Why I Paused Live Trading (And What 10 Years of Screens Are Teaching Me in the Quiet)
"The last live position I closed was smaller than my morning grocery bill in Ingolstadt. It wasn't dramatic. I just closed it, made coffee, and didn't open a new one that day. Or the next. Or the one after."
People who write about trading usually write during the highs. The winning streak. The clean setup. The month everything clicked. This isn't one of those posts. This is the other kind. The quieter kind that almost nobody writes about, because it doesn't sell anything.
I stopped taking live trades sometime in late 2025. Not "took a week off." Not "traded smaller." I stopped clicking buy and sell. Ten years after opening my first Kiwoom Securities account in Seoul in 2016, and about five years after opening my Upbit account for crypto, I did something I hadn't done since college: I let the market run without me.
This post is the honest reason why, what I'm doing in the silence, and what the last few months have quietly been teaching me. If you're one to three years in and you've been wondering whether stepping back is allowed, this is for you.
🔼 My workspace in Ingolstadt — dual-screen setup where I watch charts, write, and don't take trades. The laptop is where the Pine Script utilities and this blog get written; the monitor is where I observe.
📋 What's in this post
- What "paused" doesn't mean
- Reason 1: The day job got heavier
- Reason 2: Life outside the screen changed
- Reason 3: I was honest with myself about my numbers
- What I'm doing instead of trading
- What the quiet is teaching me
- When (and how) I might come back
- For anyone else thinking about pausing
What "Paused" Doesn't Mean
Before I write another word, let me clear up what this isn't.
I haven't quit. I didn't blow up an account, at least not this time (I did, once, on options in 2019, but that's a different post for another Sunday). I'm not disillusioned with markets. I'm not sold on some new philosophy about "trading being a scam." Markets still fascinate me. I still open TradingView most mornings before I open my work laptop.
What I am doing is something almost nobody in the trading corner of the internet talks about, because it's boring and doesn't generate engagement. I'm deliberately in what I've started calling a documentation phase. I read old trade logs. I write things like this. I refine frameworks (the 5-Layer one from last week is a good example). I do not open positions.
If it helps, think of it less as "quitting the gym" and more as "an engineer stopping a broken CI pipeline to actually read the logs." The pipeline was still running, kind of. It just wasn't producing anything worth shipping.
Reason 1: The Day Job Got Heavier
I've been a software engineer for over 15 years now. Most of my career has been in embedded systems, split between automotive and, more recently, defense. If you've never worked in those industries, the short version is: the compliance and safety requirements are, um, non-trivial. There are review cycles. There are traceability requirements. There are days that eat your brain and leave nothing left for a chart at 9 p.m.
In 2022 I moved from Seoul to Ingolstadt, which is where I still live. The move was mostly a good decision. The job that came with it is more demanding than what I was doing before, in ways I hadn't fully expected. Not harder in raw hours, but heavier in the amount of context you have to carry around in your head at any given time.
Here's the thing about discretionary trading, especially intraday. It doesn't just want your time. It wants your focus. It wants the same part of your brain that you've been using to debug a memory leak or trace a signal path all day. When I was younger, I could switch modes. Now, at least on weekdays, I mostly can't.
I could have kept trading anyway. Plenty of people do. I know what that looked like for me, though, because I did it for about a year before pausing. It looked like tired 8 p.m. decisions I wouldn't have made at 8 a.m. It looked like a slow drift toward setups I wouldn't have taken with a clear head. Not disasters. Just quiet leaks.
The honest sentence I wasn't willing to say for a long time: at my current life stage, I can either work at a level I'm proud of and pause trading, or trade at a level I'm proud of and pause my career. I can't do both well right now.
Reason 2: Life Outside the Screen Changed
The other reason is quieter, and honestly a little harder to write about, because it involves people who didn't sign up to be on a blog.
Moving countries is more disruptive than the Instagram version suggests. There's the visible stuff. Paperwork. Language. A different tax system. A grocery store where you can't find the specific gochujang brand your mother recommended. Then there's the invisible stuff. Building a new social circle. Figuring out where "home" now is when both Seoul and Ingolstadt feel partially true. Being far from parents who are getting older, at a distance you didn't have to think about when you lived a subway ride away.
Trading, for me, used to fit into a life that had more empty hours. Weekend afternoons. Late evenings when everyone was asleep. In 2018 or 2019, if I lost a chunk of a Sunday to a chart, nobody noticed. That's not the shape of my week anymore, and pretending it is only creates resentment somewhere in the system.
I'm not going to pretend I balanced this well while I was still trading. I didn't. My last year of live trading probably cost me more Saturday mornings than it should have. Pausing wasn't just about numbers. It was about acknowledging that some part of the ledger doesn't show up in the P&L.
Reason 3: I Was Honest with Myself About My Numbers
This one stings a little, so I'll keep it short.
Somewhere around the middle of 2025, I sat down and actually audited two years of my logged trades. Not the highlight reel. Not the tweets I never sent because most of my trades weren't tweet-worthy. The actual, boring log of every position I'd opened.
The numbers were... okay. Not disaster. Not glory. Roughly break-even after commissions and slippage, with a few outlier months in either direction obscuring how flat the middle was. The kind of results where you can convince yourself, quarter by quarter, that you're "almost there," and where being honest requires you to zoom out to at least 18 months to see the truth.
Here's what actually pushed me to pause: when I ran the same trades through my 5-Layer framework retroactively, the trades that satisfied all five layers had a materially better win rate and expectancy than the ones that satisfied four or fewer. The full-confirmation trades were maybe a third of my total volume. Meaning two out of three of my live trades were, by my own newly-tightened standards, trades I probably shouldn't have taken.
You can respond to that in two ways. One: keep trading and try to be more disciplined next time. Two: pause, write down the framework carefully, and don't start clicking again until you have proof, out of sample, that you can actually filter this way. I went with the second one. Whether it was the right call I'll probably only know a year from now, but the alternative was continuing to bleed slowly, in a way I could describe but not quite fix while I was still in the trade.
What I'm Doing Instead of Trading
People assume a pause means idle. It doesn't. At least not the way I've set it up. Here's roughly what a normal week looks like right now:
- Reviewing old trades. I go through my logged trades in batches, one week at a time, and try to categorize each one by which layer(s) were actually confirmed at the moment of entry. It's the least glamorous part of trading and probably the most educational.
- Writing. This blog. The 5-Layer Framework post from last week. Notes for future posts. Writing forces me to make my thinking explicit, which is where I find most of my sloppiness.
- Reading. I've been re-reading Anna Coulling on volume, and slowly working through anything CME Group publishes on institutional order flow. I've stopped reading trader Twitter and I don't miss it.
- Building tools. I've started coding small Pine Script utilities for TradingView (open-sourced on GitHub as pine-script-strategies). Nothing revolutionary. Mostly checklists and alerts.
- Observing without acting. This is the hardest one. I still open TradingView most mornings. I still form a bias. I just don't take the trade. It's a strange kind of discipline that I underestimated before I tried it.
🔼 Current TradingView watchlist — 21 symbols across US indices (Dow, S&P, VIX), MNQ Nasdaq futures across contracts, crypto (BTC, ETH), Korean KOSDAQ, DAX, and commodities. Observation only, no open positions.
What the Quiet Is Teaching Me
Some of these are things I'd sort of known intellectually for years and only started to actually believe when I stopped trading and had time to feel them properly.
Most of what feels like "skill" while you're active is actually just adrenaline. When you're not clicking, the market looks weirdly slow. You realize how much of your emotional intensity was self-generated, not market-generated. That's a humbling adjustment.
The frameworks you write down are much stricter than the frameworks you carry in your head. Every time I've tried to put a "rule" from my trading into a document, I've discovered it had fifteen hidden exceptions I'd been silently allowing. Writing them down forces the exceptions into daylight, and most of them don't survive the daylight.
Most trades don't matter, and the ones that do are obvious. Watching without trading, day after day, I've started to see a small number of setups that are obviously good, buried in a huge sea of setups that are obviously ambiguous. Discipline isn't about grinding through the ambiguous ones better. It's about ignoring them entirely and waiting for the obvious ones. Simple. Not easy.
The person you are when you're not trading is closer to the person you actually are. If a pause makes you anxious in a way that has nothing to do with money, that's information. If a pause makes you calmer, that's information too. Neither one is wrong. Both are worth paying attention to.
Boredom is where the real edge probably lives. Every good trader I've ever read about, in interviews or books, eventually says some version of "most of my day is boring, and that's the point." I used to think they were being modest. Now I think they were being technically precise.
When (and How) I Might Come Back
I don't have a date. I have conditions. Some of them concrete, some fuzzier.
The concrete ones:
- The 5-Layer Framework has to hold up on paper for at least six months of forward observation, not just backtesting on trades I already remember.
- I need to have documented, in writing, what each layer means for each of the specific markets I trade (MNQ, KOSPI large caps, BTC/ETH). Not vibes. Written definitions.
- My day job workload has to be at a level where I can commit to a specific window (probably early morning CET, before work) rather than sneaking trades in whenever.
- I want to be able to say, out loud, why this trade meets all five layers, in one sentence. If I can't, I'm not ready.
The fuzzier ones:
- I want the feeling of "trading" to be closer to the feeling of "engineering" than to the feeling of "gambling with a story." Right now I can only sometimes tell the difference in myself. That's not good enough.
- I want at least one long stretch of watching the market do something dramatic without feeling like I have to participate. To confirm the reflex has actually been rewired, not just suppressed.
- I want the pause to have earned me something I can point at, not just a break I'm about to end because I got restless.
Realistically, that's probably some months from now, not weeks. It might be a year. I've stopped setting timelines because setting timelines was part of what got me in trouble.
For Anyone Else Thinking About Pausing
A few things I wish someone had told me before I did this.
You're not going to lose "the feel." That was my biggest fear. That taking three months off would somehow reset a skill it had taken me years to build. It didn't. If anything, coming back to review old trades after a pause, I could see them more clearly. The muscle isn't as fragile as we tell ourselves.
You will feel guilty for a few weeks and then you won't. The first weeks felt like skipping the gym. After about a month, it felt like reading. Different activity, doesn't require an apology.
Your identity is not "trader," and pretending it is makes the pause harder. This one took me longer to accept than the others. My identity is engineer, husband, son, someone who lives in a specific little apartment in Bavaria. Trading is a thing I do sometimes. Framing it that way made pausing feel less like an amputation.
Write while you're paused. Even if nobody reads it. Especially if nobody reads it. Writing is how you find out what you actually think, as opposed to what you thought you thought.
Don't announce a return date to yourself. The moment you do, you're basically counting down, and you're not really pausing anymore. Pause without a deadline. Let the deadline emerge from the work.
A Boring Ending, on Purpose
There's no dramatic sign-off here, because there wasn't a dramatic beginning. I didn't blow up an account. I didn't have an epiphany on a mountaintop. I just, one Tuesday, closed a small position and then didn't open a new one, and then noticed a few weeks later that I was doing something different with my Sundays.
If you're at a similar edge, one to three years in, tired, sensing that something in your process isn't clicking, I don't have a rule that says you should pause. I just want you to know that it's a legitimate move. Nobody in the trading corner of the internet talks about it much, because you can't monetize "I stopped for a while and thought about it." But it's a real thing that real people do, and sometimes it's the most productive thing you can do.
The next post I write here will be more technical again. Volume, probably. Or maybe a deep dive into OBV. This one just wanted to say the quiet part out loud, in case somebody else needed to hear it.
Thanks for reading, and see you at the next chart.
Related Posts on This Blog
- The 5-Layer Chart Framework I Wish Somebody Had Handed Me in 2016 (previous post in this series)
- The Ultimate Volume Trading Checklist
- Kill Zones Decoded: The Institutional Time Matrix
- CHoCH vs BOS: The Complete Structural Mapping Master Guide
- Multi-Timeframe Top-Down SMC
Notes & Influences
This post is personal reflection rather than research, but a few things did shape my thinking during the pause and are worth flagging honestly, in case they help someone else:
- Jack D. Schwager's Market Wizards interview series, which I re-read during the pause. Almost every trader in those books eventually says some version of "most days I don't trade." I used to skim those parts. Not anymore.
- Brett Steenbarger's writing on trader psychology and the value of process journaling.
- Cal Newport's Deep Work, which isn't a trading book, but which frames why parallel deep-focus commitments (day job + discretionary trading) fight for the same finite resource in your head.
- Countless conversations with other engineers-turned-hobbyist-traders who have privately admitted similar pauses, but rarely wrote about them.
⚠️ Educational Disclaimer
This post is a personal reflection for educational and informational purposes only. It is not investment advice, not financial advice, not trading advice, and not a recommendation to start, continue, or pause any specific trading activity.
Trading involves substantial risk of loss and is not suitable for every investor. My choice to pause is specific to my own situation, and nothing in this post should be read as a general recommendation to do the same. Individual circumstances vary widely.
Always do your own research, consult a qualified financial advisor licensed in your jurisdiction, and make decisions based on your own risk tolerance and life situation. See our full Disclaimer and Privacy Policy.
About the Author
Dongmin Park is a software engineer with over 15 years in embedded systems (automotive and defense industries) and 10+ years of active trading across Korean equities, US options, MNQ futures, and crypto. He started trading on a Kiwoom Securities account in Seoul in 2016 and now lives in Ingolstadt, Germany, after relocating in 2022.
Coder Trader is an ongoing project to document where systematic engineering discipline meets discretionary trading. Say hi on X, look at the code on GitHub, or email hello@codertrader.com.
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