I walked past a flock of pigeons this morning. One spooked, and within half a second, all thirty of them exploded into the air like a feathered firework. None of them knew why they were flying — they just knew the others were.
That’s the market. That’s us.
We like to tell ourselves we’re rational investors. We model cash flows, track P/E ratios, run Monte Carlo sims (okay, maybe not all of us). But truthfully? We’re pigeons. We watch the flock, and when the flock moves, we flap.
This is what I call Echo Trades. Not trades based on fundamentals, but on the sound of everyone else’s trades bouncing off the canyon walls of the market. Meme stocks in 2021 were Echo Trades. So were the dot-com IPOs of the late ’90s. So is every FOMO-driven surge in a coin no one can explain beyond “number go up.”
Why Echo Trades Feel So Good
Echo Trades are intoxicating because they validate us.
You see a green candle. You buy. Someone else buys. The candle grows. You think you were right — but really, you just joined the chorus.
It’s narrative gravity pulling you, not truth. And like all echoes, they get weaker over time, until silence hits and you’re left holding what you thought was music but turns out was just reverberation.
The Discipline Against the Echo
Remember back in Day 41 when I introduced our lexicon? This is why it matters. Spotting an Echo Trade in real-time is like spotting a Riskquake tremor or a Liquidity Mirage: you need a private vocabulary to remind yourself, this isn’t signal — it’s noise amplified.
The Stoics from before (Day 86) would say: don’t be dragged around by the flock. Build your inner keel. Filter your inputs. And most of all: never confuse volume with value.
A Better Path
So what do you do instead?
You look for the Treasure Edge — the contrarian opportunities hiding off the beaten trail. You measure whether you’re stepping into a Moonstake or just parroting a pigeon. And sometimes, the bravest thing is to sit out the echo entirely, sipping your coffee, letting the birds flap themselves tired.
🔥 Closing Thought:
The loudest trades are rarely the smartest. Echoes fade. Fundamentals remain. Learn the difference, and you’ll stop being the flock — and start being the falcon.
Leave a Reply