Adrian ReidFounder of Enlightened Stock Trading

How to Scale the Number of Trades in Your System to Suit Your Account Size

1 Sept 2025 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

0:57

Adrian Reid explains how to adjust a trading system's maximum simultaneous trades to suit account size. Key advice: increase the number of concurrent trades for large accounts to spread capital (smaller position sizes reduce slippage), and reduce the number for small accounts so each position is larger (to reduce commission drag). He gives a concrete example of changing a system that normally takes ~30 trades to a version that takes ~15, then re-evaluating the equity curve and capital allocation percentages to determine tradability.

Chapters

So imagine you want to trade a system, but because of the amount of capital you've got at either end of the scale, you need to change the maximum of trades that system would take. Let's say you've got a huge account, then you probably want more trades in the system so that you're spreading the capital allocated to that system more broadly. Smaller position size, less slippage. If you've got a small account, you might want to have less positions so that each position is bigger, so the commission drag is not so much of a problem. So whichever one is relevant for you, you might redesign the system, so you might be thinking, all right, out of the box, it takes 30 odd trades. I might make a new version and increase the position size so that it's taking only, say, 15 trades simultaneously. You make that system as good as you can, then you're going to put that equity curve back into the capital allocation. Fine tune the percentages again and see if it spits out at a level that makes it tradable.