Better System Trader is the podcast and blog dedicated to systematic traders, providing practical tips from trading experts around the world.
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…
“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…
Our guest for the episode is Gary Hart, the founder of Trendfinder Trading Systems, a company offering mechanical intra-day 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…
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…
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…
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…
One of the challenges of Mean Reversion trading is deciding when to get into a trade. How far from the mean should we actually wait before we consider getting into a trade? In a trending environment where the dips are shallow, getting in closer to the mean can bring lots of trading opportunities which can…
Today we’re going discuss a point Dr Brett Steenbarger made in episode 25 of the podcast – the process of learning from trading challenges so that we can become better traders. This doesn’t just apply to drawdowns or losses as Brett mentioned but also to other aspects of trading… Strategy development… Trading platforms… Strategies that stop…
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…
I live near a river. Beside the river is a walking track so on a sunny day it’s a popular destination for walkers, runners and people who like to ride a bike. It’s one of my favourite locations to go for a ride when I only have an hour or less to spare. On one…
In the previous podcast episode with Larry Tentarelli, we opened up the opportunity to submit questions for Larry and received quite a few pages of questions. 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…
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,…
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…
One of the most common uses of optimization is to find the “best” 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…
