From Bedside Leisure Reading to the Way of Trading: Why I Use Yin-Yang and Bagua to Create the Yi Dao Trading Method

In the 2024 New Year, I had my gallbladder removed and rested at home for over a month.
The days felt painfully slow, passing time watching Journey to the West on TV, while flipping through old books my dad bought at a street stall—"The Mystical Face Reading," "Divination and Fortune-Telling Classics."
My dad told me that if I understood them, I could get rich😂
I am someone who received nine years of compulsory education, so logically, I should keep a respectful distance from these "superstitions."
But when I was extremely bored, curiosity overtook stereotypes.
I didn’t study deeply, just roughly looked at the table of contents, saw how the Eight Trigrams were combined, how symbols corresponded, just to pass the time, not delving daily, nor taking it seriously.
But there was a paragraph, repeatedly appearing in the introductions of both books, that I remember to this day, roughly:
There exists an all-knowing, all-powerful being in this world, nameless and formless, called gods, immortals, or the Supreme Being, the source of all things.
Before casting a hexagram to ask questions, one must first calm the mind and pray, clearly stating in the heart the person, matter, and background to be asked about; sincerity makes it effective.
Remember: do not speak it out loud, do not tell others, once spoken, it will break or change, and the hexagram will be inaccurate.
The copper coins used should preferably be those that have been burned with incense for three years and touched by human energy, so they can respond.
At the time, I just thought it was mysterious, didn’t think deeply, just saw it as an expression of ancient people's reverence—a ritualistic way to show respect.
Jumping ahead to May 12, 2026, I was in Nanjing for training, and I couldn’t sleep late at night.
Suddenly, those words from the old books popped into my mind—not intentionally recalling, but as if someone gently tapped me.
At that moment, by coincidence, I suddenly understood:
Trading is just asking questions, isn’t it?
The rise and fall of the market, trends starting and ending, opportunities and risks—fundamentally no different from ancient questions about harvest, travel, or blessings and curses—
all are about finding a thread of certainty in chaos and uncertainty.
And Yin-Yang and Bagua are not mystical fortune-telling tools; they are the underlying logic ancient people used to observe heaven and earth, summarize changes, and understand patterns:
• One Yin and one Yang represent the opposition and unity of more and less, rise and fall, strength and weakness;
• The combination of the Eight Trigrams is the interplay of capital, sentiment, cycles, and news;
• The 64 hexagrams represent the complete lifecycle of the market—from initiation, fermentation, climax, to reversal;
• The Five Elements generating and overcoming each other reflect the strength, transformation, and restraint of energy—just like today’s Xin Mao day and Gui Si month, water generating wood, wind and thunder benefiting from double wood in the hexagram, naturally energizing the market and making it rise smoothly.
The so-called “sincerity makes it effective” in trading means respecting the market, focusing on the present, avoiding greed and impatience, and uniting knowledge and action;
The so-called “not to be spoken to others” means trading is a solitary matter, trusting your own logic, not seeking external validation, and not being disturbed by outside noise;
The so-called “incense and coins” mean tools should be pure, methods stable, used repeatedly over the long term, to form an “induction” with the market.
I am not using Bagua to “fortune-tell,” but applying this thousands-of-years-old philosophy of change to understand the market’s Yin and Yang growth and energy flow.
It’s not mystical or superstitious; rather, it’s the most simple and objective: the market is alive, it has life, just like heaven and earth, following the eternal cycle of birth, growth, decline, and renewal.
From the leisure books by the bedside, to the midnight epiphany in Nanjing, to today’s use of the Thunder and Wind Hexagram to analyze the market—
The Yi Dao trading, for me, is not curiosity-driven, not superstition, but a fortunate coincidence—finding the trading language that best suits me and most closely aligns with the market’s essence.
It’s simple, direct, and warm, more in tune with human nature—because from the very beginning, it didn’t treat the market as cold numbers, but as a living being with emotions, cycles, and breath, just like us.
That’s roughly how it is: what we believe in are the summarized laws, what we trust is science.