Better System Trader

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 on something they will automatically get better at it, but performance scientists have shown that is not necessarily what happens. A lot of people reach a certain level of competence and plateau... Others don’t really progress much at all... And often the process can take a long time to play out, progress can be slow... So that leads to the question, is it possible to reduce the amount of time that process takes? Are there techniques that we can use to accelerate the process? Well, there are and today we’re going to talk about one called "deliberate practice". Our special guest, Kris Longmore from Robot Wealth, is

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, Algorithmic Trading and Artificial Intelligence. He is the co-founder and Head of Quantitative Research at Quantify Partners and also provides consulting and educational services through his website Robot Wealth. In this episode Kris is going to share with us some of his insights into Machine Learning and strategy validation, including: How Machine Learning can be used to analyse huge amounts of data, uncover patterns and relationships, and define a trading edge, How Machine Learning tools can be abused and the common mistakes that traders make with Machine Learning, Strategy validation techniques that best suit mar

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 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.

"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 performance is not necessarily indicative of future results.

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 sustainable. Something that may persist long enough in the future for us to take advantage of, and hopefully make some money from. Our guest for this episode, Dave Bergstrom from BuildAlpha, has spent years researching, building, testing, and implementing market making and trading strategies for a high frequency trading firm, CTAs, money managers, individual clients, and even aspiring retail traders. In this episode Dave is going to share some of his insights into strategy development and validation, including: How adjusting the ratio of in-sample/out-of-sample data can lead to creating different types of strategies Varianc

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 thinking about exits more and I recalled an interesting point that Murray Ruggiero made back in episode 42. I think Murray raised a really important concept which most traders may not even consider when they’re looking at exits and specifically how to choose the best type of exit for your strategy, which we’ll get to in just a sec. How do you choose the right exit? Larry was kind enough to share his philosophy behind exits but you may have noticed that he didn’t give exact details about them, which I think was intentional because it’s something that traders really need to figure out for themselves. So then how do you go abo

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 shares the trading insights and approaches he's developed over the past 20 years. In this episode Larry shares: Simple techniques to trading and trade management that turned Larrys trading consistently profitable How traders can overcome the challenges of finding a trading style that suits their personality The “four legs of a table” approach to trading and why it’s so important for trading success Why there is no perfect entry signal and the key aspect of trading you should focus on instead PLUS a bunch of listener questions submitted by you!   Disclaimer: Trading in the financial markets involves a substantial risk o

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, making it one of the best-selling childrens books in history! Think that was a fluke? Dr Seuss found that setting constraints was so powerful he used it with other books as well. His book ‘The Cat in the Hat’ was limited to around 250 different words from a list of 348 words selected from a first graders vocabulary list. That book sold millions of copies too. Dr Seuss is just one example of the power of constraints, showing us that setting limits can often produce better results than “keeping our options open”. Constraints can force us to think better, work better, and come up with more creative solutions. So how can we a

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 competition 3 years in a row. Andrea has a slightly different view on optimization which we touched upon in a previous podcast episode, back in Episode 16. Today we’re going to dig into that a little more and hear Andrea’s thoughts on optimization and how he uses it to get a deeper understanding of the markets.   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 futur

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 sure you’ve seen his name around the place and it’s an honor to have him here on the show today. In this episode Art shares: How to combine simple market concepts to create robust trading strategies The four rules of system development to reduce over-optimization Simple ways to improve the statistical reliability of our strategies What traders can learn from Arts experiences being an expert card counter in black jack   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 purpo

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 indicative of future results.

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 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.

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 topic for serious traders to consider. We have plenty of examples in history that show what happens when Risk Management goes bad, so what can we learn from these and how can we best protect ourselves from catastrophic losses? Our guest for this episode, Robert Carver, is an independent systematic trader, freelance writer and research consultant. He spent years working for one of the world’s largest systematic hedge funds and is the author of “Systematic Trading: A unique new way to make investment and trading decisions.” In this episode, Rob shares with us: The different types of risk we face as traders – including

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 today. How big is that? Much of the hype around Blockchain has been focused on the financial industry, or the potential for Blockchain to fundamentally change the financial services industry. Which got me thinking.. ... How could this impact us in the future, both as traders and as fine, upstanding members of society? :-) Anyway, my own personal knowledge of Blockchain was pretty limited - even though I’d heard of it a number of times I didn’t really have an idea of what it was. But I do remember that Bert Mouler mentioned it episode 64 of the podcast where we were discussing cryptocurrencies. So I asked Bert to come bac

How do we know when it's time to quit working on a trading strategy and move on to something else? Here's a lesson from the TV show Gold Rush.   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.

The guest for this episode is Jack Vogel from Alpha Architect, a quantitative asset management and consulting firm. Jack has published a number of papers on SSRN and also co-authored a couple of books including “Quantitative Momentum: a practitioners guide to building a momentum-based stock selection system”. In our chat with Jack you will hear: Momentum - what is it, what causes it and the different types you need to be aware of How to best apply momentum techniques to a portfolio Why measuring the quality of a trend is so important and how to do it   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.

What can traders learn from airline pilot Captain Sullenberger and his response and actions landing a plane in the Hudson River?   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.

So here it is: The Top 10 Trading Lessons for 2016! I have to admit, creating this list was really fun. Not only because I got to look back and remember all of the great episodes we released and the knowledge that these fantastic guests shared with us, but also because I had the chance to think about the impact these episodes hopefully had on your trading too. This Top 10 List was chosen based on a few factors, including download stats, feedback from listeners and some of my own personal favorites. So although this list is not solely based on analytics, each episode was chosen with the intention to offer powerful trading insights as you move into the new year. So if you missed any of these episodes, make sure you listen to them before we ring in the new year! Also make sure to download the FREE BONUS audio package — This audio contains the biggest trading lessons from each of the guests in this Top 10 list and I compiled them to make sure we all learn from their insights. It’s only short but it’s packed with

As markets become more mature and more efficient, it can be become increasingly difficult to find sustainable edges. Many traders are looking at the same data and using the same techniques, so what are our options here? 2 of the obvious options we have are: Try to find a unique approach to the markets or at least something that isn't so popular, Explore alternative markets where inefficiencies are more prevalent. In this episode, our guest Bert Mouler is going to discuss both options and share his solutions. Bert has been an independent trader for close to a decade and is the President and CIO of Profluent Capital, which uses advanced AI and machine learning technology to produce uncorrelated alpha for their clients. In our chat today, you will learn: Cryptocurrency markets – what to trade, the huge inefficiencies that exist and finding edges in the bitcoin markets The advantages and disadvantages of Machine Learning and tips to use it effectively in trading Feature engineering and the importance of lookin