Why I Still Trade Every Session
Most people in finance stop being practitioners. I think that is a mistake.
Most people who work in finance eventually stop trading. They move into management, origination, or advisory, and the screen becomes something other people look at on their behalf.
I never stopped, and it has turned out to be one of the more useful decisions I have made.
What I actually do
I trade NQ futures and NDX options every session. I run systematic strategies through TradingView with webhook execution, and I work daily in Tradovate, Rithmic, and NinjaTrader.
Not paper. Not a hobby account someone else manages for me. Live, every session, with my own capital and my own mistakes.
Why it matters in the day job
When I sit down with a trader, a broker, or a prop firm, I am not describing markets from the outside. I use the same platforms they use and I have the same problems they have, including the unglamorous ones about execution and connectivity.
That changes the conversation immediately. There is a particular tone people use with someone who has never done the thing they do. I do not get that tone, and not getting it is worth more than any credential I could put on a business card.
What the screen teaches that a desk does not
Position sizing is the whole game. Most people in finance learn this intellectually and never learn it in the body. Trading teaches it in the body, because the lesson arrives with your own money attached.
Being wrong fast is cheaper than being right slowly. This is true in markets and it is equally true in credit and in a sales pipeline. The expensive outcome is almost never the fast no. It is the slow maybe.
Discipline is a system, not a personality trait. If your process depends on you feeling strong that particular morning, you do not have a process. That belief has shaped how I build a pipeline at least as much as how I trade.
The transfer
Underwriting a business and sizing a position are the same activity wearing different clothes. In both you are asking three questions. What is the realistic downside, how much of it can I survive, and what am I being paid to take it.
The instruments are unrelated. The question is identical, and someone who has answered it under live risk answers it differently than someone who has only modeled it.
Twenty five years in
The screen is still the most honest feedback I get. It does not care about my track record, it is not impressed by anything I did last year, and it settles every single day.
I do not know a better teacher than that, and I am not planning to stop.
Edward M. Liceaga has spent more than 25 years across private credit, specialty finance, and capital markets, with over $100 million funded and more than 1,000 transactions closed internationally. MBA, Derivatives Concentration, Loyola University Chicago. More at edwardliceaga.com.