This is a YouTube video titled "Unlocking Successful Trading: Where Great System Ideas Come From" featuring a discussion involving Adrian Reid and another speaker. The conversation focuses on how to generate and refine ideas for developing trading systems, emphasizing the importance of having a rationale behind testing and drawing inspiration from charts, books, social media, and personal reflection. The content is a multi-speaker dialogue recorded in August 2025.
When someone is new to developing systems, a common question we get is, where do you get ideas from? How do I know what to test? So, you know, what's your process for coming up with ideas, for documenting them, for refining them, choosing which ones you're going to work on?
Look, I'll start with the please don't do and let's just start throwing things into code and testing because we've all done it. I'm not going to say I haven't, but because you're not trying to throw rules at a market or a period of time and hope that something works right, you have to have a good idea behind why it would work. There has to be a reason something should work. And it comes down to the fundamentals of types of system rotation, trend following, mean reverting sort of behavior. But from that, you know, you've got some very core concepts, but where do you look for those triggers? For me, it's a combination of three things, really. One of them is time looking at charts and thinking about what behavior looks like. The second one is like, Adrian, I've got a hundred books behind me and not just what's in those books, but reading those books will generate an idea or a brainstorm or a light bulb or something go up in my mind and I'll think about that. The third one is, you know, ironically, social media, but sensible social media, find guys that are talking about trading and look at what they're talking about. Never believe what they say, but always verify, test and use some of those ideas. And I guess as a bonus fourth one, you can just think of things while you're riding a bike, going for a walk or, you know, trying to go to sleep. Sometimes they just. I'm always thinking about training, to be honest, and they just pop into your head.
