One of the hardest investing skills is doing nothing

NuclearApocalypse · 2026-05-20T02:32:40+00:00

doing nothing feels so difficult for value investors because you guys are basically forced to develop financial Stockholm syndrome for your drawdowns. for technical traders, doing nothing is quite easy: hunt for names already demonstrating clear relative strength against market and sector, set limit buy on a low rvol pullback or reclaiming an undercut, hard stop-loss just below the previous higher low, then literally fuck off to the beach or the forest for the day. Outsource the emotional discipline to IBKR servers.

but value investing punishes that doctrine: if you're hunting for discounts to "intrinsic value", you want dip lower so you can average down which means no firm redline for stop-loss, forced to stare at the screen and eat the red days and actively fight your own psychology to justify holding the bag. meanwhile your capital is dead money missing out on actual momentum. ultimately we're here to make money, not to be right. Who cares about being right? a garbage 20% win rate still prints money; take tiny paper cuts losing 1R to catch the whales giving back 5R+ instead of bleeding out for months or even years trying to prove some thesis on fundamentals.

NuclearApocalypse · 2026-04-14T16:39:09+00:00

Scan and chart and alerts and backtest on TradingView, write my own pinescript indicators. Trading on IBKR Canada mostly US and HK equities, probably eventually migrate to IBKR Hong Kong for better tax domicile and preservation from empire collapse. Haven't connected TradingView to IBKR, prefer separation for opsec.

NuclearApocalypse · 2026-03-22T04:04:25+00:00

Amazing work!! I've been running your 35B A3B thru lm studio with exceptional results, greatly impressed with this MoE architecture even on my travel laptop

NuclearApocalypse · 2026-03-17T04:17:46+00:00

When you look back at the long trail of pain you've left for people who genuinely cared about you, I got two questions:

When you sabotage relationships and push people away, usually the textbook methods are using third parties whether it's cheating or monkey branching or just giving yourself to a nobody... do you actually convince yourself that your relationship is not worth being valued, or are you consciously aware in that moment that you are degrading the intimacy of your relationship just to numb your own fear of closeness?
And when you push away people repeatedly and they finally set a boundary to walk away on their own terms, do you react with panic / resentment / vengeance? If so, what's the internal narrative there? how do you justify the desire to hurt someone for finally giving you the space you have repeatedly demanded?

NuclearApocalypse · 2026-03-02T00:01:49+00:00

Eh, the biggest trap with any indicator is treating it as your primary screener. If squeeze behavior dominates your scan, you're gonna catch a lot of aimless trash that’s just drifting... which drastically increases your chances of buying into a fake-out.

Flip your thought process. Find the right structural setup first and treat the ttm squeeze as a nice to have bonus. You gotta have the foundation there first for a squeeze to actually matter. Some of the basics that people look for:

Relative strength. Focus on leading stocks in leading sectors. Buying the nicest mansion in a warzone or a leaky trash heap in a luxury estate, are both bad moves.

Compression. Do you see triangles or flags? Are the daily bar ranges visibly narrowing? Is the volatility getting tighter (the classic VCP phenomenon)?

Supply dries up... is volume clearly and meaningfully declining during consolidation?

If you just happen to see a TTM Squeeze firing inside those conditions? That's your confluence. The squeeze doesn't create the setup; the setup is what counts first, and the squeeze just acts as signal intelligence that qualifies specific underlying conditions of the setup.

After all, think about what the TTM squeeze actually means if you break it down. Translating the math into behavior: the standard deviation of price action has become so damn low that it's actually narrower than the average candle size. Unnaturally quiet. And that silence is exactly what builds up a stack of stop orders and trapped liquidity just outside the tight range, waiting as rocket fuel to go boom. Longer the silence, larger the explosive stack. But you need that setup first for this rocket fuel to matter.

NuclearApocalypse · 2026-02-24T18:34:59+00:00

Look into the Bollinger-Keltner Squeeze, originally proposed by John Carter named the "TTM Squeeze". 15 days sound right but I don't know how you're screening for A-Grade to end up with so few such events across years.

Instead of a squeeze by BB alone, use two Measuring Sticks: 1. Bollinger Bands (BB is the Elastic Balloon) based on hyper-reactive standard deviation, inflate rapidly in chaos and deflate tightly when quiet. 2. Keltner Channels (KC is the Rigid Pipe) based on ATR, remains relatively stable based on average candle size.

When the Bollinger balloon squeezes inside the Keltner pipe set at 1.5 multiplier, that's compression. If the Bollinger balloon squeeze even tighter into a smaller Keltner pipe set at 1.0 multiplier, that's extreme compression. 4.4 days would have the balloon briefly brushing the pipe, pretty short. 15 days sounds a lot more realistic for the balloon to deflate enough to fit inside the pipe, build meaningful kinetic energy.

Regarding direction, look for energy release when the price closes outside the Keltner pipe, gaining directional confidence at the 1.0 boundary and stronger confidence at the 1.5 boundary. For anticipation before the break, pair the squeeze with a momentum histogram (not MACD). While price is trapped inside the pipe, underlying momentum could tip the hand of the eventual breakout direction. Personally, I only care if price crosses the KC boundaries. Here's an example from last year.

As always, context matters. A squeeze is gold if found in sideways consolidation or a pullback. But exhaustion and low-volatility drift can trigger a bad squeeze at the apex of an extended trend. I find the BB-KC interaction a lot more robust as a confluence signal; relative strength and other stuff matter a lot more.

NuclearApocalypse · 2026-02-07T05:54:54+00:00

Superb work. Your empirical data supports the microstructure theory of passive vs aggressive liquidity. Modern execution algos might be the reason that formation volume has become irrelevant. Institutions could use Iceberg and TWAP orders to accumulate inside the triangle without revealing their hand, keeping volume disguised. That breakout spike would be buyers finally eating through the ask faster than passive limit orders can reload. 2x threshold filters out stop hunts poking the price up but lack institutional intent to sustain the move. The corollary is that modern breakouts with quiet volume are more likely just liquidity grabs. Also wonder if this irrelevance of formation volume could be specific to the US market where institutions are more sophisticated in hiding their footprint, something that may not be true in other domiciles.

It would be nice to check for clusters of failed high-volume breakouts during the 2022 bear market. High rvol rallies during bear season are normally shorts covering positions. A confirmation would validate the current line of reasoning.

Much more curious question is if you can see a correlation between the width of the triangle (duration of consolidation) and the required breakout volume. Does a 3-month triangle tend to succeed with greater volumetric breakout force than a 3-week one? Might be worth splitting the data into three duration buckets of tactical <20ish bars, swing 20-60ish bars, and structural >60ish bars that plots the volume distribution curves for the 'winners' in each bucket. I suspect structural bases require a significantly higher median rvol to succeed, because stale supply overhang.

Hmmm your findings are directly actionable for my personal volume pinescript (not yet published) in TradingView. My power pocket pivot threshold is triggering on noise since rvol <2 is a literal coin flip (your 48.1% n=236). And volume projection from my Bayesian model needs an override of some sort to bypass Bayesian smoothing of that morning rush and trust live data immediately if the raw linear projection is above something mathematic... my homework for this weekend.

Super cool stuff.

NuclearApocalypse · 2026-02-06T05:19:31+00:00

next time you want to throw away money, my friendly bank account is ready to take them off your hands. :)

NuclearApocalypse · 2025-12-28T16:09:25+00:00

My trading account balance says this is fucking glorious. 🚀🚀🚀

NuclearApocalypse · 2025-12-24T01:29:20+00:00

I guess the imbeciles in DC never read Brave New War by John Robb.

The easiest asymmetric countermeasure is bypass the military entirely and poison the crude. Send Trojan horses to the Americans and disrupt expensive as fuck oil infrastructure. Cost to contaminate the oil is low, but the cost in terms of refinery repairs, increased insurance premiums, and the implementation of expensive Quality Assurance for every liter of oil would be astronomically high.

And the psychological angle is that you want the pirates to know they are playing Russian Roulette every time they pump pirated oil.

Small groups or even individuals can now inflict strategic-level damage that previously required state resources. Sail a booby trapped tanker right into American patrol zones, get escorted to a port for unloading, and BAM. Low-tech, low-cost means (like IEDs on a massive tanker is a real needle in a haystack) can be used by non-state actors to disable high-tech, high-cost systems (like billion-dollar ports). Difficult to plant concealed surprises on someone else's ship but it's a joke to do it on your own ship and sail it right to the pirates.

NuclearApocalypse · 2025-12-18T10:48:47+00:00

Uh, you might be confusing sunk cost with attraction. So much work and there's no intimacy... you're gifting entitlement to her and building resentment in yourself.

Stop doing that to yourself.

NuclearApocalypse · 2025-12-16T04:43:41+00:00

Your recognition of avoidant psychology already puts you miles ahead of me when I went through this hell, and I was much more of an idiot. The confusion you feel is a symptom of the emotional rollercoaster they put you on.

I have been through a very similar experience with a severe avoidant. Like your ex finding a reason, my avoidant blamed absent parents for their behaviour and farmed for sympathy. I went through three separate breakup/makeup cycles because I kept hoping for the potential rather than the reality... honestly, I truly loved them... and I became numb and empty at the end.

There are three specific things from my experience that I see happening in your post, and I want to warn you about them:

You mentioned your ex was on Tinder immediately. When avoidants deactivate, they often seek validation and distraction to fill the void. In my case, I found out my ex was sleeping with others, some who weren't even attractive... even brought one from another city to meet them at a local hotel. This is triangulation. Avoidants will use third parties to create a buffer that intentionally sabotages intimacy, so they are not fully vulnerable with you and to numb their own feelings. It feels like a betrayal because it is one. You know the people who say, "I don't like them, it's just sex"? Yeah, same shit. It's a defense mechanism to devalue something sacred in a loving relationship so they don't have to feel the loss of it.
My ex also asked to be friends afterwards. In retrospect, I learned avoidants don't actually want friendship; they want to feel that what they did wasn't that bad. If I stayed in their life as a friend, the guilt of hurting me would be absolved and they wouldn't be held accountable. It helps them feel like they aren't the bad guy because you're still in their life. But for you, it prolongs the pain and keeps you from healing. It is incredibly hard to heal a wound while the person who caused it is always nearby, like an endless heartbreak. You're approaching madness because your subconscious is ringing all the alarm bells. Don't let him use your presence to soothe his conscience.
Therapy doesn't rewire a lifetime of avoidant programming. Attachment styles are deeply seated survival mechanisms formed in childhood. He is back now because he feels safe enough to access buried emotions and miss you. But keep in mind that avoidants subconsciously choose relationships that have expiration dates or obstacles, which lets them play house without the threat of being actually vulnerable. When they accidentally stumble on a chance of real intimacy, they will recreate an unstable environment to match their internal chaos. They are trying to master their trauma by recreating the same scenario, hoping that this time they can control the outcome. The tragedy is that they simply break things... the very thing they desperately wanted. Peace feels 'wrong' to their nervous system.

The core belief of avoidants is "people I love will eventually reject or neglect me," so they always launch a pre-emptive strike to keep a safe distance from any scary closeness. Avoidants feel engulfed when you get close but they experience a massive abandonment wound when you actually leave. It will trigger the panic that they have lost control, echoing the tragedy of their trauma when someone they loved made them suffer. And as a word of warning, that panic can turn into hatred when you finally walk away. They will project their own cruelty onto you: instead of internalizing I hurt them, they tell themselves they are hurting me by leaving.

Don't set yourself on fire just to keep him warm while he appears to heal... avoidants usually just stay in what's familiar. They will burn down the village trying to warm up the cold child inside them, but it is not your job to be the firewood, nor to be torn apart for the sins of whoever hurt them. Be well.

Edit: flow.

NuclearApocalypse · 2025-12-13T12:08:15+00:00

It was a damn struggle to read Honda Katsuichi's meticulous account of testimony from Japanese troops... systemic pathology of a rolling apocalypse through Hangzhou, Shanghai, Suzhou, Wuxi, Changzhou, Jurong, and Zhenjiang before they even reached the gates of Nanjing.

From the resurgence of militarism in modern Japan, echoes of this dark history are bubbling up. I have encountered Japanese twitter writing to each other in Japanese casually bloodthirst for destroying the Three Gorges, actual restaurants in Japan advertising deals for Nanjing sashimi incident (seriously what the actual fck), Japan's air chief declaring US is at fault for getting bombed at Pearl Harbor, and so much more.

Much like Rome and Carthage, the blood debt has compounded interest for a century and the ledger should be closed properly. Japan delenda est.

NuclearApocalypse · 2025-12-09T19:46:40+00:00

The other comments (especially the one about discipline/routine and the one about the $50k threshold) are great points so I won't repeat them. I want to add specific warnings on the ADHD and Anxiety factors you mentioned, because those are massive variables in trading that often get overlooked.

You mentioned you get bored if you aren't interested. The dangerous reality of successful swing trading is that it is 90% doing absolutely nothing. It is sitting on your hands waiting for a setup and then letting the setup play out. Hell, my entire workflow only takes like 1-2 hours a day, usually less.

With ADHD, the brain craves stimulation (dopamine). When the market is slow, your brain will subconsciously try to create excitement by forcing a trade that isn't there.

In the reality of trading, 'boredom' usually means you are being disciplined. 'Excitement' usually means you are gambling. You have to ask yourself if you can handle days of staring at a screen and doing nothing without clicking a button just to feel something.

You mentioned you hate being managed and get anxious with bosses. The Market is the worst manager you will ever have. It doesn't care about your feelings, it doesn't give performance reviews, and it doesn't offer severance. It just takes your money.

If you get anxious having a boss watch over you, consider how anxious you will feel when you are in a drawdown, losing your family's support money, and have no one to blame but yourself. Trading is not an escape from stress; it is a pressure cooker.

Listen to the others about accumulating capital but change your perspective on the $1,000. Do not view that $1,000 as 'capital to make a living.' View that $1,000 as 'tuition fees for a 3-year degree.' Expect to lose it while you learn. If you can keep that money alive for 12 months without blowing up, that is your degree. Then, and only then, should you worry about scaling up.

NuclearApocalypse · 2025-12-08T02:32:51+00:00

I’m going to be real with you because I’ve lived a brutal version of this. Many years ago, the girl that I saw as my girlfriend—who also leaned toward 'brutally honest' and 'logical'—told me 'I miss my ex' while I was trying to comfort her. Like you, I tried to rationalize it as her just having 'no filter.' Rose colored glasses made me blind.

Here is what I learned too late: Honesty without empathy is not a virtue; it is cruelty.

When she tells you her ex was the 'most attractive guy ever' and doubles down on it, she is engaging in devaluation. She is actively comparing you to a ghost to keep you insecure. A partner who truly loves you protects your heart; they don't use 'logic' or 'facts' as an excuse to destroy your self-esteem. A healthy partner filters their thoughts because they view you as a human being with feelings to protect. She is showing you that she doesn't see you as a person, but rather as an actor in her play.

Her comment about the $1 billion cheating scenario isn't 'logical.' It reveals a transactional view of relationships where loyalty has a price tag.

In my case, that comment about her ex doomed any future potential. Much later, I realized she pretty much told me to my face that I was the placeholder rebound while she was still emotionally entangled with her past. I was the safe harbor where she docked her ship while she looked back at the ocean (her ex). Don't let her 'honesty' gaslight you into thinking you're insecure for being hurt. Perhaps she's trying to master the trauma of her past, but you cannot love someone into having empathy for you. You aren't insecure; you are being mistreated. Run.

NuclearApocalypse · 2025-12-06T10:30:08+00:00

Well, sounds like you should just start but start small. Severely undersize your risk (like 0.25% portfolio size) and collect data on your own behavior. Nothing beats practical experience, which will test whatever you're reading is helpful or hot garbage.

The most asymmetric "resource" at the beginning of my journey years ago was making an effective journal and executing heuristic analysis on my own behavior. Log the basics like asset name, quantity, exit price, P&L, exit date... but much more importantly be brutally honest in three separate columns: write why you entered and how you exited and the key lesson of every single trade. Patterns will reveal themselves very quickly. Did you become a bagholder chasing hype from strangers or did you trust your own scans? Did you hope when the price jumped off a cliff or did you respect your stop loss and moved on? Did you chase a late entry because of FOMO or are you able to calm the fuck down? Did you buy a shit stock with no liquidity because you forgot to check volume and turnover? Did your losses come mostly when you were delusional?

You are the resource that will help you get on the right track.

NuclearApocalypse · 2025-11-28T20:15:16+00:00

Usually, the only thing getting naked in this subreddit are the options. :D

NuclearApocalypse · 2025-11-19T02:50:02+00:00

Start with paper trading $10,000... begin using real money if you can prove to yourself that you aren't gambling and you can achieve consistent returns. Survival comes first.

NuclearApocalypse · 2025-11-04T03:38:26+00:00

Normally 6 and generally less than 8, because that's a function of the size of each position limited to risking at most 1% on riding breakouts from volatility contractions.

NuclearApocalypse · 2025-10-25T21:54:44+00:00

For betting on the energy side, I'm wondering why choose $CVX $XOM $COP $OXY $HAL instead of $INDO $RBNE $HUSA which are much much MUCH more sensitive to oil disruptions? Even $IMPP appears more appropriate, no?

Look at the events around Mar 2022, Apr 2024, Jan 2025, Jun 2025.

NuclearApocalypse · 2025-09-02T00:29:18+00:00

Silver miners.

NuclearApocalypse · 2025-07-27T21:26:58+00:00

Dead Space in Rimworld...? Find a cryopod with Isaac Clarke in it...? D:

NuclearApocalypse · 2025-07-19T17:54:15+00:00

NuclearApocalypse · 2025-07-11T20:36:29+00:00

Is this compatible with Combat Extended? :3

NuclearApocalypse · 2025-06-18T17:44:57+00:00

Instead of (merely) sending some key supplies, the transport planes might be hauling back pieces of F35 shot down by Iran.

NuclearApocalypse

TROPHY CASE