YouTube video by Adrian Reid (Enlightened Stock Trading) describing five key changes that transformed his trading: becoming systematic, controlling risk, diversifying across strategies/markets/timeframes, and automating trading systems. Reid argues these practices reduce stress, preserve capital, enable compounding, and restore life freedom while improving long-term wealth. The video closes with a call to comment and engage.
Chapters
Have you been looking for that one game changing thing to really transform your trading? Well, I hate to tell you, but there's not just one thing that's going to transform your trading, there's several things. My name is Adrian Reid, I'm the founder of Enlightened Stock Trading. But let me tell you what they are. The things that are going to really transform your trading and game changers that are going to make all the difference for your trading journey. The first one is getting systematic, becoming a systematic trader following a set of objective trading rules that you've back tested, you have confidence in and you know will keep you afloat and keep your account growing through bull markets, sideways markets and bear markets. Going systematic is a game changer because it reduces the amount of stress, it reduces the amount of time, it increases consistency, and it gives you a positive edge. Those things are absolutely critical if you want to win long term. The second thing that is going to be a game changer for you in your trading journey is learning how to control and manage your risk. Most traders are so obsessed with making money that they forget about the downside. The way to win as a trader is to think first about the downside, second about how much money you're going to make. This is why if you make 100% this year and you lose 100% next year, you end up with zero. But if you make 50% this year and you lose 20% next year, you're well ahead. So continue. Controlling your downside is far more important than maximizing your upside. Most people think far too much about getting rich and far too little about going out the back door. So managing your risk, keeping your position, size small, keeping your overall exposure and leverage small, is the second game changer that's going to keep you in the game. Because again, trading is about compounding. And if you can't stay in the game, if you blow up your account, you lose that time, you lose that compounding. You've got to start again. And starting again is the absolute worst thing for your long term wealth. You've got to avoid blowing up your account. If there's one thing I did well in my trading journey is I always controlled my risk. I never had huge exposure, huge leverage. And so it didn't matter what happened. I never blew up an account. I had some drawdown, sure, but I never blew up any account, which meant I never had to start my compounding again. And that meant over the long term I was able to build a very big account, make a lot of money, because I was compounding consistently. But as soon as you blow up your account, everything resets. You start again at zero and you've got to grow from the ground up, which is just devastating for your future wealth. So controlling your risk is the third game changer, the fourth game changer that's really going to make all the difference, and it did for me is diversification. Not just diversification as in holding different stocks. I mean, anyone can hold different stocks in a portfolio whoop de do. But diversifying into different strategies, different markets, different time frames so you can make money in a variety of different market conditions is an absolute game changer. It certainly was for me. I've spoken before in other videos about how it took me a long time before I diversified out of long term Australian trend following. I traded a long term Australian trend following strategy for years before I diversified into anything else. And that was a huge mistake. But if you can diversify and make money in different markets using different strategies across different time frames, then all of a sudden your trading becomes much more robust. It doesn't matter what happens in the market, you've got a chance of making money. And incidentally, long and short makes all of the difference. If you're a long only trader, there's going to be times it's really hard to make money. So that's the fourth game changing thing that you need in your trading. What's the fifth one? The fifth and final game changing moment for me really has been automation. Now most people come into trading going, oh yeah, what a trading bot. I'm going to buy this bot, it's going to make me rich. Like that's not what I'm talking about. I would absolutely not automate. Early in your trading journey, there's too many lessons you have to learn about backtesting, risk management and diversification. But at a point in time, once you've started diversifying, you get to the point where you're running too many systems across too many markets and mistakes can start to creep in or it starts to take too much time. That's when automation is the key. That's when automation becomes game changing. Because I was trading multiple strategies and I was placing many, many trades every single day. And every day I had to be at my computer at the same time to place my trades. And when I automated, all of that went away. My trading, I put it on a VPS in the cloud and the automation runs my trading and it generates the signals, it places the trades after doing the position sizing and it gives me a report of what it did each day, that was game changing because before that, you know when, when my family and I went away on holidays, I would have to have Internet all of the time, I'd have to be able to download my data and if there was no data there'd be a panic and I'd have to go find WI fi and I have to carry my laptop everywhere with me. And really the final nail in the coffin was we were, my wife and I went away for our anniversary and we got to the, to the place we're staying is like shit, no WI Fi. And it's, it's a weekday stuff to do my trading. And then we got the weekend away and I had to do my crypto trading. And she's like something's got to change. And I feel like something's got to change because you know there was all of this stress on anniversary weekend because I had to do my bloody trading. And so automation at that point became a non negotiable. So I automated everything and all of a sudden now I can go traveling and just take my phone. I went overseas for a couple of weeks, I only took my phone, didn't take a laptop. I went climb Mount Kilimanjaro with my son in Africa. I didn't take my laptop, there's no reception on the mountain anyway. But I took my phone and I used my phone to access my VPS and check everything was running and that was all fine. That's how automation becomes a game changer. I already had back tested systems I was confident in. I was already diversified. All I needed was automation to pull all the pieces together and to allow me to get all of my life back in freedom and make my trading much more consistent. So there's some game changing moments in my trading journey and if you haven't been through some of those moments, maybe implementing them can help you accelerate your path too. Because one thing I know is that long term success in trading is about compounding. And if you do these things sooner, if you bring, bring that learning curve forward and start compounding more consistently more quickly in the long term, you're going to make a lot more money. Stay in the game, have systems that work, diversify, then automate and you'll find that your trading can do amazing things for your long term wealth. My name is Adrian Reid. This is enlightened stock trading. I hope this has helped you with your trading comment below. Let me know what you think. Which of those game changing moments have you implemented and which ones do you still need to implement, and I'll see you in the next video. Bye for now.
