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Trading Systems – Maintain Your Perspective
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Yesterday I received an email: “I have been following yourstrategy CoinCollector for the past two weeks, and it seems thatthe strategy is down by $360. Did your strategy stop working?”
When trading a system you need to maintain a long termperspective. In the past two weeks the system made 14 trades.That’s definitely not enough to judge the performance of asystem.
Trading a system means playing a number’s game: You need toplace at least 40 trades before you can look at the performanceof the system. Most traders only evaluate their performance oncea month and try to have as many profitable months as possible.Hedge Funds evaluate their performances quarterly or yearly. Ifyou look daily at the results of a trading system it will driveyou crazy.
Sure, nobody likes going through a drawdown. But losses are partof our business and you need to deal with them. The famousRichard Dennis once said: “It is totally counterproductive toget wrapped up in the results. You have to maintain yourperspective. Being emotionally deflated would mean lackingconfidence in what I am doing. I avoid that because I havealways felt that it is misleading to focus on short-termresults.”
Many traders focus on short term results and lose theirperspective. That’s why they fail: They experience a loss or abad week and shop around for the next system. And while thetrading system they just abandoned is recovering from thedrawdown, the new trading system might produce first losses, andthey start looking for the next system.
They are like the dog chasing many rabbits: At the end of theday he’s totally exhausted and didn’t catch a single one.
Maintain your perspective!
About the author:
Markus Heitkoetter is a 15 year veteran of the markets and theCEO of Rockwell Trading.
For more free articles and a free eBook “How to make moneywith trading systems” visit http://www.rockwelltrading.com and http://www.free-trading-info.com
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