Adrian Reid's trading system worked on paper but broke him in real trades. A brutal drawdown forced him to rebuild it, accepting lower profits to make it something he could actually stick with. The lesson: a system you can't follow is worthless.
Can you take us back to a moment when you had your most uncomfortable drawdown?
The first one was not so much about the drawdown as what led to the drawdown. I was doing my analysis and I was feeling very uncomfortable about my trading at that point, because I had loss after loss after loss. I was systematic. I had backtested my strategy. I knew it had an edge. But I won't say I was an expert at backtesting system development by any stretch of the imagination. I remember when I flicked it to curiosity, I was like, okay, something's different or something's weird, or I missed something, what was it? And I threw myself into the research at another level. I had the interplay between stop loss, position sizing, and so on in the system. I didn't have set in a way that worked for me, for my psychology. And I had missed the fact that I could fine tune my system to make it easy for me to follow just by adjusting some of the parameters. And yeah, I might sacrifice a bit of theoretical backtesting and profit, but it would be followable. And that was my first real deep dive into I've missed something, what was it? And so finding that was pivotal to my whole journey henceforth, because that was the realization that my systems have to fit me because the system was profitable. It's just that it went through a phase with a lot of losses that I didn't want to cope with.
