Adrian Reid discusses how traders constrained by job-related rules can still trade systematically by choosing alternative markets/assets (e.g., Hong Kong, Australia, Canada, ETFs, crypto) or by designing strategies that encode constraints (transaction limits, mandatory hold periods) into the trading rules. He gives concrete examples and anecdotes (a student limited to 15 transactions/month and a 30-day hold; another banned from stock-market-related trading but allowed crypto) to show these approaches can perform well despite restrictions.
Firstly, on the restrictions. There are a lot of people who are restricted by their job about what they can do. Maybe you can't trade stocks, you can't do anything on the stock market. You have to declare every trade you make or you can only make certain number of trades. It's all sorts of crazy restrictions. And I've dealt with clients who have a lot of them.
And there's almost always a way to trade systematically within those restrictions. So for example, let's say you have a job and you're not allowed to trade US Stocks. Okay, well what about stocks in Hong Kong? What about stocks in Australia? What about stocks in Canada? Whatever. Will the job let you do that? What about ETFs? What about crypto? All of those different strategies you can trade systematically.
There's also.
Some restrictions which are about frequency of trading. I had a student who was only allowed to make 15 transactions a month, no more. And every transaction had to be declared and had to go through a compliance process. The immediate impulse is to say, well, I can't trade systematically because I have this restriction. But with that student, what we did was we designed a strategy that there was no way that strategy would ever make more than 15 transactions a month. And he also had the 30 day hold period as well. So we included that as a requirement in the, in the code, the system rules. And we developed a strategy that worked. It actually performed amazingly well. Obviously there was a little bit of a sacrifice because didn't quite have the flexibility of everyone else, but we designed a strategy that fit within those constraints. And so for anyone who's got some sort of constraints, don't lose hope. There's often a way to work within them. Now every now and then there's some blanket constraints. I have another student who's not allowed to trade anything globally to do with the stock market. It's like, wow, really? Do you want to go get a new job? Maybe. But he can trade crypto. So then, you know, we work on, on crypto with him instead. So that's, that's about restrictions.
