If….

If you had a time machine and could send just one message to your past self, what would it say?

I’ve thought about this more than I probably should.

The obvious answer would be something clever.

Buy Bitcoin.

Buy Amazon.

Buy property in Dubai before everyone else noticed it.

Sell everything before a particular crash.

Some perfectly timed piece of information that would make the younger version of me considerably richer and probably considerably more smug.

But I don’t think that’s what I’d send anymore.

If I could get one message through, I think it would be much more boring.

Start earlier. Stay consistent. Stop interrupting the compounding.

That’s probably it.

And, if I’m being completely truthful, I think part of the reason that message appeals to me now is because I’ve made most of the mistakes contained within it.

I’ve chased things.

I’ve changed direction.

I’ve been too confident at times and too cautious at others.

I’ve looked at markets and thought I needed to do something when, occasionally, doing less would have been the better decision.

I’ve had periods where I was completely convinced that the next trade, the next idea or the next opportunity was the important one.

It usually wasn’t.

What mattered far more was what happened to the capital over years.

That is a surprisingly difficult thing to understand when you’re younger.

A year feels like a very long time.

Ten years feels almost abstract.

You naturally think in terms of individual wins.

The good trade.

The good month.

The great investment.

The property that doubles.

The stock that everyone wishes they had bought.

But eventually you start to see things differently.

You realise that a fairly unremarkable return, repeated again and again, can become much more interesting than the occasional spectacular result.

And you realise something else too.

Compounding is incredibly easy to understand mathematically and surprisingly difficult to live with emotionally.

Because real life doesn’t compound in a neat spreadsheet.

There are bad months.

There are drawdowns.

There are positions that take far longer than you expected.

There are moments when you begin questioning decisions that looked perfectly sensible six months earlier.

There are times when somebody else seems to be making money much faster than you are.

And there is always something new promising a shortcut.

That’s the difficult bit.

The formula is simple.

The behaviour isn’t.

I know that from experience.

There have been plenty of occasions over the years when I’ve felt frustrated by a market, by a position or simply by the fact that progress wasn’t happening quickly enough.

I still feel it.

I don’t think experience makes you immune to those emotions.

Maybe it just teaches you to recognise them a little sooner.

The temptation is always to react.

Push harder.

Increase the risk.

Find another trade.

Change something.

And sometimes changing something is exactly the right thing to do.

But sometimes the most expensive decision you can make is abandoning a perfectly reasonable long-term process because the short term has become uncomfortable.

That lesson has probably influenced Blackwave more than anything else.

When I started trading, I was naturally much more interested in the trades themselves.

Entries.

Exits.

Charts.

Setups.

Being right.

Today I think about it rather differently.

The individual trade is important, obviously.

But it is still only part of the machinery.

What interests me more is what happens to capital over five years, ten years or longer.

Can it survive difficult periods?

Can risk be controlled when markets behave badly?

Can profits remain productive rather than constantly being taken out and spent?

Can the process continue long enough for compounding to actually become meaningful?

That is a much less glamorous way of looking at trading.

I think it is also a much more useful one.

Blackwave itself has now been around long enough for me to look backwards and see periods that felt enormous while I was living through them but which, with the benefit of distance, look much smaller.

Markets that seemed impossible.

Drawdowns that felt painfully slow.

Political shocks.

Covid.

Interest-rate cycles.

Wars.

Currencies doing things that appeared completely irrational at the time.

And somehow the years keep moving.

That is perhaps the biggest thing I would try to explain to my younger self.

Time is going to pass anyway.

Whether you invest or not.

Whether you compound or not.

Whether you are disciplined or not.

Ten years will arrive surprisingly quickly.

And at that point, the difference between having allowed capital to quietly work for a decade and having constantly started again can be enormous.

So I wouldn’t send myself the name of a stock.

I wouldn’t send a currency level.

I wouldn’t send the winning lottery numbers either, although I admit I’d be tempted.

I’d probably just write:

Protect the capital. Keep adding to it. Let time do more of the work.

Maybe I wouldn’t have listened.

That’s another possibility.

But I understand it now.

And perhaps that’s the frustrating thing about compounding.

By the time you fully appreciate its power, the one thing you most wish you could buy is more time.

You can’t.

But you can decide what you do with the next ten years.

Blackwave — Designed to Compound.