As Wittgenstein observes, language captures our limits and our possibilities. If our language describes people of a certain race or ethnicity as inferior people, we will sustain all sorts of behavioral biases against those people. If we feel a need to trade to make a living and our language construes markets as impossibly noisy, frustration is the inevitable result. The trader who bemoans choppy markets is really conveying the meaning, "I find this market untradable and frustrating".

The problem with such language is that it leads to no possible solution. If I regard a class of people as worthless, I have basically blocked any potential positive interactions. If I view markets as filled with noise, I block any efforts to identify signal.

The traders I see making money are employing language differently to make sense of frequently-changing markets. For example, several traders I know are trading shorter-term strategies and longer-term strategies and adjusting the weighting of those based upon how markets are moving. A good example was yesterday's trade in the ES futures. We had early selling off the weak jobs number, but many sectors of the market displayed buying interest. The advance-decline line was unusually strong, given the decline in the average, and we never hit a selling extreme of -800 or less in the NYSE TICK measure. This was a useful tell that the selling was part of sector rotation, not part of a general bear/risk-off move. Recognizing this made it much easier to take profits on short positions early in the day and not get whipsawed by the afternoon strength