James Bruce swapped professional rugby for full-time trading and now coaches others. In this Market Framework exclusive, he explains why the hardest part of trading isn’t reading a chart, but managing yourself: your discipline, your risk, and the urge to prove you’re right.
Plenty of people can look at a chart and guess where a market is going. Far fewer can actually make money doing it. James Bruce, a former professional rugby player who now trades full time and coaches other traders at ASFX says the difference has very little to do with prediction and almost everything to do with self-control.
We spoke to him about the mental side of trading: discipline, risk, and following your own plan.
From the Field to the Screen
James Bruce says his years in professional rugby gave him something he only came to value once he started trading. “I think rugby gave me a foundation that I probably didn’t appreciate until I became a trader.” The lessons carried over more than he expected, showing up when you don’t feel like it, preparing properly, taking criticism, and handling defeat. “You have to turn up when you don’t feel like it. You have to prepare properly. You have to take criticism. You have to deal with losing. And most importantly, you have to keep doing the basics when the pressure gets high.”
There is one big difference, though: in sport you have a team around you. Trading you do alone. “Trading can be incredibly lonely. Nobody stops you from taking another trade. Nobody tells you that you’re emotional. Nobody benches you because you’re making bad decisions.” So rugby built the discipline, he says, but screen time taught him how to use it: “Thousands of hours in front of the charts taught me how to actually apply it to markets.”
Being Right Isn’t the Same as Making Money
In his coaching, the biggest mistake Bruce sees is traders assuming a good market view automatically leads to a good trade. “The biggest gap I see is that traders confuse being right about the market with making money from the market.” You can be spot on about where the S&P, Nasdaq, gold or the dollar is heading, he says, and still lose, because entering a trade well is a separate skill.
“Most retail traders destroy good analysis by entering too early, risking too much, moving stops, adding to losing positions or taking five trades around the same idea because they are desperate to be proven right,” he says, adding: “I’ve done all of those things myself.”
The fix was changing the question he asks. Instead of only “Where is the market going?” he now asks: “What would need to happen for me to put money behind this idea?”
Analysis builds the plan; his execution rules decide whether he acts on it at all.
Surviving the Bad Days
Bruce is open about the painful side of trading, including early days when he lost control. The hardest part, he says, wasn’t the money. “The worst part isn’t even the money. It is waking up the next morning knowing that the loss wasn’t because your strategy failed. It was because you failed to follow your own rules.”
Those days forced him to strip everything back to a few simple rules. “Today I want defined risk before I enter. I want a maximum daily loss. I don’t want unlimited attempts at the market. I don’t want to hold onto a losing position just because I want to be right.” In practice that means “a maximum of around three trades in a session, defined risk per trade and a hard limit on what I’m prepared to lose for the day.” But the rule he cares about most isn’t a number: “I don’t want one emotional decision to have the ability to seriously damage my account.”
He is also honest that writing rules down doesn’t mean you always keep them. “Having rules written down doesn’t magically mean you never break them again. I’m still human. I still have sessions where I trade poorly.
The difference now is that I’m much quicker to recognise it.”
James Bruce's Non-Negotiables
| The Rule | What It Means |
|---|---|
| Define Your Risk First | Know exactly what you can lose before you enter a trade. |
| Set a Daily Loss Limit | A hard cap on the day, no unlimited attempts at the market |
| Around Three Tradesa Session | Keep it to a handful of quality trades; don’t force action. |
| Never Add to a Loser | Don’t hold a losing position just to be proven right. |
| Guard Against One Bad Moment | No single emotional decision should be able to seriously damage the account. |
| Review Your Process Daily | Ask “did I trade the way I planned?” not just whether you made money. |
Finding Calm in the Noise
With markets reacting to every rate move and headline, Bruce says clarity comes from removing things, not adding them. “For me, flow comes from removing things rather than adding more things.” Early on, he thought he needed more: “More indicators, more news, more opinions, more screens and more confirmation. Now I want less.”
He keeps his focus to a few essentials: his key levels, his setup, the bigger picture, and simple tools like the opening range, VWAP and how individual stocks are moving against the indices and then he waits. “That waiting is probably one of the hardest skills in trading.”
There is always another headline, he says, and reacting to all of it means you stop trading your own plan. His faith now anchors how he approaches each session. “Before I trade, I want to remind myself that my job isn’t to force money out of the market. My job is to make wise decisions with the opportunities in front of me.” Some mornings, he says, the clearest call is simply: “There isn’t anything here for me yet and that is still a successful decision.”
The South African Edge
Bruce trades global markets from South Africa, and thinks the location is underrated. “I genuinely think South Africa is an underrated place to be a global trader.” The timezone, he says, is practical: “You don’t have to wake up at ridiculous hours to participate in London, and New York still happens during a very manageable part of the day.”
Being outside the US financial bubble can also help you tune out the hype. “We’re trading the same Nasdaq, S&P, gold and FX markets as someone sitting in New York or London, but geographically we’re removed from a lot of the hype surrounding them.” Still, he is quick to add that geography alone won’t make anyone profitable: “Your location won’t make you profitable. The advantage only matters if you use it to build a good routine.”
One Habit to Start Tomorrow
Asked for the single habit a struggling trader should adopt, Bruce doesn’t mention strategy at all. “If I could choose only one, it would be a daily process review. Not just a P&L journal.” At the end of each session, he says, ask honest questions, did you take your setup, risk what you planned, move your stop, overtrade or chase?
Above all: “Did I actually trade the way I said I was going to trade?”
The scoreboard, he argues, can mislead you. “Some of my worst trading days have included profitable trades. And some of my best trading days have been losing days where I followed my plan perfectly.” Stack enough well-executed days, he says, and the results tend to follow, which points to the thing most traders get wrong. “Most traders spend their entire career trying to improve their strategy. Sometimes the strategy isn’t the problem. The person executing it is.”
It is a humbling way to trade, and the reason he still loves it: “Trading has humbled me more times than I can count, but that’s also why I love it. Every day you get another opportunity to come back and do it better.”
