I’ll admit something. For years I had a quiet theory about the people who are genuinely good at trading money — the ones who buy when everyone else is running for the exits and somehow come out ahead.
My theory was that they were just… wired differently. Maybe a little autistic. Able to stare at a spreadsheet the rest of us find mind-numbing, and — this was the part I fixated on — able to feel nothing while doing it. No fear. No greed. Just cold math while the rest of us sweat.
It’s a comforting theory, honestly. Because if they’re built different, then I’m off the hook. I’m just not one of the special ones.
So I finally went and checked whether it’s true.
It’s not true. And the truth is better news for you.
There is no real evidence that autistic people make better traders. When researchers actually studied it — a 2025 study looked directly at autistic adults and money — they found the opposite of the myth: more caution, less investing, not some hidden superpower. The “autistic trading genius” is a story the internet tells itself, built out of a couple of famous names and a lot of repetition. I’d believed it for years and never once checked it. That’s on me.
Now, one of those famous names is real: Michael Burry, the investor from The Big Short who saw the 2008 crash coming. He does describe himself as being on the spectrum — he recognized it in himself after his son was diagnosed. And there’s a great line, from Michael Lewis’s book, where Burry says only someone with his wiring would sit down and actually read a boring mortgage-bond prospectus that everyone else ignored.
But here’s the part nobody quotes. Burry himself refused to treat it as a gift. He said he was glad he never got to use it as an excuse. He didn’t think his brain made him win. He thought it made him willing to do the tedious, unglamorous work — and then he did the work.
Read that again, because it’s the whole thing: it wasn’t the wiring. It was the willingness.
The real trait isn’t a brain. It’s a skill.
Here’s what the research does show, clearly and repeatedly:
The single biggest thing separating people who do well with money from people who don’t isn’t intelligence, and it isn’t a special brain. It’s whether they can stay factual and calm at the exact moment their gut is screaming at them to do something stupid.
And your gut will scream. That’s not a flaw in you — it’s the deal. The market is the one place in life where your survival instincts betray you. Everywhere else, “run when you’re scared, grab it while you can” keeps you alive. In money, that same instinct makes you sell at the bottom, buy at the top, hold onto a loser hoping it comes back, and dump a winner too early. The researchers have measured it: the people who trade the most, driven by exactly those emotions, lose to the plain, boring market by around six and a half percentage points a year. Every year. That’s the tax on the screaming gut.
I know this one personally. I’ve told you before — I’ve never been dispassionate enough to make excellent money choices in the heat of the moment. My gut screams too.
So here’s the part that’s actually good news
If cold-blooded calm were a gift — something you’re born with or you’re not — then most of us really would be out of luck.
But it isn’t a gift. It’s a system.
The most reliable finding in this whole field is that you don’t have to become an emotionless person to make emotionless decisions. You just have to move the decision outside the screaming moment. You decide the rule when you’re calm, and you let the rule carry you through when you’re not.
That’s not a personality. That’s a checklist. It’s the person who sets up their savings to move automatically on payday so they never have to “feel like” saving. It’s the investor who writes down “I sell if X happens” before X happens, so the decision is already made when their hands are shaking. It’s why, over twenty years, a plain index fund that just sits there quietly beats something like nine out of ten highly-paid professionals who trade on their judgment. The boring rule beats the brilliant gut. Almost every time.
You were never competing with a special brain. You were competing with a habit — and habits can be copied.
Which is exactly what I’m testing right now
This is the whole reason I’m running the experiment some of you are already following: I handed an AI $1,000 of my own real money and let it trade, in public, for a year — with one hard requirement. Every decision has to be written down, with its reasons, before the outcome is known. No acting on a gut feeling. No rewriting the story afterward to look smart.
That written log is the dispassion. It’s the calm-moment rule, put on paper so the screaming moment can’t override it. Watching an AI forced to be factual and disciplined turns out to be the clearest way I’ve ever found to show what that discipline actually looks like — and to prove you don’t need a rare brain to do it. You need a rule and the honesty to follow it.
If you want to watch that play out — every move, the good days and the ugly ones — it lands chapter by chapter in my free daily email.
Follow the experiment free: getoutofdebt.org/subscribe
No pitch, no upsell. Just me finding out the truth out loud so you don’t have to risk your own money finding it.
— Steve
As always: my take is only ever input, never instruction. You’re the one who decides what to do with your own money. I’m just running the experiment out loud so you can see how the calm-decision-on-paper thing actually works.