A short YouTube presentation by Adrian Reid (with a second speaker) arguing that patience—waiting for proper entry and exit signals—is a key advantage for systematic traders. The speakers warn that impulsive trading often destroys returns and advise using idle time for portfolio analysis: identify weak exposures, test hypotheses, and develop or diversify systematic strategies. The video also contains a brief call-to-action to subscribe and like.
Chapters
Have you ever felt impatient waiting for a trading signal and just wanted to trade? This is one of the most destructive emotions and feelings or impulses you can have as a systematic trader. In this video, I'll explain why sometimes.
You just need to stop and wait.
And what you should do instead of trying or forcing a trade or looking for trades to put on.
Stick around and watch this video.
But before we go any further, make sure you hit the subscribe button and give this video a thumbs up so that you get notified of all of my future videos. Because I've got new trading content coming out all the the time and I don't want you to miss a thing.
The temptation as a trader to do something is very high. I'm a trader, I must trade.
But there's something to resist because actually the money is not made by trading, it's made by sitting, by doing nothing.
And that's really important because once you're in a trade, you've got to wait. And it's only by waiting until you get the exit signal that you'll make money. When you're not in a trade, you've got to wait until you get the right entry signal so that you can then make money. But if you start doing something when you don't get an entry signal because you're being, you know, impatient or you just want activity, then you're going to do the wrong things and you'll lose money. We've got to wait. And there's going to be times when your portfolio is really not giving you much action. So what do you do with that time? Because it takes you five minutes a day to run your trading. You've got, you know, all this time allocated. What do you do? Well, you use that for learning and development. Say, okay, in my portfolio, what is the weakest link? What type of market behavior am I most exposed to?
Or what is happening now that is hurting me? That I could develop a system or modify a system to profit from so that I could improve the performance of the portfolio. That's what you put the time into. So doing as a systematic trader, like keeping yourself busy, is not taking trades. It's by thinking about your portfolio and diversifying and adding systems to cover different market behaviors. So that's what you want to be doing with it. So use this to use that time to build confidence in systems. You've got to test hypotheses to satisfy worries that you've got about existing systems or to close gaps in your portfolio with new systems.
