Don't get treed by a chihuahua

Fifteen hours into a mountain hike during Delta Force selection, seventy pounds on his back, exhausted, Pete Blaber saw a shape in the dark. He thought it was a bear. He ran, hit the edge of a cliff, and jumped rather than face it. He fell about a hundred feet. On the way down, or shortly after, he got a better look. It wasn’t a bear. It was a pig.

The three ways of getting treed

Blaber’s own name for what happened to him, from his book The Mission, the Men, and Me: getting treed. Without enough context, you don’t sit still and wait for more, you fill the gap with a story, then act on the story instead of the situation. He names three symptoms: overreacting, underreacting, and failing to do anything at all. All three come from the same place, a decision made without the context you need to make it.

Context isn’t optional, it’s the actual decision

This isn’t really a story about mountains or the military. It’s a story about what you do under three conditions at once: not enough information, real stakes, and no time to wait for more. Strip any one of those three away and good judgment mostly takes care of itself. Put them together and you don’t slow down to compensate, you speed up, reaching for the fastest story that explains the gap so you can act on something. A doctor triaging in the dark, a manager reacting to one bad number in a meeting, a parent hearing a crash from the next room, they’re all a version of Blaber on that mountain. The shape isn’t the danger. The absence of context is.

Every investor meets this mountain

Investing puts you on that mountain on a schedule. A position drops, a headline breaks, an asset you don’t own doubles in a day, and there’s the shape in the dark again, except now it comes with a countdown, because the market doesn’t wait for anyone to get their bearings. Every investor, on every platform, eventually faces a decision with real money attached and not enough time to actually think it through. The three symptoms show up exactly as Blaber describes them. Panic-selling is jumping off the cliff. Freezing on a real signal, the one time the move is actually worth acting on, is standing still and hoping. Both come from the same gap: a decision made without what you need, at the one moment that decision costs money.

Aurono was taking shape while I was reading this

I read this part of the book that December, right when Aurono’s proof of concept was taking shape on my own laptop. I can’t point to the exact line where one became the other, but somehow Blaber’s instinct about getting treed found its way into Aurono’s principles anyway. I’ve written before about the version of this that shows up as tilt, and about why Aurono won’t let a strategy be changed from the couch, mid-panic. Blaber’s fix for getting treed isn’t more courage in the moment, it’s context gathered before the moment arrives, what he calls developing the situation: “when in doubt, develop the situation.” The catch, for an individual investor, is that the middle of the day, while you’re doing something else entirely, doesn’t leave time to develop anything. Nobody gets an hour to patiently gather context on a falling position while it’s still falling. A rule isn’t a shortcut around judgment, it’s judgment that already happened, made with the context you had at your desk in a calm moment, not the context you have on your phone in that moment, with adrenaline in your system. Two mechanisms in Aurono exist to hand you that hour anyway. A large enough crash triggers a cooldown period, so a falling market can’t be panic-bought into before there’s been real time to evaluate whether a change is actually needed. And the ACB Guard blocks the other direction of the same panic: it won’t sell below your average cost basis, so a bad afternoon can’t turn into a realized loss just because watching the number felt unbearable. Neither one thinks for you. Both just make sure the moment doesn’t get to decide before you do. Aurono’s rules exist so that when the shape appears in the dark, there’s already an answer for what it is, decided back when you could actually tell a bear from a pig.

Blaber had to jump off a cliff to learn this. Reading about it is a lot cheaper.

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