The Power of Simplicity in Trading

The beauty—and difficulty—of simplicity

Keep it simple. Less is more.

When I set off in the summer of 2021 on my first major cycling trip abroad, from Alkmaar to Land's End, the southwesternmost point of Great Britain, to attend my sister's wedding, my biggest challenge wasn't the distance. The real question was far more fundamental: what should I bring and, above all, what should I leave at home? I found that exceptionally difficult.

2293 kilometers in 24 riding days. Wheeling my bike onto the ferry's loading ramp in Hoek van Holland, among the cars heading to England, and on the other side via Harwich on to Cambridge and Oxford. After five days of wedding celebrations, then back along the sometimes almost tropical-feeling southwest coast, via Brighton, Dover to Calais in northern France. It was magical.

That trip became the first of many. Added up, over the past years, during longer trips, I've spent well over half a year living from my bike, with everything I needed in my bike bags.
Pretty quickly, one thing became clear: less isn't just lighter, it makes life clearer. Calmer. Sharper. The less you have to occupy yourself with, the more room opens up in your head. By nature we're hunter-gatherers, built to move and to be on the road. We evolved to travel light, with few possessions. From that perspective I can recommend the book Sapiens, which captures concisely how deeply that nomadic existence is anchored in us.

The urge to want to bring a lot doesn't come from nowhere. Our primal brain still steers us subconsciously more than we think. Scarcity is the default setting. For a long time humans had to be prepared for periods when there was little, and survival was the priority. Nowadays the supermarkets are always fully stocked, but our brains haven't automatically caught up.

Our rational brain knows there's enough, but the moment tension, uncertainty or nerves come into play, the primal brain quickly takes over. That's also why marketing campaigns built around stockpiling work so well. Walk into a big supermarket without a list and you see the effect immediately: an abundance of choices, no clear plan, doubt and impulsive decisions. With a clear shopping list - a plan - the opposite happens. Less noise, less doubt, more calm. Exactly the same applies at your daily workplace: systems, processes, agreements.

And that is precisely where the parallel with trading emerges. Think of trading without a plan as walking around that supermarket without a list and without a goal: you do buy something, but rarely what you actually need. The human brain is primarily organized around avoiding pain and seeking reward. In the markets, that mechanism gets magnified. Profit feels like reward, loss feels like pain. In daily life we move within a relatively safe, predictable environment, but in the market you step into a different reality: unpredictable, volatile and unforgiving. There it's either profit or loss. And waiting can feel deeply uncomfortable, especially without a plan. How good are you, really, at making choices or waiting without a plan?

Most novice traders lack a clear strategy and drown in a flood of possibilities, while trying to grab onto everything at once. The core challenge in trading isn't knowing more, it's being able to streamline and filter information through your own plan. Without a plan the brain gets restless. The primal brain takes over and rational thinking fades into the background. That's when patterns like revenge trading, overtrading, forcing setups or blindly following a live trader emerge. Less is more here doesn't mean being less active, it means focusing on one type of setup and specializing in it.

The less sustained mental effort the brain has to expend, the clearer the mind stays. The more balance emerges, and the sharper the focus is at the moment it really counts - a kind of laser focus. The more scenarios and instruments you try to follow at once (stocks, indices, gold, silver), the faster the brain gets thrown off balance, and the more stress that creates. Many clichés in trading are simply true: fear is a poor guide.

During my bike trips I make sure everything is organized, so I can fully focus on what really matters: the road, the landscape, the adventure. That's exactly where I saw the parallel with trading. I went back to basics: as little clutter on the charts as possible, focus on one strategy, and work with my own plan and matching confirmation checklist. I only focus on what I want to see; the rest is secondary. That makes trading clear, controlled and calm for me.

Your brain is essentially a filtering and focusing system. Think of the moment you buy a car: suddenly you see that same model everywhere. Not because there are suddenly more of them, but because your brain has decided it's relevant. That's the Reticular Activating System (RAS) at work - a fundamental, biologically driven survival mechanism that, through neurochemical processes, determines which stimuli your brain lets through and which it ignores, with the goal of saving energy and preventing mental overload.

As primitive humans we needed this when walking through the forest looking for food. Once the goal is clear - finding edible berries - those berries jump out among thousands of leaves and branches. Not because they just appeared, but because everything that doesn't contribute to survival is automatically filtered out.

With a clear trading plan for specific setups, you consciously program this filter.

You switch off the noise, recognize high-quality setups faster, and keep your brain calm and rational in an environment that naturally triggers chaos and scarcity. You can make your RAS work for you by consciously choosing which pattern or setup you want to learn to recognize. Your brain automatically becomes more attuned to it.

Without a plan for specific setups your brain can't focus and becomes restless, which makes rational subsequent decisions increasingly difficult - and that's putting it mildly.

Break and retest or reversals—which one will you become a specialist in?

Specialization determines your success tomorrow.