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Taste the Food
By Sean | June 30, 2010
When I was growing up I was fascinated by cooking. Actually that’s not so true come to think of it. I was fascinated by the process and I loved to eat the results.
Fortunately my mother (who did all the cooking in our home) was not the sort to discourage my interest. I’ve got to admit that my fascination was mostly about the machinery involved as well as the process of mixing stuff up and following a map of what to do in order to enjoy some great tasting stuff I could pig out on and drink a gallon of milk with only to come back and repeat the process whenever that bloated, can’t stuff another bite in, feeling subsided just enough to permit disposing of yet more of the refrigerators contents through my digestive system. But that’s entirely another process for a different article.
Don’t get me wrong I was like any other kid who liked to lick out the bowl, lick off the spoons, and lick up just about any other food fragments that landed wherever.
Fast forward to when I moved out on my own at 16 years old. I think I was the only 16 year old I knew who could cook outstanding food that everyone loved and make it taste awesome damn near every time. Sure I experimented a lot and sometimes I didn’t get it just right like the time I tried making cacciatore out of calf tongues. It wasn’t bad but the leftovers got moldy before I had to admit that neither I nor my roommates were going to eat the rest of it. The point is that I was good at cooking from recipes and as I experimented more and more I discovered that I didn’t need recipes to cook great food. Why not? The title of this article should answer that question.
Fast forward to a decade ago when I met my wife. Grace was not that great of a cook when I met her. She was good in the kitchen, (with food I mean) but not great (with food I mean). She had cool ideas but they didn’t always pan out as good as they should have. As I tasted various dishes I’d ask her about the process she’d used — at least 1/2 the time using recipes and the other 1/2 just throwing stuff together like I did. It puzzled me what the key was to helping her pull off better dishes. Then one day she made something that was just bad … not terrible but not that good either. I could not imagine someone spoiling this dish if they’d followed the most basic principles of cooking so I asked her if she tasted the food as she was preparing it. She replied “no”.
At that point I embarked on a discussion where I asked her more questions about how she thought she could make stuff taste good without tasting it. She seemed to figure that mixing up the right stuff in the right quantities — if it looked right — should taste OK. I tried to dissect her train of thought about how that should work but she was not buying it — I mean she genuinely thought I’d lost the plot to suggest that her tasting the food while cooking it would enable her to make better food.
Over time other meals happened that did not taste as good as it should and I’d ask if she tasted it while mixing the ingredients. For quite some time the answer was still “no”. I think it was about 5 years before she was consistent about tasting food.
Then when we were watching the show Kitchen Nightmares one evening Gordon Ramsey asked a chef if he tasted the food as he was preparing it before sending it out. He also replied “no”. There’s Chef Ramsey dressing down a chef who did not taste the food nor see the importance of it. Gordon went ballistic on that chef telling him he was mad to think that he was going to produce great food without tasting it while cooking it.
You can guess that I pointed out that Chef Ramsey seemed to think the way I did. By that time my wife was thoroughly indoctrinated in the “taste the food” gospel so she was not that receptive to my gloating — but nonetheless good humored enough to allow me to enjoy my vindication a little. She makes a lot better food now and she doesn’t need recipes to do so. When I cook a new dish she can taste it once and make it as good or better than me — often the first attempt.
So why this story about tasting the food? I think there is a great story there about trading. When we learn to trade there are some things that will always separate successful traders from unsuccessful ones and also that separates mediocre traders from outstanding ones. The outstanding ones — even during the learning process recognize (sooner or later) the things that need to be done and they do them. Things like a written trading plan, written entry and exit rules, written money management parameters and compounding strategy. Not to mention trade documentation such as a trade journal. Proceeding step by step in the learning process and not being impatient to get there all at once.
In cooking as in trading there are basics that not only need to be learned — but consistently applied. In cooking we begin with recipes to train us how to taste food. There are chefs who never learn from recipes and who never taste the food they are cooking. Perhaps there are some who are even great. But there is no way they learn the scope of the master chefs without employing the fundamental principles and techniques that are essential to become a master chef who can stand up to the scrutiny of the best judges in the world.
And yet dear trader when you trade real money you are immediately trading against the best there is. But the only reason you’ll make any money as an amateur is that there are enough people who are (as a group) sufficiently worse off than you — that you can get a bit of it.
But to trade consistently there are many trades you’ll make where your money is taken from you by the best out there and the only way to take enough trades away from them to rise much beyond break even is to employ every edge you can. Most of the rookies are out there are focused trying to find the best system and they consequently ignore some of the essentials.
Also bear in mind that you need to learn faster than they do because the markets are always changing and to keep up you’ve got to build learning upon learning and never stop. A chef who stops tasting the food is ignoring the most basic feedback tool to help him improve his game and stay abreast of changes in food taste as new farming methods gradually change the taste of our live foods and also alter how those foods react to the seasonings we use in them. So with the markets as they change.
The average trader who actually bothers to read most of the stuff about psychology and rules and such — nods and sees the value in them and thinks about possibly doing that but rules it out for the time being (procrastination) — thinking that by having read and understood the point — that it is as almost good as as if they implemented it. Most of this thinking process passes by almost without the traders conscious recognition of the stupidity of that line of reasoning.
Like one of our members recently said “when you have to write something down it shows up all the holes and flaws in your thinking that you never notice until you are forced to write it out. You can think you have it clear in your mind until you are forced to write it down. Understanding in your mind (the value of writing out your plan) counts for 5 percent of the edge but implementing it (writing it down) counts for 95 percent of it. How many 5 percent’rs are there out there? About 95 percent of you people reading this.
There is nothing easier in trading than reading about trading systems (entry and exit strategies) and pouring over indicators and staring at charts, drawing lines, backtesting, and changing the parameters of your indicators. Doing the easy stuff gets you nowhere but has the illusion of being productive. Jumping from system to system and trading it demo (or worse live) until it gets too tough and overwhelms you — and you think the system was not right for you so you’ll move on until that magic connection happens and you luck into just the right system. Sorry but it doesn’t happen that way.
Trading is a systematic game. But most people don’t have a clue what that means so they focus on the idea of system trading rather than on trading systematically. There is a world of difference. These people do not become systematic in how they trade. They are undisciplined and do what is most interesting, fun, entertaining, or hypnotic — and they procrastinate when it comes to doing the hard stuff and instead become “system addicted”, chart staring, losers. With each new system they are looking for their fix. The conquest of a new idea that might make them rich. Some people call this the “holy grail” search. I just call it unprofessional work habits.
Kind of like the guy who chases girls for the conquest. He is unwilling, unable, and therefore too immature to actually plan a future with someone because he is not interested in long term satisfaction — he’ll take immediate gratification as a substitute and that becomes a destructive habit that makes him less and less capable of being a reliable mate. At 45 he’s out on the ocean snorting coke in a cigarette boat with increasingly dumber 23 year old bimbo’s as he goes bald and his beer gut becomes larger and hairier.
That’s a great metaphor to describe what happens to system junkies. They are always looking for that new system or indicator or mentor or whatever their latest conquest is. Once the reality and tedium of committing to a course of action and pouring their energy into becoming the kind of trader that is sustainably profitable — they cannot stand what it requires of them so they drop it prematurely and move on. They are also attracted to loser systems and the losers that sell them just like the old farts who never grew up are continually attracted to women that are too dumb to see what losers they are but just clever enough to take their money.
So taste the food if you want to make great meals…
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