5am In Vegas

I got married in America on a three week road trip and still set an alarm twice a week to publish. The trading ran itself the whole time. Everything I built around it did not.

Systematic trading is supposed to buy your life back, and mine does. The book ran for three weeks while I was in America, across eight cities and a wedding, and it did not need me for a single minute of it. The thing that needed me was this blog. Twice a week, at 5am, in a hotel room, before anyone else in the family was awake.

I have not published since 3 August. This is what happened in between.

What does three weeks in America actually look like?

Three nights in Chicago. A flight to San Francisco for two more. Then a Dodge Durango down the west coast, stopping a night each in Carmel, Cambria and Santa Monica, before two nights in Los Angeles. From there we drove into Vegas for five nights, where I got married and where my whole family flew in to meet us. Then Clearwater, Florida, for five nights, and home.

Twenty to thirty thousand steps a day. Two young kids in tow. Late nights with a couple of beers and family I do not get to see often enough, followed by early starts with two children who have no interest in jet lag as a concept.

It was the best three weeks of my life, period. I would do the whole thing again tomorrow.

And twice a week, in the middle of it, I set an alarm for 5am.

Why did I still set a 5am alarm?

Because publishing an article is not the same job as writing one, and I had only solved the writing.

Here is what actually goes into a piece on this blog. It starts as a sketch, usually a line or two that I think is worth an argument. That gets fleshed out into a proper structure, which is the part where I find out whether the idea has legs or whether I have three paragraphs and a feeling. Then I write it, and a lot of that is voice dictation, because I think faster out loud than I type. Then it goes through Claude for the grammar pass and the tidy-up, and then I read the whole thing again cold, because the pass always changes something I did not want changed.

Then the article is done. And then the actual morning starts.

Images have to be made, social posts have to be written, content has to be reviewed. Then the article goes live. Comments come in, and I try to answer them properly, because a comment section where the author never shows up is a ghost-town.

The grammar pass deserves its own note, because it is the stage that looks most automated and is the least. Claude is very good at catching what I actually meant and very willing to smooth the life out of a sentence while it does. Every pass comes back with something tidier and flatter, and half the job is putting the rough edges back in. That is not a complaint about Claude. It is the reason the stage cannot be skipped or handed off, and the reason it cannot be done at speed on four hours of sleep.

An hour to an hour and a half, twice a week. In Vegas, that hour came out of the front of a day I was never getting back.

What I got wrong about writing ahead

I thought I had been organised. Every article that went out whilst I was away was written before I got on the plane, four or five of them, done and sitting there ready.

What I underestimated was two things at once. The first is how much of the work is not the writing, which I have just spent five paragraphs on. The second is more personal: I underestimated how much time I would want to spend exploring with my family.

You cannot pre-write your way out of a business that runs on your attention. I tried, and it solved less than half of the problem.

You cannot pre-write your way out of a business that runs on your attention.

The moment it landed

It was a Monday morning in Vegas. Awake at five, running on not much sleep, legs still sore after the previous day’s 30K steps, sitting in the dark with a laptop while my family slept a few feet away.

And I remember thinking: what am I doing?

Not in a dramatic way. The article was good. The blog matters to me. But I was grinding myself down to hit a publishing schedule of my own invention, with nothing behind it but my own habit, in the middle of three weeks I had been looking forward to for a year. I had let the calendar become the boss.

Those three weeks were not coming back. The Thursday slot absolutely was.

So I finished that one, shipped the rest, and when I got home I did not open the blog for two weeks. Thank you to everyone who has messaged asking where the articles went. That is where they went.

Why is trading easy to separate and a business isn’t?

Because I automated one of them and I am still the machine in the other.

Trading, for me, is a means to an end. It is a way of generating money, and it is a craft I genuinely love the mechanics of, but it is not where fulfilment comes from and I would be lying if I said it was. It never hugged me. The reason I can leave XAQP alone for three weeks on another continent is because of the architecture. The strategies fire on their conditions, the risk rules are in the code, and there is nothing useful for me to do at the screen. I built it that way deliberately, and the payoff is that it makes no claim on my time at all.

A content business is a different animal. It runs on me. My voice, my name, my face, my opinions, my inbox. There is no version of it that executes while I sleep, because the whole product is that a specific person is behind it. And that is exactly why it converges with your life without ever asking permission. The trading book has a hard edge around it. The business does not, and it will expand into whatever space you leave it.

That convergence is the trap. Once your work is built on your name, the boundary has to be built by hand, every time, because nothing in the structure builds it for you.

Once your work is built on your name, the boundary has to be built by hand, every time.

How do you run life, business and trading at the same time?

There is no clever system for this.

What I came home with is a much clearer sense of the order. Life first, and I mean that as a structural claim about how the week gets built. The other two are shaped to fit around it, and when they stop fitting, they are the things that change.

The useful test I have landed on is simple enough to apply on a Sunday night. For each of the three, ask what it takes from you when you are not there. Trading takes nothing, because the decisions were made in advance and written into code. The job takes nothing, because it has boundaries somebody else agreed to. The blog took an hour of every publishing morning, on another continent, with my wedding in the diary.

I am back to the normal routine now, twice a week, same as before. Readers are considerably more forgiving about a gap than my kids are about me being on my laptop on holiday.

One more thing worth saying, because it took me years to work out. The reason any of this gets built in the first place is the people who are asleep in the room while you are working on it. Lose that thread and you end up with a very impressive machine and no idea who it was for.

Common questions

Did the trading suffer while you were away?
No. XAQP is fully automated, executing on MT5, with the risk controls written into the strategies themselves. There is no operational reason for me to be at a screen, on holiday or otherwise, and three weeks away is the strongest argument for building it that way.

Why not just schedule everything in advance?
Substack will schedule the article. It will not make the images, run the read-through, write the platform-specific social posts, or answer the comments. That is where the hour goes, and it lands on publish day regardless of when the words were written.

Is it worth stopping if you publish on a schedule?
If the schedule is self-imposed and it is costing you time you cannot get back, yes. I stopped for two weeks and the consequences were nil. The readers are still here and in fact growing, thanks to the endless hours of work I pour into The Letter.

How do you keep trading separate from the rest of your life?
Automation does most of the work. A systematic book with the decisions pre-committed in code has no claim on your attention, which makes it far easier to leave alone than a discretionary one. The harder separation is the business built around the trading, because that one runs on you.

The trip was the point

I built a systematic trading book so that it would not need me, and then built a publishing schedule that did. That is a funny way to end up, and I suspect I am not the only one who has done it.

Three weeks in America, a wedding in Vegas, my family in one place for the first time in years, and two kids who will not be this age again. Set against that, four or five articles and a Monday and Thursday slot I invented look exactly as important as they actually are.

Back to it, twice a week, starting now. It just does not get to come on holiday.

Personal commentary, not advice. Capital at risk.