Join Me in Space

The best trading decisions I've made this year didn't happen while I was staring at screens.

They happened in the quiet moments. The spaces between trades. The times when I wasn't actively doing anything at all.

I've been thinking a lot about this lately, especially as I reflect on the themes I've been exploring in recent posts—about creating space, about following plans, about the tension between discipline and intuition.

Here's what I'm wrestling with: I spend so much time building processes and plans to follow. I create rules to keep myself from making emotional decisions. I establish stops and targets before I enter trades so I'm not making those calls in the heat of the moment.

All of that is essential. I believe that deeply.

But then there are these other moments—moments when my plan says one thing, but something inside me is whispering something else. My plan says hold, but my gut says exit. My plan says exit, but I sense the trade needs more room.

How do I navigate that?

I don't think the answer is to always follow the plan rigidly or always trust my gut. The answer lives somewhere in the space between them. And I can only access that space when I'm not in constant motion.

This is why the space between trades matters so much. It's not wasted time. It's not just waiting for the next setup. It's where the real work happens.

When I'm not actively trading, I have the mental bandwidth to reflect. To notice patterns. To recognize when my intuition has been right and when it's been fear disguised as insight. To understand which rules in my process are genuinely serving me and which ones I'm hiding behind.

I've noticed something about my best trade ideas: they rarely come when I'm grinding through charts for hours. They come when I'm hiking. Or sitting quietly in the morning before the market opens. Or in that moment right after I close my laptop and just breathe.

The space creates clarity.

But here's the tricky part: intuition only becomes reliable when it's informed by experience and filtered through awareness. Raw gut feeling without the context of thousands of trades? That's just emotion. But intuition that's been sharpened by years of pattern recognition and honest self-reflection? That's different.

This is why I keep coming back to the idea of creating s p a c e . Not just in my trading schedule, but in my mind.

S p a c e to let my subconscious process what my conscious mind has been observing.

S p a c e to notice when I'm trading from fear versus confidence.

S p a c e to hear that quiet voice that sometimes knows things my spreadsheet doesn't.

So what do I need to do when my process conflicts with my feelings?

First, I need to pause. Create that s p a c e —even if it's just sixty seconds of breathing before I click the button. I need to ask myself: is this feeling coming from fear, or is it coming from something deeper?

If it's fear—fear of giving back gains, fear of being wrong, fear of missing out—then I lean on the process. The plan exists precisely for these moments when emotions are screaming at me to do something stupid.

But if it's something else—a recognition of changed conditions, a sense that the thesis has shifted, an awareness that the market is telling me something I didn't account for when I made the plan—then maybe that deserves consideration.

The key is knowing the difference. And I will only learn that difference through experience, reflection, and honest assessment of when I've been right and wrong in the past.

I'm not suggesting I should abandon my plans every time I get a feeling. I'm reminding myself to create enough s p a c e to distinguish between feelings that should be ignored and intuition that deserves to be heard.

The s p a c e between trades isn't empty. It's full of learning, pattern recognition, and self-awareness. It's where I can develop the judgment to know when to follow the plan and when to adapt.

Some of my biggest wins came from following the plan exactly as written. Others came from recognizing when conditions had changed enough to warrant flexibility.

The only way I knew which was which? The s p a c e to think clearly.

--> If you'd like to receive these notes in your email, sign up here.

Sean McLaughlin | Chief Options Strategist, All Star Charts