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 Trader is for informational or educational purposes only and does not constitute trading or investment adv...
May 12, 2017•5 min
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 trading profits. It's a common goal for alot of traders, but getting to that stage can be difficult, ...
May 04, 2017•34 min
" 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 combines his witty sense of humor with his knowledge of exits, to entertain and to also share: How to c...
Apr 30, 2017•35 min
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 can find lots of ideas to test too. Take a listen to this short audio snippet from Rob explaining how ...
Apr 28, 2017•8 min
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'... ... A stop loss order for one of my strategies had been rejected ... I failed to check my trading plat...
Apr 21, 2017•10 min
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 to share with us: Some of the warning signs a correction could be starting and how to protect your ca...
Apr 16, 2017•50 min
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 experience, however it got me thinking about the risks of flying. Now admittedly, it's probably not the be...
Apr 14, 2017•8 min
"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 episode, we explore this idea further by reviewing a dangerous trading assumption and how traders can be...
Apr 07, 2017•6 min
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 trading strategies that do that plus we also cover a lot of other aspects of trading, including: The...
Apr 02, 2017•48 min
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 increase in market noise can have a huge impact on trading strategies and particular trading styles too an...
Mar 31, 2017•8 min
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 i...
Mar 23, 2017•14 min
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 Resea...
Mar 19, 2017•43 min
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 co...
Mar 16, 2017•10 min
"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.
Mar 09, 2017•15 min
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...
Mar 05, 2017•38 min
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.
Mar 02, 2017•5 min
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...
Feb 23, 2017•7 min
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 ...
Feb 19, 2017•48 min
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...
Feb 17, 2017•5 min
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 p...
Feb 10, 2017•14 min
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 th...
Feb 05, 2017•36 min
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.
Feb 02, 2017•9 min
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 in...
Jan 26, 2017•5 min
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 ...
Jan 22, 2017•1 hr 4 min
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, o...
Jan 19, 2017•8 min
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.
Jan 12, 2017•6 min
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...
Jan 08, 2017•41 min
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.
Jan 05, 2017•10 min
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 favorit...
Dec 24, 2016•7 min
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 h...
Dec 11, 2016•45 min
