On Christmas wreaths and relaxed trading
Have you ever thought about where the Christmas wreath came from?
I was wondering that this morning so I Googled it.
(what an amazing age we live in, to just look up random information like that to satisfy our curiosity!)
Unsurprisingly, the wreath was born out of the Christmas tree.
This dates back to the 1500s in northern Europe when people would bring in evergreen trees to decorate their homes around Christmas season.
The trees needed to be trimmed up, making a triangle that represented the Trinity (the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the Christian tradition). Naturally, there were leftover branches from the trimmings which they weaved into a wreath.
They lived in an age of using everything to its full potential.
Some might call this “using every part of the buffalo.”
An idea born from the American peoples who would use up all the meat, organs, bones, and hide of the buffalo for various purposes. Nothing was thrown out and left to rot — they used all of it.
In trading, this might be using up every bit of capital.
Easy enough to do in a fund where you can just have your broker purchase partial shares of said fund.
Harder to do when you can’t do partial shares.
And even harder when you have to group everything in 100 share lots because 95% of your trading is selling cash-secured Puts.
(Which is my trading strategy of choice.)
I actually make a part of my strategy NOT using every bit of capital. I like to have a buffer available in case I need to “fly a Rescue Mission” on a trade.
To use a farming analogy, I sometimes call using up every bit of capital possible “plowing the corners.”
Which is a biblical reference where God commanded His people to not plow the corners of their fields but to leave them for the poor to work and harvest on their own. Thus, plowing the corners shows off both greed and relying on yourself rather than God.
Leaving a bit of capital around is a chance for me to trust God with my finances.
It’s actually a kind of freedom for me. Instead of stressing over everything in life being on my own shoulders, I can trust God with the things I could never control.
Which is most things in life.
Precious few things are actually under my control.
Rather than worrying, I can relax and trade and trust that things will work out.
Not in a naive “trusting the universe but never working” way — but in a “God’s got this, just do your best and trust Him with the rest” way.
Like I said, very mentally freeing.
All right…
I have no idea how I got here when I started talking about Christmas wreaths.
🤷
I guess I’ll just say Merry Christmas Eve!
— Ricky Ketchum