Something in between

A weekend with my daughter

Last weekend my daughter and I took a few days off. Shopping. Picking out little restaurants. A piece of Japanese cake for dessert that I’m still thinking about.

While we were out, Aurono sold into a nice run-up. A few hours later, when the price had eased back, it bought the dip. I didn’t notice any of it in the moment. I woke up the next morning, opened the daily digest email over coffee, and saw two clean trade stories waiting for me. Sold high. Bought back lower. Capital back in the strategy. Nothing for me to do.

That’s the test.

What weekends used to look like

A few years ago, the same weekend would have looked very different.

TradingView in one tab. Bitvavo in another. A buy order fires — open the laptop, look at where the next sell should sit. A sell fills — same thing, in reverse. Lunch with my daughter, but really half of me is still on the chart. Did the limit fill? Should I move it? What if it runs away?

Constant small alarms. Constant small decisions. None of them individually big, all of them together exhausting. And the worst part: I wasn’t even getting better results for the distraction. I was just present for the results — present in the wrong way, at the wrong moments, in the wrong room of my own house.

I found out quickly that day trading wasn’t for me

Too stressful. Too time-consuming. And I kept letting emotions overrule my own plan.

I’d write a rule — sell at +5% — feel calm about it, then watch the chart melt up and quietly move the sell to +7%. Just a bit more. Then +10%. Then the trade rolls over and I’m holding bags I had a perfectly good exit from twenty minutes ago. The rule wasn’t wrong. I was wrong, the moment the rule met the market.

That happens to almost everyone who tries to day trade with their own money. Discipline isn’t really a property you have. It’s a property the system has. If the system asks you to be disciplined in the moment, you will eventually fail it. Not because you’re weak — because you’re a person, and the chart is designed to make people do exactly the thing they shouldn’t.

So I stopped. Closed the screens. Stopped reading about TA setups. Decided to try the other end.

But just buying every month didn’t feel right either

The honest version of “stop day trading” is DCA. The first of every month, buy €X of Bitcoin. Set it and forget it. It works. It’s defensible. It’s what I’d still tell most friends to do when they ask.

But two things bothered me.

First, the market doesn’t move at the pace of a monthly calendar. There are weeks where the price gives you a real gift — a 20% drop in four days — and a calendar rule has nothing to say about it. It buys the same €200 on the first whether the price is at €60K or €100K. Fine in theory. In practice, my hand kept hovering over the buy button anyway during real drops, and I was right back in the trap: making a decision in the moment, with emotion in the room.

Second, DCA has no exit. It’s an accumulation machine that doesn’t, on its own, ever ask you to take anything off. The same cycle that runs the chart up runs it back down, and your monthly rule is silent at both ends.

I wrote a longer post about this — DCA is the floor of disciplined investing, not the ceiling. The floor is real, and worth standing on. The gap between the floor and what’s actually possible is where I wanted to live.

What I actually wanted

What I wanted, underneath the technical version, was simple: I wanted to look at graphs less. I wanted to be at lunch with my daughter and actually be at lunch with my daughter. I wanted dinners where I wasn’t sneaking a glance at my phone. I wanted weekends away where the part of my brain that used to live on the chart was free to be somewhere else.

The technical version was downstream of that. I wanted something that:

Didn’t ask me to look at a chart, ever. Not for the buy, not for the sell, not even to “just check.”
Reacted to real movement in the price, not to a calendar.
Was written when I was calm, executed without me, and not negotiable in the moment.
Sold above my cost basis, never below — so a drop couldn’t panic the system into locking in a loss.
Ran on something I owned, not in someone else’s cloud.

That’s not day trading. Day trading is fast decisions, emotional involvement, screen time. This is the opposite — slow decisions, written once, no screen time at all.

It’s also not DCA. DCA only buys, on a clock, ignoring price. This watches price, buys when price drops enough, sells when price rises enough above cost — and otherwise does nothing.

It’s the thing in between. Rule-based execution. And it bought me back the hours, evenings, and weekends I used to spend half-on-the-chart.

The weekend test

What I didn’t fully appreciate until last weekend is what this feels like on the days that matter. Not the average Tuesday. The days you’re supposed to be somewhere else — with a kid, with a partner, on a trip, asleep.

The old setup punished me on exactly those days. The buy order didn’t care I was at a restaurant. The chart didn’t pause because we were ordering dessert. Every signal felt urgent because I was the executor, and I was somewhere I couldn’t be both present and responsive.

The new setup is silent on those days. The rule fires when it fires. The trade story shows up in the morning email, and I read it the way you’d read the news — interested, but not implicated.

Somewhere between a dress shop and a bookstore last weekend, my daughter looked over and asked: “Pap, are you looking at graphs again?”

I wasn’t. I was looking at her. But the fact that the question even exists — that it’s a thing she’s learned to ask, in the half-resigned voice kids use when they’ve watched a parent disappear into a screen one too many times — that’s the part that landed.

That used to be a fair question. For years. At dinners, on weekends, during exactly the moments that should have been hers. And the worst part is that it wasn’t because I was making money on those graph-checks. It was because the system I had asked me to be in the chart, and I obliged.

Last weekend she asked it once, half-joking, and got to hear no. That’s the win. Not a clever trade. The fact that the question is becoming the wrong question.

The honest version

I don’t think rule-based execution is a magic trick. It doesn’t beat the market, and I don’t claim it does. It does one specific thing well: it lets the price-aware version of you — the calm one who wrote the rule — do the trading instead of the chart-aware version of you, the anxious one who’d otherwise be there at 11 PM on a Saturday instead of in the same room as the people who love you.

If you DCA and you’re happy with it, keep DCA-ing. It’s the floor for a reason. If you day trade and it genuinely suits your life — some people love the screen — keep at it.

But if you’ve already found out that day trading isn’t for you, and you’ve also quietly suspected that calendar-only buying isn’t quite enough either, there is in fact something in between. That’s what Aurono is. That’s why it exists.

The point was never to be a better trader. The point was to be there. A Japanese cake, a sleeping phone, and a daughter who got to ask her question and hear the right answer reminded me of that again last weekend.

Try Aurono for free in shadow mode — €99 license unlocks live trading.