Better System Trader

Last week I had to make an emergency trip to the hospital. It highlighted a gap in my trading 'operation' (pardon the pun) so I wanted to share that with you so that you can learn from my mistakes. How will your trading handle an emergency?   Disclaimer: Trading in the financial markets involves a substantial risk of loss and is not suitable for everyone. All content produced by Better System Trad...

Have you ever dreamed of leaving your day job to trade for a living? Or living a life of freedom - travelling the world or hanging around at home, doing whatever you like during the day while you live off your trading profits? When I first started getting into trading I had this grand vision in my mind of leaving my corporate job, travelling the world, living a life of luxury all supported by my t...

" When you have a bad entry, you can always work your way around it, but when you have a bad exit, this is final…  This is when the P&L gets printed." – Laurent Bernut Exits have such a dramatic impact on overall strategy performance, so having a full and proper understanding of the best way to leverage exits is absolutely essential. In this episode, Laurent Bernut from Alpha Secure Capital combin...

I recently received an email asking me where all the trading ideas are. I think every episode provides at least 1 idea of value, but one that stands out in my mind was the chat with Rob Hanna in episode 7 . In that episode he share loads of trading ideas. But he also goes one step further and explains the technique he uses to find new trading ideas... Every. Single. Day. Using this technique we ca...

One of the appeals of automated trading is that it can be automated. You can 'set it and forget it' if you want. However there can be some dangers with doing so. About a year and a half ago I went through a period of being a little bit slack with monitoring my automated strategies and there was one occasion where my 'set it and forget' approach turned into a case of 'forget it and regret it'... .....

Market corrections can be a stressful and challenging time for some traders, but it can also be a time of incredible opportunity. How can we not only protect our trading accounts but also grow our capital even further during market corrections? Our guest for this episode, @Ivanhoff, is author of the book ' Crash: How to Protect and Grow Capital During Corrections ' and in this episode he's going t...

Earlier this week I was on a flight from LAX back to Melbourne. As we were sitting on the plane waiting for our departure I overheard a flight attendant say to a fellow passenger that one of the other planes had been struck by lightning causing delays to other flights. At the time I didn't know if a lightning strike on a plane was a bad thing, it sure sounds like something you don't want to experi...

"Basing your decisions on past data is like driving down the road, looking in the rear-view mirror". For the most part, traders don't know what's going to happen in the future and never will. In the previous podcast episode, Gary Hart explains how considering future probabilities can be beneficial, suggesting traders "base decisions on the probable future instead of the certain past." In this epis...

Our guest for the episode is Gary Hart, the founder of Trendfinder Trading Systems, a company offering mechanical intraday and swing trading strategies in futures. Gary has been trading futures for close to two decades now, becoming a member of the NFA and a registered CTA. He's had a number of trading strategies take the top spots in Futures Truth rankings so we're going to discuss how he builds...

One of the biggest challenges we face as traders is strategies that either fail or experience a reduction in performance over time. There are a number of possible causes for this, one obviously being changes in the market. In podcast Episode 10, Perry Kaufman discussed the change in the markets and how they've become noisier over time, with an increase in erratic movements up and down. This increa...

Last week I finished reading a book called 'Peak – Secrets from the new science of expertise'. I wanted to share a concept from that book with you today because it contains a model that has the potential to: accelerate the learning process and dramatically increase our level of expertise in a short amount of time. What trader wouldn't want that? Most people tend to assume that if they keep working...

Machine learning has seen a huge amount of growth over recent years with the increase in available data and processing power. It's an incredibly powerful toolset for uncovering patterns and relationships in data, however, these tools can be challenging to learn, apply correctly and are also open to abuse. Our guest for the episode, Kris Longmore from Robot Wealth, specializes in Machine Learning,...

One of the main challenges with Mean Reversion trading is when to get into a trade, which can have a huge impact on profit and drawdown levels. How far from the Mean should we wait before considering a trade? PJ Sutherland shares the approach he uses to: Lower drawdowns Reduce the role of luck in trading Produce performance results that more closely resemble backtest results.   Disclaimer: Trading...

"My best losing year ever" and how traders can become better by learning from drawdowns, losses and other trading challenges.   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 per...

With the toolsets we have available to us today it's really quite easy to create a trading strategy by just mining market data. As we've just heard in that opening bit of audio and also from previous podcast guests too, if you try enough combinations you can find something that appears to work purely by chance or by luck. The challenge however is trying to identify something that could be sustaina...

My face-off with a deadly brown snake - what can traders learn?   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 future results.

In the previous podcast episode with Larry Tentarelli , we opened up the opportunity to submit questions for Larry and received quite a few pages. Surprisingly, a large portion of the questions were about exits. Why are exits so hot? I actually asked Larry why he thought exits were such a hot topic and he suggested that perhaps exits are an area that people really struggle with. This got me thinki...

As traders, we can sometimes get tempted into making things more complicated than they need to be. Entries... Exits... Position sizing... Trade management... There are a number of aspects to trading where we get to decide how simple or complicated we really want to make it. Our guest for this episode, Larry Tentarelli, has developed a simple, no nonsense approach to trading and in our chat he shar...

Did you know that Dr Seuss wrote the book "Green Eggs and Ham" on a bet that he couldn't write a book with 50 words or less? That's right, in 1960, the founder of Random House made a $50 bet with Dr. Seuss that he would not be able to write a book using only 50 different words. Well he accepted the challenge… Creating "Green Eggs and Ham"… And that book has sold more than 200 million copies, makin...

One of the most common uses for optimization is to find the best value or best group of values for a trading strategy, but is this approach only giving us part of the picture? Are there other uses for optimization that we can leverage to create better trading strategies? Today we're going to have a quick chat with World Cup Trading Champion Andrea Unger,  the only trader to ever win the competitio...

Our guest for this episode is Art Collins. Art's story is interesting because in his younger days he was an expert card counter in black jack, and he's translated some of those skills into building robust trading strategies from really simple market concepts. Not only is Art a trader but he's published a number of books and magazines articles, he's done lecturing, both online and offline so I'm su...

Let me tell you the story of 2 lumberjacks and how we can become better traders by NOT trading.   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 in...

Let's have a bit of fun today. It's Australia Day, so we're going with an Aussie theme for this Thursday Trading Thought... I'm going to share an email about a lamington and what it can teach us about trading strategies. (Yes, food and trading combined - it's ingenious! Just don't listen to it before bed...)   Happy Australia Day!   Disclaimer: Trading in the financial markets involves a substanti...

Risk Management… It's not as sexy as the latest hot indicator… Or the undiscovered penny stock poised for an explosive move… Or the trading guru who appeared out of nowhere and is now promising to share the "secrets" to making million dollar profits overnight… … But there are a whole host of risks that have the potential to destroy trading accounts in just seconds, so it's an incredibly important...

Today we have a quick chat about technology and in particular Blockchain. Yes, Blockchain has been around for a few years now but we're really seeing more and more of it in the news lately, and there has been a lot of hype about the potential applications of this technology. Some people have even said the Blockchain will have a greater impact on our lives than ANY other technology that exists toda...