Touch grass.
If you have spent any time online lately, you have probably seen kids saying it. It is shorthand for: stop staring at your screen, go outside, talk to actual humans. The internet is not the real world.
Markets work the same way.
I am writing this from St. Barths. The plan was to relax.
The chart shows up the same in every country, so I have been trading the open from a beach club. But the real edge this trip has not come from the chart.
It came from the people.
Last night we ended up dancing on a table at La Guérite. If you have not heard of it, La Guérite is the spot in St. Barths where the yachts empty out around 4 PM. Lunch turns into a dance party then into the place where deals get made.
It is the kind of room where you do not just bump into a CEO. You bump into a roomful of them.
We made friends with a group of CEOs from LA, all of them worth nine figures, several of them having taken companies public.
The motorcycles with champagne buckets gave it away. They were generous, funny, and open.
One of them was a founder. He took his company public a few years back.
I asked him how the stock was doing. He laughed and said, "Don't buy it."
Then he told me why.
I am not going to name the company because that is not the point.
The point is that the founder of a publicly traded company, sitting at a beach club with no PR team, no IR script, no analyst on the line, told me in plain English why his own stock was a bad investment right now.
He was just being honest. The kind of honesty you don’t get on a CNBC interview.
That is the edge.
Not the chart, not the indicator. The unscripted conversation with the person who knows the business.
Researchers have a name for this. It is called the strength of weak ties.
A 2022 study by MIT, Stanford, Harvard, and LinkedIn tracked 20 million people and 2 billion connections over five years.
The finding: the most valuable information you receive in your career almost never comes from your inner circle. It comes from looser connections, the people one or two steps outside your normal world.
Your charts are your inner circle. They tell you what you already know how to read.
The trader sitting next to you at a hotel bar in St. Barths might tell you something you would never have seen coming.
I am not saying drop everything and book a flight.
The next time you find yourself in a room with someone outside your normal world, ask them what they are seeing.
Ask them about the dollars they are watching, the products that cannot stay on the shelf, the hires they cannot fill, the customers who stopped showing up.
Those signals are real time. They are usually six to twelve months ahead of the data.
Touch grass. Or better yet, touch sand.
The chart will be there when you get back.
Rock On,
Voz
P.S. Every afternoon before the close, I take what the tape has been telling me all day and turn it into one trade. That is Trade To Close, and right now you can try it free for 7 days. The setups go out before the bell so you have time to act on them. Start your free trial here