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I got a question this week that made me realize I’ve never really explained how I organize my trading.
Someone asked why I might consider an income trade on Palantir Technologies (PLTR) while passing on it for my Two Sigma strategy. At first glance, that probably sounds contradictory.
But the answer is actually pretty simple: Everything gets separated into different buckets.
Each bucket has its own rules, objectives, time horizon and reason for existing.
Once you structure things that way, it becomes much easier to hold different views on the same stock without feeling like you’re constantly contradicting yourself.
Honestly, that’s one of the only ways to stay sane in this business.
Different Buckets, Different Jobs
The income bucket is probably the easiest example.
That bucket is designed for short-term premium selling and faster trades. If I’m looking at PLTR there, it’s because implied volatility, premium pricing and probabilities line up for that specific type of setup.
Right now, PLTR actually does look interesting from that perspective because volatility remains elevated enough to make the premium attractive.
But that’s completely different from how I approach the Two Sigma bucket.
With Two Sigma-style trades, I’m generally focused on buying underlying shares and letting a slower mean-reversion process develop over time. It’s more patient, less reactive and not really tied to short-term premium dynamics.
Then there are completely separate structures altogether.
The JD-Silas weekly competition in the Opening Playbook runs on a one-week time horizon and behaves differently from both of those approaches.
My binary and Opening-Bell Arbitrage trades are another category entirely, driven by forecasts I build each morning around the S&P 500 ETF (SPY).
Different buckets. Different goals. Different timelines.
Why Separation Matters
The important part is that these strategies aren’t competing with each other.
They’re designed to respond to different market conditions.
If volatility expands, the income bucket may become more active. If something stretches too far away from its average, the mean-reversion bucket might finally get involved.
If opening forecasts create an Arbitrage setup, then the binary bucket becomes the priority for the day.
Each one exists to solve a different problem.
That’s why I can look at PLTR and say it makes sense for one strategy while completely ignoring it somewhere else. The context changes depending on what the bucket is trying to accomplish.
Without that separation, traders end up mixing time frames, mixing objectives and constantly talking themselves in and out of positions.
That’s usually where the emotional chaos starts.
Why This Keeps Me From Second-Guessing
One of the biggest benefits of the bucket system is psychological.
It gives every strategy room to operate independently without forcing all your trades into one giant opinion about the market.
A lot of traders feel like they always need to have one unified view — bullish, bearish or neutral. But markets don’t really work that cleanly.
Different opportunities exist at different speeds and in different environments.
Once you accept that, it becomes much easier to stop overthinking every position.
So if you ever see me bullish somewhere, cautious somewhere else and completely inactive in another area, that’s intentional.
Different buckets, different games.
Same trader. No contradiction.
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Talk soon,
JD
The Rational Trader
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P.S. I’ll Share Some Historically High Probability Signals on Zoom
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Disclaimer: We develop tools and strategies to the best of our ability, but we can’t guarantee the future. There is always a risk of loss when trading. Past performance is not indicative of future results. In live trades since Nov. 2025, the strategy has won 88.9% of the time, with an average winner of 8.74% and an average return of 3.49%, and an average hold time of 5 days.
