The Hidden Skill Structure for Great Trading, a NZD/JPY Trade, and More

Trade of the Week

In this week’s video we go through a short trade on NZD/JPY.

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Stop Just Following Trading Rules. Do This Instead.

In case you missed it, here’s the video I released earlier this week. I break down the problem most traders face when relying on trading rules, why it happens, how it damages your performance, and how to fix it. There’s also a practical activity you can do today to find clear areas for improvement.

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The Hidden Skill Structure for Great Trading

If you’ve ever felt like trading is harder than almost anything else you’ve tried to learn, it really isn’t surprising. To perform at a high level, you’re actually required to switch between three completely different cognitive roles, each one with its own mode of thinking.

Most people don’t realise this. They treat trading as one blended activity: analyse the charts, spot your entry criteria, execute the trade. But once you recognise the three roles, you gain clarity about how to structure your trading system and the specific skills you need to develop.

Those roles are:

• The Analyst: objectively gathering meaningful information
• The Investigator: interpreting the context and forecasting the future
• The Strategist: planning clear and effective actions

What makes trading uniquely difficult is that, in most other fields, these sorts of roles are performed by different specialists. In intelligence agencies, field analysts, intelligence officers, and operations planners are separate roles. Even in institutional trading, an entire team performs functions that support overall performance.

But as a retail trader, you have to do all of them on your own at a high level.

When you understand this, you’ll start seeing trading for what it actually is… a cognitively demanding set of specialist tasks that most people accidentally oversimplify and try to perform simultaneously. That leads to confusion, premature judgement, emotional decisions, and inappropriate strategies.

Let’s break down the roles.

The Analyst

The Analyst’s job is to objectively gather meaningful information from the market. This includes identifying structural features and characteristics, significant levels, changes in dynamics, and any shifts in market behaviour.

You can think of this as the equivalent of a field intelligence analyst gathering surveillance, signals, and raw information. The goal here is accuracy, not interpretation. To do this well you must be unbiased, meticulous, and willing to see the market as it is, not how you’d like it to be.

This is also where most traders unintentionally sabotage themselves. They let the Investigator or Strategist creep into the analysis phase. They have preconceptions about what they’re seeing, maybe from a bias toward a particular trade idea, or a pattern they hope is forming. As a result, the analysis is actually just evidence collection to justify a decision they already have in mind.

This phase must rely on deferred judgement. You gather the information first before moving on to make any judgements or decisions.

The Investigator

Once the data is collected, the Investigator’s job is to build a full understanding of the context. This is where you interpret the information, connect time horizons, identify the forces driving the market, and map out the potential future outcomes and probabilities.

If you imagine the classic investigation board with red strings linking clues together, that’s essentially what you’re doing. You’re forming a coherent picture of what’s happened, what’s currently unfolding, and what’s likely to happen next.

When gaps or questions emerge, the Investigator can send the Analyst back to gather more information. This might mean analysing a different timeframe, looking into other markets, or figuring out the catalyst behind a particular move. These roles work hand in hand.

This role is equivalent to the intelligence officer, the person responsible for transforming raw data into an accurate, contextual understanding of reality and the possible futures. It involves problem-solving and creativity.

The Investigator is not planning trades, their only goal is clarity. What is happening? Why is it happening? What are the possible outcomes from here, and what are the probabilities?

Most traders blur this stage. They start planning trades before they fully understand the situation. But an investigation only ends when you can confidently explain the current context, the potential future paths, and the logic linking them.

The Strategist

Only once the context is understood does the Strategist step in.

The Strategist uses the Investigator’s understanding to build a coherent action plan. This is where probabilities, context changes, risk, and timing all come together.

Think of this like an operations planner in intelligence, the person who designs a full plan with contingencies, triggers, and adaptive responses based on how the situation might evolve.

A genuine trading strategy isn’t a prediction. It’s a structure designed to handle all possible outcome sequences. It considers what confirms your view, what invalidates it, how the scenario might evolve, where the risk is justified, and how your decisions will adapt if conditions change.

Most traders jump straight into this stage without doing the first two properly, which is why their plans end up being too basic, uncertain, inconsistent, and reactive. The Strategist can only function well when the Analyst and Investigator have done their jobs at a high level.

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Once you see these roles clearly, the difficulty becomes obvious. You’re required to perform neutral observation, contextual reasoning, and probabilistic strategic planning.

These thinking modes conflict with each other. You can’t be neutral and interpretive and strategic at the same time, it leads to cognitive overload and bias. This is why your trading can feel chaotic.

The moment you recognise the three roles, you can structure your thinking deliberately:

• When you’re the Analyst, you don’t judge.
• When you’re the Investigator, you don’t plan.
• When you’re the Strategist, you don’t attempt to fit the information to the trade you want.

This alone removes a huge amount of confusion. You start to see more clearly, understand more deeply, and base your decisions more effectively on logic.