I talk a lot about systems and rules, but the people I secretly admire are the naturals, the discretionary traders with uncanny feel. What I admire is that they don’t give a shit about naming “edge” or diagramming it to death; it’s baked into their being. They don’t lecture you on expectancy, out-of-sample data, etc. They don’t need the rules mapped out in front of them to play the game. They don’t talk edge, they are edge. Across most games, the peak is discretionary, the player who feels tempo, space, and risk better than anyone. Put the systematic type beside them and it’s almost comic: one hand clutching instructions, the other a calculator, pausing the flow to verify the rulebook while the naturals score again. Everywhere except trading, that clipboard-and-calculator energy gets exposed. Trading is the outlier: a solid system can haul you into competence and keep you consistent; only at the very top do the true naturals clear a ceiling the models can’t. But discretionary is seductive because the entry barrier is low: no heavy tech, just judgment. The trap is that it’s easy to mistake luck for skill. With systematic trading, the bar to start is higher and the feedback is colder, numbers don’t flatter. If you mapped outcomes, you’d see 95% of discretionary traders fooling themselves at the bottom, systematic traders above them, and a tiny sliver of elite discretionary pros at the very top. Discretionary is easy to enter and brutal to master; systematic is hard to enter but steadier to sustain.