Better System Trader

Nick Radge from  TheChartist.com.au  discusses how to achieve consistent equity growth using multiple layers of diversification. For more details about The Empowered Trader monthly newsletter, visit  http://theempoweredtrader.com   Disclaimer: Trading in the financial markets involves a substantial risk of loss and is not suitable for everyone. All content produced by Better System Trader is for i...

Cesar Alvarez from AlvarezQuantTrading.com discusses effective Market Regime techniques to improve strategy performance and reduce risk by only trading in the best market conditions.   Disclaimer: Trading in the financial markets involves a substantial risk of loss and is not suitable for everyone. All content produced by Better System Trader is for informational or educational purposes only and d...

Details about what's next for BST and the special event being hosted this weekend.   Disclaimer: Trading in the financial markets involves a substantial risk of loss and is not suitable for everyone. All content produced by Better System Trader is for informational or educational purposes only and does not constitute trading or investment advice. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of f...

As I'm sure you've realised, I've taken a break from podcasting for the last year or so. I've been focusing on some other trading projects so I haven't released any new episodes for quite a while, but over that time I've received a lot of messages from traders hungry for more podcast episodes. Has Better System Trader finished? Is it coming back? I have some interesting news to share - take a list...

This podcast episode made me think back to the very first computer I bought in my high school days. We're talking about the mid-1980, when computers were still relatively new. Actually, my first computer was a commodore 64 (how good were they!), which my parents bought me, but the first computer I actually bought myself was a pretty serious computer at the time. It cost about 3 or 4 thousand dolla...

In this podcast episode we're going to be talking about something incredibly fundamental to traders. It's something we have to do all the time as traders, and it can have such a huge impact on our trading performance. In fact, it doesn't just impact trading, it can impact ALL aspects of our lives. So, what is it? Any ideas? It's decision making. Now I don't need to explain the importance of decisi...

Glad you could join us today for a discussion on what is probably one of the most popular topics in trading, and that is entries and exits. Traders love talking about entries, but the truth is, when you dig deeper and test them out, you might just discover lots of entry and exits techniques either don't actually work very well at all or don't work as well as expected. So, how do traders know what...

  Our special guest for this episode has done some really interesting work into strategies that manage trading strategies based on their current performance. This can have a huge impact on performance results, but what does it actually mean, how does it work and how can we do it? Well, David Bean from Capstone Trading Systems is joining us to explain exactly that, plus he's going to share a whole...

I just want to start by saying happy new year! I know it was a few weeks back, but I hope you've had a good start to the year and I wish you all the best for 2019. Now I'm really excited to be sharing this episode with you for a number of reasons. I think it's very timely considering this is the time of the year where we make new years resolutions. We reflect on where we are and what we want achie...

With so much focus often on the actual trading strategies or investments, portfolio construction can sometimes become an afterthought… or not even considered. However, as we're going to hear about today, portfolio construction and optimization has the potential for huge increases in wealth... But there are a number of aspects we need to carefully consider if we want to maximise the potential of po...

With recent market stock market actions, talk again is turning to whether this is just another correction. Will the bull market resume or are we in the beginning stages of a bear market? In this episode we have a timely look at the market with Troy Bombardia from investment research firm Fundamental Capital and the website BullMarkets.co. Troy has been working in his family's hedge fund for 10 yea...

Joining us today as special guest is Michael Grech from Quantopolis. Mike is a quantitative trader with a background in signal processing and computer modelling, and in our chat you'll discover a number of interesting topics, including: Trading based on assumptions and building portfolios of diversified strategies, Why every trader should have some kind of volatility strategy in their portfolio an...

A common dream sold to traders, especially when they're starting out,  is the dream of sitting back on the beach sipping cocktails while our trading systems go to work and make us money. While certain aspects of that dream are possible, for example automated trading, traders still need to do a lot of work to get to that point. We've got to research the markets, find trading edges, do testing and r...

In this episode we're going to be talking about the pits. The trading pits may be closed (or most of them are anyway) but there is a lot of history there. There are lots of stories and events that occurred in the pits over the years that we can still learn from today. On this podcast episode we have special guest Damon Pavlatos who has been extensively involved in the commodity and financial futur...

Ever wonder how the 'other side' trades? I suppose it depends what 'trading world' you live in but in this episode we're exploring 2 different worlds - the institutional world AND the private trading world. And joining us to do that is special guest Petra Zacek. Petra started out in the institutional world and in this episode she shares some interesting stories and lessons about her time there. Bu...

Quite often the focus for traders are the technical aspects of trading - indicators, back-testing procedures, robustness checks, statistics, trading platforms, infrastructure etc. All of these aspects can have an impact on trading performance. However, there are other aspects of trading too that often go unrecognised, ignored, and can have a huge impact on our performance no matter how good our st...

" Backtesting trading strategies does not work !" Got your attention? Maybe you agree with this statement. Perhaps you strongly disagree and you're currently heading out to the backyard to grab your pitchfork. Or maybe you're shaking your head thinking ' what the heck swanny, have you finally lost it man ?'. Well, the good news is I haven't lost it (yet). We're going to dive deeper into this state...

As Warren Buffet once said: " the stock market is a manic depressive. " The market can be full of euphoria and greed one moment, and switch to fear and panic the next. This can often be a time of danger and high-risk for some traders, but for other traders it's a time of immense opportunity. How? In this podcast episode we're joined by special guest Larry Connors. Larry has over 30 years in the fi...

In this podcast episode we're going to be talking about strategy design and different ways to look at the markets, and joining us as our special guests is Rikard Nilsson from Autostock. Rikard trades all different styles and markets, and has even built his own trading platform with some interesting features he's going to share with us. Plus he's going to share some interesting ideas on how he look...

A huge part of algorithmic trading is all about stacking the odds in our favour. Finding statistical edges, identifying times when probabilities indicate that market conditions are either favourable for a trade or perhaps unfavourable for a trade. And although probabilities aren't certainties, they can still be an important guides for traders, so joining us as special guest for this episode is Sco...

In this episode we're going to be talking about holey strategies and portfolios. Now, when I say "holey" I'm not talking about religion, divine intervention, holy grails or anything like that, although we could probably apply todays topics to those type of strategies that need divine intervention (and who hasn't had a strategy like that at some point?). No, when I say "holey" I mean something with...

Confidence is a powerful thing – when people have it they can do some pretty amazing things, but on the opposite side, a lack of confidence can be debilitating too, and for traders it can have some similar effects, especially when the performance of a strategy starts to suffer and a trader has money on the line. So, what can we do about this? How can we have more confidence in the strategies that...

Predictive modelling is used in many aspects of our lives today.. in the banking and insurance industries to assess the risks and behaviours of customers… in marketing to anticipate customer purchasing behaviours… in meteorology to forecast the weather… in fact there are too many applications to list here but predictive modelling has the potential to be applied pretty much anywhere, even in the ma...

I think it's pretty safe to say we've had some interesting times in the markets so far this year. There has been an increase in uncertainty, higher volatility and even outside of the markets there have been a number of events that seem to be impacting the markets. Some traders may be seeing the current market environment as riskier than it has been in the recent past, while other traders may be en...

One of the biggest issues we have as systematic and algorithmic traders is that the markets are dynamic and constantly changing, however its quite common to build trading strategies that are static and are designed to take advantage of an optimal set of conditions which don't actually last very long, if at all. This can cause periods of good and poor performance as trading strategies fall in and o...