The submerged iceberg of the trading profession (70% of the result is underwater)

Core idea

The visible part of the job — clicking trades, looking at the chart, analyzing RSI, price structure, multi-timeframe logic — is the part with an immediate reward, so everyone does it. But 70% of the real result comes from the submerged part: the trading journal, reviewing trades, writing down emotions by pen and paper, reading, running. The submerged part pays no immediate reward, so almost nobody does it — and that's why most people don't turn a profit.

Details

1. The two parts of the iceberg

2. Why the human brain only does the visible part

The brain tends to carry out actions that are rewarded immediately. Clicking Buy/Sell has instant, clear reward–punishment (profit/loss shows up on screen right away), so it's extremely addictive. Meanwhile reading a book or writing a journal returns nothing that same day.

The metaphor the teacher uses: tell a dog to plant an apple tree so there's fruit to eat next year and it won't do it; but throw it a piece of food right now and it will. It's the same going to work at a company — with KPIs, bonuses, and a paycheck at the end of the month, only then does it get done.

Bottom line: simply clicking Buy/Sell does not make a trader.

3. Write by HAND, not typed

The teacher stresses this very strongly: you must hold a pen and write it in a physical trading notebook, not type on your phone, not type on a keyboard.

• Handwriting = the language of reason, of will — only what has won out in your rational mind can be written down by your hand.
• Sitting glued to the screen, thinking scattered thoughts "this, that" = the language of emotion.
• The practical result: writing it down strips out most of the unclear trades, and decisions become much harder for emotion to slip into.

Content to record: the trade plan, the analysis, the reason for entering, how you felt at that moment, and a review of the trade after it closes.

4. Running and reading

• Running ~5 km/day, consistently: the teacher gives the reason as increasing gray matter in the cortex, raising testosterone — the "hormone of victory," creating a strong mental state and positive emotion. (The scientific basis for these figures comes from the teacher — the source is unclear; verify it before using it in any write-up.)
• Reading: raises your general knowledge, sharpens your analytical ability, gives you a broader view of the financial markets.
• The general mechanism: a healthy body → a solid mind → positive emotion → better trading decisions.

5. Redefining "a trader's job"

Once you've mastered the analytical knowledge, the real job is no longer analyzing or clicking trades (even a child can press a green or red button), it's: keeping a journal, writing out the analysis, writing down emotions, reviewing trades, pen–paper–candle, running, reading.

5b. Two FORMS OF SKILL: the visible part ~30% vs. the submerged part ~70%

Session 24 wraps up the iceberg along the skill axis, not just the habit axis:

• Visible-part skill (~30% of the iceberg) — what anyone taking the course gets taught, and what everyone mistakes for "the whole profession": (1) technical analysis / reading the chart / reading buying–selling pressure & money flow, (2) thinking by stage (lower your expectation and raise caution in a sideways market; charge in and take more in an uptrend), (3) tactics by shape (an uptrend requires waiting for agreement; a sideways market often doesn't wait for agreement), (4) trading psychology. These four exactly match the four pieces in Combining knowledge with tactics — why knowing still isn't enough to stop you losing.
• Submerged-part skill (~70%) — what nobody sees and almost nobody does: a trading journal to check yourself against right/wrong, but giay nen / meditation to control emotion, reviewing mistakes, forcing yourself into discipline. (The teacher did read out a more detailed percentage breakdown for each visible-part item, but the transcript audio is noisy there, so only the overall 30/70 ratio and the point that "most of the real effort lies in the submerged part" are kept.)
• Session 24's metaphor: look at a company's leader, and an outsider only sees the visible-part skills (leadership, strategy, marketing); the submerged part — handling crises, inspiring people, building culture, absorbing stress — is what actually decides whether the company becomes big or not. Trading is exactly the same.
• The key difference: the visible part, once learned, becomes your permanent skill (analyzing a chart only takes 2–10 minutes); but the submerged part never becomes a "fixed skill" — it has to be trained into a habit you redo every single day, and let go of it and you lose control immediately.

5c. Why the journal is the most costly part of the "submerged" set

Every stopped-out trade is tuition paid to the market. Fail to record it → forget by the next day which trade you took and why → that trade stops being a cost and becomes a waste (the teacher's example: a $100k account, a stop-loss of ~1%, and forgetting to extract the lesson means "throwing away 20 million VND — might as well have donated it to charity"). The more detail you record (time, timeframe, price level, reason for entering, SL/TP, outcome), the more impossible it becomes to overtrade — the mere requirement of having to write out a full reason already filters out the reckless trades; the number of trades per day naturally drops from ~10 down to 3–4 and then even fewer.

6. The motivation to sustain it

Because the submerged part pays no immediate reward, the only thing that keeps it going is a clear goal → see SMART goals in trading.

4c. "Running literally creates money" — the session 33 version, plus a TEST

Session 33 restates these two practices in the tightest way and adds a few things session 25 didn't have:

"Running literally creates money. Reading literally accumulates money." — and both are listed as WORK, not a hobby, not a habit.

• Why it has to be an ENDURANCE sport — the teacher answers each sport a student asks about: yoga leans toward flexibility, gym is for keeping muscle and staying young, cycling and swimming are relaxing — none of these four push the heart rate up as much as running does. And what needs training is the heart rate, because heart rate is directly tied to emotion: when the account is close to blowing up, a heart rate of 150–170 is normal; someone with an endurance base can tolerate that level and still think. (The mechanism the teacher cites is "high-intensity heart rate releases dopamine → sharpness, clarity." Note: in one session the teacher cites the testosterone/gray-matter mechanism instead. Two different explanations, both the teacher's own words, neither sourced — the part that's certainly correct and usable is the empirical observation: run consistently and trading psychology clearly improves after ~1 week. If writing this up, use the observation, don't assert the biochemical mechanism.)

• The minimum dose session 33 gives: 20–30 minutes/day, ~4–5 km. Outdoors or on a treadmill, either works — as long as the heart rate goes up. No need to run 21 km or a marathon.

• A progression path through books: 1 book/week → 4 books/month → ~50 books/year; hit that and reward yourself with something big enough to feel genuinely exciting about. This is a replacement for the "promotion ladder" a company would otherwise draw for you (Moving from a day job to full-time trading).

• Read, don't listen: the teacher distinguishes reading (the eyes committing it to memory) from listening to an audiobook, and holds that listening "doesn't have much effect."

** The most valuable TEST of this session — using running to diagnose your KNOWLEDGE:**

Turn off your phone, go run for 30–60 minutes. If during that time you feel restless, unable to bear not looking at the chart — then the problem isn't in your discipline, it's in your KNOWLEDGE.

The reasoning is sharp: when your analysis is good enough and the scenario is already built, you know in advance which hours you have to sit and watch and which hours are guaranteed to have nothing happen ("it just turned down, it can't pull back yet, there's still a few hours left"). Someone who knows what they're waiting for can step away from the screen. Someone restless is someone who doesn't know what they're waiting for — and that's a gap in knowledge, to be patched by reviewing, not by forcing willpower.

One good habit cancels out many bad ones: run and sweat for half an hour and you can't go out drinking after — you'd hate to waste a whole day's effort. This is the cheapest way to break old habits, rather than fighting each one head-on individually.

7. Periodic review — two aspects that must be kept separate

The full process + the quantitative measuring stick have been split out into a separate note: tong ket thang tu phe binh. The section below keeps only the principle.

At a minimum once a month, sit down and self-evaluate, and you have to keep two aspects separate — merging them loses the effect:

1. The training aspect: how did I review this month, how many times did I rewatch the video, was I consistent about journaling, did I hold discipline.
2. The account-practice aspect: was each trade right or not; was a winning trade entered correctly or was it luck; was a stopped-out trade due to the system or due to emotion. All of it must be made clear, not spoken vaguely as "this month had some wins some losses, overall it's fine."

This is also a form of keeping to your rules — the principles and discipline inside the process of working, not a side task.

The procrastination mechanism everyone falls into (the teacher describes it almost word for word as students experience it): lazy tonight, "I can do it tomorrow"; busy tomorrow, "the day after"; that day passes, "next week"; then it slides straight into next month — no month is actually ever sat down and reviewed.

8. Why self-imposed discipline is harder than externally imposed discipline

A sharp comparison the teacher draws:

• Working at a company, a salary of 15–20 million/month: the boss makes you write end-of-week and end-of-month reports, chase KPIs, daily work plans, even write down your thoughts after a team-building event — you do all of it.
• The same exact person, working on their own account, something that could bring in millions of dollars after a few years: told to sit for 15–20 minutes in the evening with a pen and a notebook, they get lazy.

The trading journal is exactly the KPI and work report of this profession. The only difference: discipline imposed by someone else is easy, imposing it on yourself is harder than climbing to heaven.

A way to reverse this view: as an employee, someone else controls your life, so they pay you a meager wage; as your own boss, you take all of the reward and all of the responsibility — the payoff is far larger, so the accompanying work must also be carried by you alone.

9. The order that creates results: vision → goal → discipline

Looking at people in high positions across every field: on raw individual expertise, many of them are far inferior to the very people they employ. The difference lies in three things, in exactly this order:

1. Vision — what do I want my life, assets, income, and family to look like 5 years from now. The vision has to be strong enough to create inspiration in yourself.
2. Goal — break the vision down into pieces. "Make $5 million in 1 year" is hard; spread across 5 years it might turn out to be just 10–15% profit per month.
3. Discipline and persistence — have vision and a goal but lack this, and you'll never get there.

10. The four pieces ARE the visible part — they are the EFFECT

Session 25 ("The Iceberg Principle") is the source session for this note, adding a second axis alongside the skill axis in point 5b:

• The four pieces of a professional trader — knowledge · thinking · tactics · psychology — are exactly the visible part, ~30%. They are the effect of the ~70% mass of work underwater, not the cause.
• Evidence in terms of time: looking at an already-built scenario takes only ~2 minutes, writing a journal entry takes at most ~15 minutes. The whole rest of a day is what actually decides your psychology at the moment you click a trade.
• The psychology here is "quite brutal": knowing what to do and still not being able to do it, as if something inside is pulling the other way. Emotion doesn't manage itself without concrete training — a slogan reading "must have discipline" stuck on the wall has zero value.
• Good knowledge/thinking/tactics with bad psychology still gets you hit: when the submerged mass breaks, the visible part sinks with it (the Titanic hit the part you couldn't see).
• The most valuable illustrative case: a student trading their own account entered even the murky trades; trading their wife's account (under pressure of being scolded) only entered the clean ones — the same mind, two completely different results. Discipline doesn't come from knowledge; it comes from constraint and habit.
• The root rule: new work produces new results. Keep the same old habits and you keep the same old results. The teacher doesn't ask you to believe it right away — only to try it and stick with it.

4b. Running & reading — the detailed version

Task #1 under the iceberg: HEALTH. Logic: a weak/sick/hungover body can't produce good trading emotion. Control your health (easier) to pull your emotion (harder) along with it — not the other way around.

Why RUNNING, not soccer/tennis/martial arts:

1. It directly affects heart rate — and heart rate is tightly tied to emotion.
2. It's a solitary sport: you fight your own laziness and your own fatigue, there's no winning or losing, no ego facing an opponent. This matches the true nature of the trading profession (bon vong tron tien bo).
3. Under stress, the brain's energy gets pulled into breathing → breaking the loop of circular thinking. (The teacher: overthinking your psychology, so put on your shoes and go run ~30 minutes, then check back in with yourself.)

Dosage: the typical target is 3 km or 5 km/day; run outdoors rather than on a machine (the teacher says a treadmill saves ~30% of the effort). Beginners should run slowly to train the muscles before training the heart — if your legs get tired first, keep the pace slow, don't push hard and break the rhythm. A brisk walk isn't enough, you have to run to get the heart rate up. Warm up before running. Gym/muscle-to-fat ratio is a secondary sport, fine to have or not have.

Reading: prioritize trading psychology, then economics/finance, then Buddhist books (Thich Nhat Hanh). Don't read about other technical-analysis systems before you've mastered this one — it will create confusion; reading them later, you'll see for yourself they share the same nature (kien thuc du gio luyen ban linh). Don't read romance novels/horror stories/comics/shallow books. If you don't have the habit yet, 30 minutes/day, or split it 10+10+10 morning–afternoon–evening; the teacher himself sets a minimum of ~2 hours/day. Re-read books you found valuable (~once every 6 months); the goal is understanding and applying, not pages per day. (The teacher mentions an app for saving and resurfacing book notes; the audio is unclear — likely Readwise; check again if you need the exact name.)

Bottom line: if you can't even hold onto the basic discipline of 3 km, don't talk about mastering greed–anger–delusion–conceit–doubt on the chart. Run consistently for a while and you'll usually drop alcohol/cigarettes on your own, because you can't stand the feeling of your energy crashing.

11. A sample daily schedule

• The night before: write down tomorrow's goals & schedule; keep your phone away from the bed.
• ~6am wake up, light movement, drink ~half a liter of warm water.
• One pomodoro (25 minutes) of analysis + journaling at the start of the day.
• ~7–8am gym; a cold shower in the morning (the teacher: it wakes you up more than coffee) — no cold showers after 7pm.
• 9–11am reading / pen–paper–candle / journaling.
• A nap before lunch, max 15–30 minutes. Past 30 minutes during the day, the brain reads it as nighttime sleep → you wake up groggy.
• Don't overeat at lunch/dinner, prioritize plant-based food.
• Afternoon: run according to your training plan (3/5/10 km depending on the day, not a fixed number).
• Before sleep: one pomodoro of reading.

Pomodoro: 25 minutes on one task → 5-minute break; after 4 pomodoros → a 15-minute break. Sitting/lying still for ~30 minutes straight causes metabolism to drop sharply (the teacher cites a figure of ~70–80% — this is the teacher's own claim, or from a book he read, not verified); standing up and moving for 5 minutes reactivates it, which conveniently lines up with the Pomodoro break rhythm.

On relationships: prioritize family and yourself over socializing; every meeting should create value in both directions. If your disciplined schedule gets encroached on, say no, arrange another time. In the early stage, don't show off your goals on social media — discipline inherently goes against the crowd, and showing it off too early makes it easy for others to pull you back down.

Putting it into practice

1. Get a physical trading notebook. For every trade: hand-write the plan before entering, the emotion while holding it, a review after closing.
2. At month's end, review the notebook: a green check for trades that followed the system, a red mark for emotional trades (see Timeframe consistency (the profit-generating strategy)).
3. Fix a set schedule for running and reading — treat them as work that generates money, not a side activity.
4. Draw your own iceberg, stick it beside your desk, and mark how many times this week you actually touched the submerged part.

What the teacher stresses / common traps

• The biggest trap: thinking a trader's job is looking at the chart and clicking trades → the more you click, the more you get swept into the green-red whirlpool.
• The second trap: journaling on a phone/computer for convenience → it loses its effect, because it doesn't engage the rational mind the way handwriting does.
• The teacher admits it plainly: not 100% of students succeed. But every single person who has results, big or small, has and sustains these submerged-part habits.

Related lessons

• SMART goals in trading — the source of motivation for sustaining the submerged part
• Timeframe consistency (the profit-generating strategy) — the journal & trade review are the tools for measuring consistency
• The Psychology Switch — controlling emotion, FOMO during the decision process
• Combining knowledge with tactics — why knowing still isn't enough to stop you losing — the submerged part is exactly the CAUSE; trading results are just the EFFECT
• Combining knowledge with tactics — why knowing still isn't enough to stop you losing — the four visible-part skills are exactly the four pieces: knowledge–thinking–tactics–psychology