Adrian Reid explains how traders should measure results across systems with very different holding periods. He contrasts long-term trend-following positions (sometimes held 12+ months) with short-term and intraday systems (held for days or hours), and emphasizes that measurement and satisfaction depend on trader personality—some value closed trades while he values account growth and following his system.
Chapters
Yeah, look, I, I guess the first thing is what do you measure? And a lot of traders struggle with the pace of trading and how quickly they get feedback. Because some of my holdings in my long term trend following systems, for example, I might hold the same stock for, for 12 months or more. Doesn't happen often, but it does happen. Whereas some of my short term systems I might hold the stock for a day and that's it. And I have some intraday systems as well and they hold maybe for a couple of hours but I don't watch the market for those. It's all, you know, the orders are placed before the open and the, the system just takes care of the, the entry and the exit.
So I think this comes back to the personality thing. Knowing how much action you need, knowing how quickly you need feedback. I don't care if I'm holding a stock for 12 months as long as it's going in the right direction because I view it as money in my account. But like I'm raising my trailing stop all the way and it's building my wealth. So I don't care that I haven't closed it out and banked the ca, the cash. You know, it doesn't, that doesn't bother me because it's just about points on the board and the points on the scoreboard are the liquidation value of the account and I want to see that going up. So some people take their satisfaction from closing a trade. Yes, I got a winner. I take my satisfaction from, I followed my system, my account's growing.
