The Best Way to Develop an Excellent Trading Strategy

THIS IS YOUR GREAT TRADING SYSTEM

“Bruce Lee once said, “I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”

In this example, sticking to one strategy, even if suboptimal, is the man who has practiced one kick many, many times. The trader who strategy hops is the one who has tried almost every kick out there, but mastered none. In order to ensure that our trader is a losing trader, we need to ensure that they never develop any mastery and keep switching from strategy to strategy. We need to constantly dangle a new strategy, indicator, or trading style constantly in front of our trader. Thus, no matter what strategy the trader picks, they will lack the hours necessary to have anything but suboptimal trade execution, poor overall market sense, and a general lack of nuance and understanding.” – Team TradingView 

NOTE
Stick to One Good Trading Strategy and Perfect It
Hopping from one strategy to another never helps, and that is why you see many traders with many years of experience but who aren’t able to make consistent profits from the markets.

A lot of these traders have come across good strategies in the past, but they abandoned the strategies because of a transitory losing streak.

The reason most market speculators do this is because they think there is a better strategy somewhere. But this is a fallacy. It’s why most traders eventually get 100% frustrated and a good number of them end up quitting trading, having the notion that the Holy Grail is beyond their reach.

There is no strategy that is better than what you have used in the past and abandoned because of a losing streak.
How to Identify a Good Strategy
If you came a cross a trading system (whether manual or semi-automated or automated) in the past and it made money for you before running into losses, you have already seen a good system.

Go back to use the system again.

The system made money for you, but you left it because of certain losses. Then why not try to do some research and find out why the system ran into losses and what you can possibly do about that?

The system made money in the past; it would make money again. If you shop for another system, that also would soon run into its losing streak. It’s only a matter of time.

History Repeats Itself – and That’s True of Trading
For you to optimize the trading system which made money in the past but which is currently losing, you need to ask yourself these questions, and also take these actions:

What went wrong? What do you think caused the system to lose money? What market conditions and patterns occurred which make the system lose.

What mistakes did I make? What were the mistakes you made, which turned to losses for you? Did you use high lot sizes? Did you use stop loss? Did you honor your exit plans? You would eventually see that the losses had little to do with the strategy but more to do with you.

What lessons have I learned? Did you learn any lessons? What are the steps you can take to ensure that the mistakes aren’t repeated in future?

If you can’t do this, you’re bound to repeat your mistakes.

I have seen many traders who lose big, fund their accounts, lose again, fund their accounts, and only to lose again, all because of undisciplined psychology. They know the mistakes they made, which resulted in losses for them, and those exact things are what they would do again once they resume trading.

If you can’t find a way to ensure rock-solid discipline for yourself, then what business do you have with trading?
One Strategy That Has Been Perfected
There is one non-directional crypto trading system with extremely huge potential, which I have been testing for years.

The strategy is great and makes cool profits, but it sometimes runs into losing streaks.

The strategy has been tested under different market conditions (I pity those who tests strategies for one week or less and then go live), and I can quickly recognize what the current market condition is and what to do, based on the market condition.

There are stops, the lots sizes are minimal, and I know when to be in the market, and when to stay out of the market, with the strategy.

I have exit plans: When do I take my profits? When do I need to truncate all open trades? When do I need to stop using the strategy for a while and when do I need to return to the market with it? When do I have to be positional and when do I become market-neutral?

I can answer all the questions above perfectly, because the strategy has been tested for years, under different market conditions, and thus, I can trade it with utmost confidence, and the result has always been very nice.

Have you ever done the same for your strategy?

Conclusion
This takes us back to the first and the second paragraphs above. It is better to test a good strategy for as long as possible, under different market conditions, to see its weakness and improve on it, finding a way around it, and also capitalize on the strength of the strategy.

That is far, far better than jumping from one trading system to another, inadvertently missing opportunities to achieve permanent trading success, throwing away the baby out with the bathwater.

A trader who has a very good trading system and has perfected it over a long period of time is destined to make money from those who go from one system to another. That’s good way to make sure that the trader at the other side of your trade is a consistently losing trader. The loss they make is your gain.