The Quiet Between Moves

Night settles into the corners of my serviced apartment in Kuala Lumpur, my laptop's dim glow barely piercing the ambient darkness. The screen illuminates price charts and options chains—familiar patterns on my screen, thirteen hours ahead of the New York markets I trade. As the city below drifts toward sleep, another world prepares to wake.

The rhythm of these hours has become a meditation, far removed from my previous lives. A year ago, I juggled the controlled chaos of relocating a boxing gym while building models for consulting work. That duality had evolved from an even earlier iteration: my departure from banking during Covid when I first began splitting myself between finance and fighting. But what started as liberation—an escape from the trading floor's artificial certainties, from the chorus of Bloomberg terminals and morning calls filled with market predictions—had begun to crack under its own ambition, each role demanding more than I could sustainably give.

In seeking simplicity, I found my way to this minimal setup: cross-legged on a barstool, watching markets move across my screen. The constraints of this pared-down approach revealed something unexpected—how limitation itself can breed insight. The markets pulse with implied volatility, each breath measured against the steady scroll of data. This deliberate simplicity offers a truth that escaped me in those fractured days of trying to contain multitudes.

This lesson in simplicity extends beyond my trading setup. Three mornings each week, I step into the Damansara gym's embrace of humid air and whirring fans. During these one-on-one sessions, my coach and I work through combinations while ceiling fans conduct their lazy orchestra overhead. The philosophy of trading and boxing has always struck me—the way both disciplines dance between aggression and patience, risk and technique. Here, between the sharp report of gloves on pads, these parallels deepen with each session. Each missed punch illuminates the virtue of patience; every landed combination speaks to timing's subtle art. These lessons echo in my daily dance with the markets, each discipline informing the other in an endless feedback loop.

The memory of my first real fight still visits me, both in training and trading. It unfolded on a Johor Bahru rooftop, the makeshift cage assembled on concrete that held the day's lingering heat. Despite months of preparation, despite every combination drilled into muscle memory, something essential slipped away when the bell rang. My punches arrived a heartbeat too late; my defenses opened a fraction too wide. It wasn't fear that undid me but a peculiar paralysis born from excessive preparation, from wanting too precisely. My opponent won not through superior strength or speed but because I couldn't bridge the gap between preparation and presence.

That first defeat became a lens through which I began to see both disciplines differently. Markets, like opponents, move with sovereign indifference to our plans. Sometimes, a setup appears immaculate—price coiled at support, volume surging, indicators aligned like stars—yet something holds me back. Other times, I enter without hesitation, only to watch positions move against me with mechanical precision. Between these extremes lies the narrow path where action flows not from certainty but from presence.

With each trade and training session, I noticed how expertise itself can become a barrier to action. Each additional layer of analysis offered another reason to hesitate, and each new technique was another way to doubt. The market, like any skilled opponent, doesn't just exploit technical flaws—it feeds on these moments of overthinking, these tiny gaps between knowing and doing. I watched my trading sessions replay like fight footage: the missed entries like pulled punches, the delayed exits like dropped guards.

This recognition drew me to study professional fighters with new eyes, watching their footage between trading sessions. What struck me wasn't their speed or power but their efficiency—the economy of movement that approached stillness. These masters waste nothing: no excessive motion, no dispersed energy, no unnecessary tension. Their exchanges reveal what I'm still learning: that mastery manifests not in dramatic moments but in sustained presence—in every breath, every weight shift, every minute adjustment to changing conditions.

Over time, I found myself surrendering to the structure of both disciplines. My trading platform enforces strict position limits, just as my hands return to guard position after every punch—both ingrained through endless repetition. These boundaries, rather than confining me, create space for a deeper kind of freedom. Within their limits, each decision becomes an exercise not in prediction but in response—a dialogue with what is rather than what might be.

When I lost half my hearing last year, the world shifted overnight. Basic movements became treacherous as my balance faltered and familiar sounds twisted into alien frequencies. Recovery demanded a fundamental reimagining of how I moved through space. Each day brought new adaptations—learning to read intention in subtle shifts of posture, orienting myself through visual cues, and navigating a suddenly foreign landscape with new awareness. Like the position limits in trading or the guard position in boxing, this new constraint forced another kind of surrender, another path to presence.

This altered perception offered unexpected gifts. In the ring, heightened visual attention sharpened my ability to read opponents—catching the slight shoulder drop before a hook, the weight transfer that telegraphs intention. This same focused awareness now infuses my trading, revealing the deeper rhythms beneath technical indicators, the subtle patterns emerging in the spaces between price movements.

Beyond my window, city lights blur into the approaching market open. I move through my pre-session checklist with the same deliberate attention given to wrapping hands before training. Check posture. Release tension. Notice breath. Soon, prices will begin their daily dance, bringing familiar temptations—forcing trades that aren't there, abandoning plans in progress, and chasing certainty in a probabilistic world.

But here, in this liminal space between night and morning, between preparation and action, I practice waiting without anticipation, readiness without rigidity. This, perhaps, is what both disciplines have been teaching all along: that mastery lives not in technical perfection or accumulated knowledge but in the quality of attention we bring to each moment. It exists in these spaces between thrown punches and placed trades, between reading opponents and reading market sentiment, between the fighters and traders we aspire to be and who we are right now – tracking time in minutes, measuring progress in breaths, finding victory in presence itself.