Adrian Reid argues that systematic trading requires significant upfront learning and system development but very little daily effort once implemented — about "10 minutes a day" to execute a single system. He contrasts this with discretionary technical analysis and fundamental analysis, which demand continual effort to find trades. Reid presents systematic trading as a scalable, side-project-friendly skill with long-term benefits.
Chapters
The 10 minutes a day is the execution time. If you're trading a single system. Yeah. So it doesn't take very long to run a single system because all you're doing, downloading the data, running the back test to generate the signals, placing those trades.
So that doesn't take very long. You need to learn this the system, you need to build the confidence in it. You need to be able to do all so that the learning phase will take more than 10 minutes a day. Okay. But the ongoing execution doesn't take very much effort. This is a work upfront, so effort now, easier later situation. The old way, the discretionary technical analysis approach is effort constantly. Because you've always got to do lots of work to find every trade. The fundamental analysis way is effort always because you've got to do the work to find the undervalued stocks, all the stocks that are going to grow. We've got to do that always with systematic trading. We learn how to trade with systems, we build confidence in a system and then we implement the system. The work effort is in the upfront, ongoing is much simpler. So you've got to devote the time now to learn. But you're learning a life changing skill that will work, will help you for decades. This is like a whole new career that doesn't. You can just run on the side if you want. It doesn't take hours and hours. Everyone you know, almost everyone can fit this in on the side.
