It's a Bull Market, You Know
The simplest advice in trading is also the hardest to follow. And right now, it might be the only advice that matters.
There’s a scene in Reminiscences of a Stock Operator that lives rent-free in my head.
It’s set in a speculation office in the early 1900s. Traders buzzing around, swapping tips, bragging about three-point gains, agonizing over the ones that got away. Standard stuff. But sitting in the corner was an old man named Partridge. The other traders called him Old Turkey behind his back because of the way he walked.
Old Turkey was different. He never asked for tips. Never volunteered advice. Never bragged about his wins. He just sat there, listening to everyone with this calm, fatherly patience. And when someone would come to him all worked up, asking what he thought about a stock or what he should do next, Old Turkey would cock his head to one side, smile, and say the same thing every single time.
“Well, you know, it’s a bull market.”
That was it. That was the whole answer.
One day, a guy named Elmer Harwood rushed over to tell Old Turkey to sell a stock that had already made him seven points. Take the profit, buy it back cheaper on the pullback. Smart, right? Logical. And Old Turkey just shook his head and said something that stuck with Jesse Livermore for the rest of his life. He said: “If I sold that stock now, I’d lose my position. And when you are as old as I am, you’ll know that to lose your position is something nobody can afford.”
He wasn’t being stubborn. He wasn’t being lazy. He was telling everyone in that room the only thing that actually mattered. The big money is not in the daily fluctuations. It’s in the main movement. And the main movement was up.
Most people don’t even notice when the conditions change.
That’s the part that gets me. Right now, as I write this, the market has confirmed a new uptrend. Stocks are ripping. NBIS went from around $75 to over $160 in about two weeks. Leaders are emerging everywhere. And most people I know have no idea.
They’re at work. They’re picking up their kids. They’re scrolling past a CNBC headline about tariffs or interest rates and moving on with their day. Their 401k sits in some target-date fund their company picked for them and they haven’t logged in since they onboarded.
And look, I get it. Life is busy. Nobody expects you to become a full-time trader. But here’s what I wish more people understood: you don’t need to learn everything about the market. You just need to learn when the market is with you and when it isn’t. That one piece of awareness, by itself, would change most people’s financial outcomes permanently.
When I talk to friends and family who aren’t in the market, I keep it dead simple. I tell them about the 200-day moving average. Paul Tudor Jones, one of the greatest macro traders to ever do it, said his metric for everything he looked at was the 200-day moving average of closing prices. His reasoning was straightforward: if a stock or an index is above it, the trend is your friend. If it’s below it, you play defense.
That’s a traffic light. Green means go. Red means stop. You don’t need a Bloomberg terminal to see it. TradingView is free. Pull up the S&P 500. Add the 200-day line. If price is above it, lean in. If it’s below, lean out. That alone puts you ahead of 90% of people who are just guessing.
When the market gives you the signal, you press.
This is the part where Old Turkey’s wisdom really hits. In a bull market, the worst thing you can be is trigger-shy. When the trend is confirmed and leaders are setting up everywhere, that is the time to be aggressive. Not reckless. Aggressive. There’s a difference. Aggressive means you are deploying capital into your best ideas with conviction, following your system, and letting your winners run.
You don’t have to be first. You don’t have to be right on every trade. You just have to be in tune with the strong times and feed them.
And then when the market starts to misbehave, when your leaders start breaking down on volume, when the index slips below those moving averages, you pull back. Incrementally. Methodically. Not in panic, not all at once. You reduce exposure the same way you built it. With discipline.
Here’s where it gets dangerous.
Bull markets feel amazing. And that feeling is the trap.
When everything is working, you start to believe you can’t miss. Every setup looks good. Every breakout seems obvious. You’re seeing names double in two weeks and it feels like the whole market is on easy mode.
But that confidence, if you let it follow you into the next phase, will eat you alive. The habits you build in a raging bull market can become the exact behaviors that destroy you in a choppy or bearish one. Chasing breakouts that fail. Holding through pullbacks that become corrections. Ignoring your stops because “it always comes back.”
It doesn’t always come back.
The discipline is this: trade the market you’re in. Not the one you were in last week. Not the one you want to be in. The one that’s happening right now, today.
When conditions are strong, be Old Turkey. Sit tight. Let the trend do the work. When conditions shift, respect it. Don’t bring your bull market habits to a bear market fight.
This is what I’m here for.
I’m not writing this as someone who has it all figured out. I made mistakes this week. I broke my own rules. I chased a name that wasn’t part of my plan, and I shook out of a trade I should have held because I got impatient. That’s the reality of doing this in real time.
But I keep showing up because I believe in the system. CAN SLIM works. Rules work. And the more people who understand that, the more people who stop treating the market like a casino and start treating it like the wealth-building tool it actually is, the better off we all are.
If you take nothing else from this, take this: pay attention to the trend. Learn what a 200-day moving average looks like. Know when the market is with you. And when it is, don’t be afraid to act.
It’s a bull market, you know.
If this kind of thinking resonates with you, subscribe and follow along. I’m documenting this whole journey, the wins and the losses, in real time. And if you ever want to talk markets, reach out. I could talk about this stuff forever.