Adrian Reid describes his personal transition from discretionary to systematic trading. He emphasizes he always had risk-management rules early on but lacked clear entry/exit rules; his discretionary approach consumed several hours nightly and was ego-driven. Switching to systematic trading reduced his routine to a short, repeatable process (download data, run rules, place trades) that took about 20–30 minutes, improved discipline, and fit his busy travel schedule.
Chapters
I'm a pretty risk averse, adverse person. And at the beginning of my trading, I always started off with risk management rules. So even from the very beginning I was like, okay, only this much risk per trade, every single trade. And so I had some discipline right from the beginning. What I didn't have at the beginning was rules that I followed in terms of what was the entry and what was the exit. And I was probably also a little bit too aggressive on my position size, but not so much that it was risking, you know, that I was at risk of blowing up. So the transition to systematic trading, for me, it was actually a huge breath of fresh air because like you said, people at the beginning of their trading journey, they like to try and outsmart the market, try and predict what's going to happen, try and choose the stock that's going to rocket to the moon. And that's all ego, right? It's all ego driven. And that was taking me a long time. I was spending three, four, five hours a night after work, after my full time job to try and find all my trades and, and look at the charts and analyze and set my entry and exit levels and all of that. It was taking hours. And when I moved to systematic trading, all of a sudden it was taking 20 to 30 minutes. And for me that was like, whoa, this is like, this is heaven. And so I loved it. And it all of a sudden trading just became easy and natural because it became a, you know, almost a button pressing exercise. You download the data, you run the rules, you find the entries, you place that place the trades, close the computer and that's it. So for me that was just perfect because I was super busy, I traveled a lot for work and I needed something simple and easy. So as soon as I found it, it was easy to follow.
