Adrian Reid argues most trading systems fail and you need to test ideas fast to find the rare winners. He ran a full backtest in 90 minutes and built a system that made him close to seven figures. The key: discard bad systems quickly and iterate until something works.
Questions this video answers
90 minutes ("90 minutes, 90 minutes end to end").
A single trading system made him high six figures, close to seven figures.
Chapters
How many of you have had that experience where you've tried to develop a system and then just falls apart, it doesn't pass and you have to throw it away? Yeah, I need to let you know that's completely normal. Developing systems that work and hold up in the future is hard and you throw away a lot. I, I liken it to trend following. In fact, in trend following, most of your money is made by a very small number of trades, the very big winners. And you have to take a lot of small losses to get to the big winners that make the money. System development is similar. You have to test a lot of ideas that you throw away after a couple of days or a couple of weeks to find the one system that works that will end up making you the money. The trick is to throw them away more quickly. So if you're testing the strategy and you're torturing it for weeks trying to.
Make it work, there's one more filter. Let me try one. I had this great idea. I'll try this one more thing. Let me just do that. Oh no, I'll just optimize it again and I'll add another fill. I'll just try again and again.
You're gonna waste weeks or months and I know because I've done it. So you're not alone. It's completely normal. But the trick is to have a once through process that you can get done more quickly so you can throw away the bad ideas more quickly, so you can test more ideas, so you can find the good ones. That's the trick. So I throw away ideas way more quickly now than I ever used to. In fact, for my mentoring program, I did a live demonstration. The entire backtesting process, end to end. All the optimization, all the brainstorming, all the testing, the filter ideas, all the validation, all the robustness testing, everything. 90 minutes, 90 minutes end to end. If you can do it more quickly, you can test more ideas, then you can get on and find the good ones. So you are going to throw away a lot of ideas and that's okay, that's normal. But most of us don't like to be wrong. We don't, we don't like to waste our time. But think of it as panning for gold. You get the kind of sand and the rocks and you swish it around in your pan with the water and the sand and the rocks and the dirt goes off the edge and if you're lucky, you're left with a couple of specks of gold in the bottom of the pan. Because the gold's heavy and it sinks to the bottom. You've got to sit through a lot of crap to get the thing that's valuable. Same thing with trading system ideas. You've got to be willing to sift through a lot of crap, throw away a lot of ideas, hopefully more quickly so you can get to the good ones that are going to make you a fortune. A good trading system can be worth hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. I've had a single trading system make me very high. Six figures, close to seven figures. One system, one set of rules. And so I. Would you be willing to throw away 20 bad systems or 50 bad systems to get to one that works? I would. Right. That was worthwhile. So the trick is do it more quickly.
