You’ve built the core: diversification that actually diversifies, trades constructed with tempo and steps, and a portfolio sized and balanced to survive. Part 2 turns that structure outward to weather (hedging during known shocks) and inward to behavior (execution hygiene and discipline). We finish by measuring the system—so you stop guessing and start knowing.
Ava checks your calendar before she checks the chart.
“Weather is on schedule,” she says, tapping tomorrow’s macro print. “We don’t hedge moods. We hedge windows.”
Same canvas: $10,000 account, ETH long from the plan, $100 max risk, −8% invalidation, +8% / +20% targets. You want to hold the idea. You also want a brain that still works if the floor shifts.
“Most traders choose between shrug or shrink,” Ava says. “There’s a smarter third: a small, dated umbrella.”
You keep the core position—0.4167 ETH (~$1,250 notional at $3,000)—and price out a put. One week, $2,900 strike, $35/ETH premium. On your size, the umbrella costs $14.60—one-tenth of one percent of the account. You don’t love paying it. You love what it buys: permission to think.
“Set the window,” Ava says. You anchor the hedge from two hours before the print to the following daily close. The plan stays the plan: your stop is still the thesis breaker, your targets are still where realized truth gets banked. The hedge doesn’t replace exits; it softens the randomness between them.
The release hits. You feel the room bend: bid depth collapses, the spread jumps, prints cascade. ETH knifes ten percent—$3,000 → $2,700—faster than your pulse can catch it. Your spot sleeve is −$125 on 0.4167 ETH. The put wakes up: intrinsic value about $200 minus the $35 you paid → $165/ETH; on your size, roughly +$68.80. Net, you’re down ~$56, not $125. It still stings. It doesn’t scramble you. You can read again.
“Umbrellas don’t make sun,” Ava says, watching the book re-fill. “They keep you from drowning when it doesn’t.”
You run the other branch in your head: no drop, a clean rip instead. The put expires worthless; the cost was $14.60—tuition for a quiet mind during a known storm. Small, dated, boring. Exactly right.
If your venue doesn’t have options, the tool is different and the principle identical. You short 0.2083 ETH—half your spot notional—on a liquid perp only for the event window. A ten-percent drop earns ~$62.50 on the hedge against ~$125 on spot; you walk away with roughly half the bruise. You close the short when the window closes or the reason disappears. You never let the hedge flip you net short by accident; the umbrella is for rain, not for sailing backwards.
You glance at the pipe map from Chapter 1. “What if correlation spikes?” you ask. Ava nods. “Then you hedge the pipe, not your favorite sticker. If majors and your L2 sleeve panic together, use the liquid instrument that actually absorbs pressure. Precision is less important than function.”
Price stabilizes. The book looks human again. Your original stop and targets are still your truth. The umbrella disappears on schedule. The trade remains the trade.
Ava closes your calendar. “Hedge dates and data, not nerves. Keep it small, keep it timed, remove it when it’s done. Protection is a tool, not a personality.”
You exhale and realize you never once considered “doubling to get it back.” That was the umbrella’s real work.
Pocket anchors
Field drill (2 min • calendar + order ticket)
Open your calendar and mark the next real event for your largest sleeve. Write the exact hedge (e.g., 1-week $2,900 put or 50% notional perp short), the max spend in dollars, and the start/stop time you’ll carry it. Stage the order now; cancel only if the trade’s thesis is invalidated before the window begins.
Ava watches you scroll. Not the chart—your fills.
“Yesterday you survived weather,” she says. “Today we stop sinking from tiny holes you drilled yourself.”
Same canvas: $10,000 account, ETH plan, $100 max risk, −8% invalidation, +8% / +20% targets.
You missed the first clean push out of the range. It happens. What happens next is the real leak. The dashboard lights up with green ticks in other pairs; your fingers move before your rules do. Click. Click. Click.
On the ledger it looks harmless: three small market orders in mid-liquidity alts. In the tape it looks like this: spread widens from $0.003 to $0.012, depth thins, you chase a tick, get a worse fill, and then another. You close them minutes later when they don’t “go.” Fees plus about 0.15% of slippage each adds up to ~$29 per trade on your sizes—~$87 in ninety seconds. Almost your full day’s risk without taking a real trade.
Ava doesn’t scold. She circles the line: “Execution friction is real P&L.”
“Flat is a position,” she says. “But only if you let it be one.”
You set a rule together: max three tickets a day, all pre-written before the session starts. Not three impulses—three allowed decisions. If the setup you planned doesn’t show, you finish with unused tickets. It feels ridiculous to need a leash for your own mouse. Then you try it. The next choppy day you take none. Your P&L curve is a straight line instead of a slow bleed. Boredom visits. Red doesn’t.
“Good,” Ava says. “Now decide how you will behave when you are wrong.”
You think about your worst pattern: three losses and then the big one you took to “get it back.” You remember the thud in your chest while it printed against you, the numbness after. Ava writes a single sentence and slides it over:
“Three red trades → half size tomorrow + one day off.”
It’s not punishment; it’s containment. A circuit breaker for a human brain that runs hot. You run the mental week: three stops at −$100 each (−$300). Under the rule, your next attempt is −$50 max or +$? if it works. The old week ended −$1,000. This one ends −$350 and a decent night’s sleep. The market didn’t change. Your edge to keep learning did.
Ava opens your journal to a blank page. “Write the things you think you’ll remember, then watch how fast you don’t.”
You log three columns: Structure seen / Action taken / What would force a change. No poetry. No revenge. When you read it back later, the story is simple: you followed your plan or you didn’t. The point isn’t blame. It’s cause and correction. You start catching your own patterns in the words: you chase most when alerts are off and you’re tab-watching; you cut winners early when size is a hair too big; you move stops when you haven’t slept. The journal turns fog into handles.
That afternoon gives you a test. ETH wobbles with no structure—noise, not signal. Your hand twitches toward a small-cap that’s moving on social heat. You look at the ticket cap—0/3 used—and you still don’t take it. The cap isn’t there to allow three bad decisions. It’s there to stop the fourth.
Later, your planned setup actually appears: retest, volume real, risk defined. You take one ticket, calmly. It stops. −$100. You close the platform and go for a walk. The day ends red on purpose, not from a thousand tiny cuts you can’t remember giving yourself.
That night you do the math you’ve been avoiding: last month’s fees and slippage across all venues. The number looks like a soft tax you never voted for. You trim one exchange you use out of habit and route more through the book that absorbs size better. You add a rule: no market orders on thin books; if the spread is a canyon, you wait or you pass. The next week, the friction line drops. The setups feel the same. The account doesn’t.
Ava closes your notebook. “Tidy hands, quiet head. That’s not a personality trait. It’s a system.”
The screen is still. Your breathing is even. You notice something small: you aren’t trying to make the market forgive you anymore. You’re trying to trade cleanly. That’s new.
“Good,” Ava says. “Now you’re ready to measure your edge across twenty trades without confusing it with noise you created.”
You put the cap back on the pen and feel the room level under your feet.
Pocket anchors
Field drill (2 min • log + sticky note)
Total last week’s fees + slippage across venues; write the number at the top of your log. Place a sticky note above your monitor: “Max 3 tickets. No market orders on thin books. 3 reds → half size + 1 day off.” Read it out loud before you trade.
The room is quiet. Charts asleep, order tickets closed, your notebook heavy with ink. Ava sits beside you and doesn’t speak for a while. The silence isn’t awkward. It’s earned.
“You built a hull,” she says at last. “You sailed through weather without tearing it. Now we stop guessing if it worked—we measure it.”
Same canvas on the table between you—$10,000 account, ETH as the training ground, $100 risk per trade, −8% invalidation, +8% / +20% targets—only now it’s a reference, not a crutch. The work moved from “what should I do?” to “what did my system actually do?”
Ava turns your notebook to a clean spread and draws four thin columns, almost like a ledger: Setup → Risk (R) → Outcome (R) → Note. No poetry, no commentary about how the market felt about you. Just the story of your decisions in units that mean something.
“Twenty trades,” she says. “Same playbook you’ve been running. We don’t change the rules to win. We record what the rules produce.”
You can feel your old impulses looking for a back door—maybe skip the losers, maybe round up a winner. Ava’s pen taps the page once. You write the first five trades you can remember without looking anything up: the DCA build, the laddered entry that averaged better than your ego, the stop that fired with a tiny slippage sting, the 1R trim that saved a day from turning red, the target that printed while your pulse stayed boring. Beside each, you write the actual R—not dollars, not feelings. +2.5R. −1R. +0.33R. +1R. Break-even on the remainder.
“See how it speaks?” she says. It does. The column strips away the drama and leaves only shape: are your winners big enough, your losers contained enough, your distribution real or imagined? You add five more from last week, then another handful from the month. The page starts to look like a system, not a scrapbook.
Ava asks for one more layer: context you can reproduce. Instead of “bad vibes,” you write “spread widened 6→18 ticks; partial fill; kept size.” Instead of “great call,” you write “pipe exposure uncapped—skipped.” Your notes read like instructions someone else could follow. That someone is you, tomorrow.
By the tenth trade, a picture forms: your average loss sits right around −1R as planned. Your average win hovers between +1.7R and +2.2R when you don’t cut early. Your hit rate floats near 40–45%, and somehow the line still tilts upward because the compass did its job. The outliers? Two early exits that donated your edge, one oversized impulse ticket you’d promised to stop doing. They aren’t mysteries. They’re fixable.
“Systems are not opinions,” Ava says, closing your notebook with two fingers. “They’re the behavior you repeat under pressure. You’ve got one now. It’s small, but it’s true.”
You look back over the five chapters you just lived:
Ava stands, but she doesn’t leave. “One more thing,” she says, pointing to the blank half of the spread. “Promise yourself a boring miracle.”
You wait.
“Consistency. Same protocol before every decision. Same unit of risk. Same way you speak to yourself on red days. Small edges only look small up close. Over twenty trades they look like survival. Over two hundred, they look like you were inevitable.”
You imagine the next month: the same checklist at the top of every session—thesis, invalidation, R:R ≥ 1:2, size ≤ 1%, entry plan in steps, stop and targets written where your fear can see them. You picture the journal turning into an honest graph: winners that pay for education, losers that stay the size you chose. You can see yourself choosing flat instead of noise. You can see yourself choosing sleep instead of revenge. You can see a system—not as a cage, but as a floor.
The room feels level again. You don’t need the market to forgive you. You need to keep trading cleanly.
Ava reaches for her notebook and gives you a look you’ve begun to understand. “You didn’t remove risk,” she says. “You shaped it. Now measure it until the shape is yours.”
You nod. Not because the lesson is over—because it finally started.
Pocket anchors
Field drill (5 min • tracker sheet)
Make a simple 20-trade tracker with columns: Date / Setup / Risk ($ & %) / Planned R:R / Outcome (R) / Note (one sentence of structure, not feelings). Log every trade until you hit 20. At the end, compute: win rate, average win R, average loss R, and expectancy (avg R). Keep what worked. Rewrite what didn’t. Then do twenty more.
