Adrian Reid, a systematic trader with 25+ years of experience, says 98-99% of trading ideas fail. But he found a simple filter that boosted one trend strategy by 25%. The real skill is testing relentlessly and discarding bad ideas instead of trusting your gut.
Or one of the things that we discover once you enter the world of systematic trading and back testing your ideas is that sadly, most of our ideas are not very good. Right. I have.
I've spent many thousands of hours backtesting different ideas. And it's, you know, apart from doing my own trading and my own teaching, that's probably the one thing that I've spent the most time on in the last 25 years.
And I would say that 98% of the time, maybe even 99% of the time, the ideas I come up with don't work.
Right. And that's a bit confronting. Like, you thought.
A trend trading strategy, that's wrong 70% of the time. Right. 30% of time was like a little bit confronting. But when you start to test your own ideas, you realize, oh, that's a bad idea. Oh, that's another bad idea. Oh, that's another bad idea. Oh my God, all my ideas are bad. Oh, am I ever going to have a good idea? Like, it's very confronting. However.
Every now and then you have an idea that does work.
And when you do, what is that worth.
A fortune? Let me give you one example I came up with again. Like, I've been doing testing for a long time now, but way back at the beginning, I came up with one rule that, you know, I was looking at the charts and I had some sort of emotional reactions to what was happening on the charts. I don't like that stock. Like, that makes me feel nervous. And I came up with a rule to eliminate that stock. And I put it into my system and it made the system better.
It's like, holy crap, that's amazing. And I, you know, I did a lot of testing on it. It's like, that really works. And that one rule, it's like literally to, to code it. I'm not going to tell you what it is you'll discover, you know, as you go through. It doesn't, what, what it is doesn't matter, right. Because it's contextually, you know, important to that one system I was trading. But it's like, you know, about 12 letters it takes on the keyboard to code it. Like, it's ultra simple, less than that even. And it improves the performance of my trend trading strategy by easy 25% uplift in performance.
So over 20 years, how much extra wealth do you think that results in? I mean, it's huge.
But you only get to those things if you'll have the tenacity, if you'll do the work and go, oh, Chuck, out, chuck away the bad ideas, right? And then you come across the good ideas.
But then there's also another key, which is if you start at the beginning and you try and do it all yourself from the very beginning. Craig said you need a team, you know, you need community, whatever. C talked about that. And the reason I brought them on is it's important because if you start at the beginning and you try and find your own good ideas.
And you're just new, how long is it going to take? Like, could take long, right? Could be years. Took me three years to get profitable, right? But now I can give you a strategy that works that I've been trading for over a decade.
And you can, you can test that strategy, you can build confidence in that strategy, you can follow that strategy and you'll get the same results I get.
But you didn't have to find that strategy. You just have to take it from me. So that's the first step is much easier if you don't have to find all your own good ideas from the beginning. But it doesn't mean you have blind faith in me. What it means is you say, oh, there's a strategy. It's from a credible source. I've heard him talk and I've asked him questions and I feel like that might be okay, but let me test it for myself to make sure.
That's why in my, in my trader success system. And I don't just teach you a strategy because I've got no interest in teaching you a strategy. I'll give you a strategy, but my main focus is on teaching you how to test and evaluate those strategies because that's how you build the confidence.
And that's how you start to be able to bring in your own ideas and your own creativity. And that's how when you're reading that, you know, trading websites or reading magazines or whatever, you can see things that other people are doing or publishing and you go, oh, I wonder if that works and you can test it for yourself. Whereas when you don't know how to test properly, you're always wondering, well, can I trust this dude or is this article credible or is that book still relevant? Did the markets change? Like, you got all these questions so you lose confidence, but if you've got the skills for yourself, then it doesn't matter. None of those, none of those things matter. You can always take those ideas and validate them for yourself. It.
