Adrian Reid discusses his search for trading strategies that align with his personality, objectives, and lifestyle. He emphasizes that markets and methods differ, so traders must choose approaches (e.g., trend following vs mean reversion, daily vs intraday) that feel natural and fit time constraints and temperament.
I think finding the strategies is, is tough and, and the problem is. Well, the problem I found was that I read a lot of books with a lot of different strategies and I just couldn't relate to some of them. You know, like some of them just didn't feel natural, they didn't fit my personality.
I read a lot of books from US stock traders because 25 years ago when, or 20 odd years ago when I was really doing a lot of this research, that was where a lot of the books came from. And I was sitting in Australia looking at the Australian stock market and I took some of these techniques. It's like it doesn't work, you know what. And I was, it was very frustrating. So it took me a long time to figure out that A the markets are a little bit different each market and B, I needed a method that fit me because even if the method worked, I felt uncomfortable and unnatural following it sometimes. And so I figured out that it needed to match my personality because I'm a fairly, you know, I don't like a lot of high, you know, fast paced action. I like to make decisions sort of slowly and methodically. I didn't want to trade 20 times a day.
I didn't want to have to be looking at the screen during the day because I had a full time job. So these lifestyle and personality constraints that I had to figure out and my objectives were really about making money, not spending time staring at the market. So it took me a while to zero in on the right strategy to develop a system around. And eventually I found trend following. And again as soon as I found it I was like, oh, that's what I've been looking for, you know, and I developed a trend following system after reading a bunch of books about it and started trading it. It was like, oh, this is easy, you know, it just felt natural. But I know other traders who look at trend following and think, God, that's it's an awful strategy. You got to wait so long to take profits and there's nothing to do. There's no, you know, so few trades. So for some people trend following is great, for other people mean reversion is great or something in between. You know, some people like daily charts, some people like intraday, some people like weekly or monthly. So I had to find where I was really best placed for my personality, my objectives, my lifestyle. And once I'd found that, then it became sort of natural, I guess.
