It’s a common metaphor to weed your garden. It can be applied to many areas of life. In trading, it’s often associated with cutting your losers so you can let your flowers (winners) grow. But as I was not metaphorically weeding my garden today, a few things really stood out to me.
The first thing that stood out was how closely the weeds would grow out of the desired plants. As if they knew I was caring for and tending to the others, and they would leech on to the plants trying to suck all the growth out of them. They would bind themselves to the roots, try to become intertwined so you couldn’t pull one without the other, and they would then crowd out the growth of the intended plants. When you weed your garden, you increase the capacity for growth. You get rid of the things that are sucking out energy - in mental energy, time, and capital from what you are trying to accomplish. Options trades you are letting expire showing a loss, companies you’ve lost hope in reminding you of your failures. It’s wonderful to learn from mistakes, but if you are the type of person who will constantly berate yourself for your failures and impede your growth - perhaps those are some weeds that need to get removed. And of course, trades that simply didn’t work out in the given time, to weed them and plant again.
The second thing that stood out was how much planting space I had once I weeded. This was most notable around my beets, where many beets took, but several areas did not - and when the weeds were there, it was too hard for me to see where the potential was to plant more. I discovered room for several more beets and an entire shady spot under the tree for some spinach. In trading, we can often get caught up with either tunnel vision on specific trades, or too many things happening. When we weed our garden, we literally create space for more. Sometimes that can mean more of what is working well, and sometimes that means creating the space for things we hadn’t yet imagined. Perhaps not only our trading account needs weeding, but perhaps our watchlists as well. Perhaps we need to remove tickers or sectors that haven’t been providing any value to us, and create space for new tickers, new trades, and more abundance in the trades that are already serving us.
