives are how we feel better about randomness — they rarely help us act better.
A system, on the other hand, has:
- Inputs — liquidity, volatility, positioning.
- Feedback loops — momentum feeding on itself until it doesn't.
- Constraints — risk limits, margin, time.
When you stop asking "what's the story?" and start asking "what's the system doing?", the noise gets quieter.
The discipline of the probe
Taking apart a transistor teaches you something trading school never will: you learn by probing, carefully, one variable at a time.
Change one thing. Observe. Change the next. Never everything at once.
That's position sizing. That's journaling. That's the boring, un-glamorous work that compounds.
Where curiosity meets capital
Supply chains taught me how goods move under constraints. Photography taught me to see what's actually there instead of what I expect. Trading is where those two habits meet — patience plus perception, applied to probability.
The 14-year-old with the screwdriver would be pleased. The machine got bigger. The questions stayed the same.