Better System Trader

Trader, author and performance coach Dr Brett Steenbarger discusses how traders can get an edge by applying innovation to their trading, including: The 2 levels of improvements traders can make, Why traders resist innovation and how to address hesitation to change, How to innovate by looking at what we do well, Why NOT trading can be an innovation for traders, Impacts of lifestyle and mindset on innovation, Why you should “limit your search” when looking for edges, The 2 qualities most shared amongst successful traders Plus, odds and backtesting market patterns, skill vs luck, testing in relevant market regimes, what successful traders focus on and much more!

Quant trader Ernie Chan from PredictNow.ai joins us to discuss how to predict the profitability of trades using machine learning, including: Unconditional probability and the problem with win% in backtest reports, Why “conditional probability” is much more useful for a trader and how to apply conditional probabilities to capital allocation, Why you should use Machine Learning for risk management and capital allocation only (and not for building trading strategies), Why feature selection and feature importance ranking are so valuable, Plus, the best ML techniques for prediction, how simple should trading strategies be, insights from cluster-based feature selection, do these techniques really work, ML as a crystal ball and much more!

Richard Metzger from Quantsys.net joins us to discuss how to combine algos using state-based market design techniques for more consistent trading performance, including: Why it's important to be sceptical of your algos, The main causes of poor algo performance and how state-based market design can address these issues, How to define market states into "buckets" and why you should keep them simple, Combining state-based algos to create a system, plus Adjusting inputs for market states, combining strategies in Tradestation, market states vs regime filters, and much more!

Mandi Pour Rafsendjani from High Performance Trading joins us to discuss tips and techniques to perform like a world champion, even under times of stress and uncertainty, including: The 2 types of fears that lead to stress in trading, Self-image and accelerating trading performance, The 3 different areas to look at when dealing with stress, "Protective Pessimism" and positive vs negative thinking, The "3M's" to check when a strategy stops working, The "Queens Gambit" strategy to performance improvement, plus How to recover from larger drawdowns, overtrading, Wim Hof and yoga, self-talk, mindset and why the market is like an “all you can eat” buffet you can keep going back to – yum!

David Bean from Capstone Trading Systems joins us to share tips and techniques to manage multiple trading strategies, including: When to start trading a strategy live (the answer may not be what you think!), Why you should learn to love “ugly equity curves”, Watching the markets for trading ideas, Identifying patterns and cycles in portfolio drawdown, Why you should consider correlation based on methodology instead of typical correlation measurements, plus Patterns vs optimization, single idea strategies, market truths, retesting failed patterns, low frequency trading strategies and much more.  

Adam Grimes from Talon Advisors discusses why trading can be so challenging and what to do about it, including: Why it can be so hard to learn from the markets, The dangers of doing stupid things in the markets that generate a good outcome, Random price movements and finding more predictable moments, Why having success outside of the markets doesn’t guarantee you’ll be a good trader, Trading psychology and interacting with randomness, Adapting to uncertainty and mispricing risk, Deliberate practise, Algo vs discretionary trading, when to stop trading a system, new events, out of sample date, how far to backtest and forward test before going live and much more.

Algorithmic trader Kevin Davey discusses the sneaky tactics trading scammers use to trick people and how you can spot a fraud and protect yourself, including: How to check if testimonials are real, Some simple ways to tell if a trader really is trading live as they claim, How to spot fake trading strategies, Trading gurus who report unrealistic returns and flaunt fake wealth, Websites you can use to check if trading educators are scammers, Why teach if you can trade, Fake trendlines and cherry-picked examples for books, Plus, Paypal refunds, money back guarantees, audited trading records, realistic rates of return, reputable trading educators, the old hedge fund trader/caravan park scam, and much more.  

World Cup Trading Championship runner-up Scott Welsh joins us to discuss how "breaking the rules" and doing the opposite of "traditional" trading approaches can lead to higher returns, including: "Burning the ships" and how limiting beliefs are hurting traders, Why traders should "start from the end" and work backwards, Why it's good to see losing in your trading, The 80/20 rule and why "getting the star" beats diversification, How to achieve real-life trading that’s better than the backtest, Selection bias - is it really so bad? Why you should say “screw you” to people who tell you that you can’t do it, Plus, doing the opposite to conventional trading wisdom, breaking the rules with indicators, strategies that never break, trading platforms, beating buy and hold, small profit targets, and much more.

Numerical Computing specialist and author Timothy Masters joins us (in his only ever interview) to discuss trading strategy development and validation techniques, including: Why trading strategies fall apart in live trading, How luck impacts trading strategy results and the impact of selecting the 'best' trading system, Why trades in an out of sample dataset are NOT representative of future trades, 3 ways to use Monte Carlo Permutation tests in trading strategy development to avoid overfitting, evaluate strategy robustness and assess the quality of your strategy development process, The danger of using out of sample trades to compute the probability of drawdowns, Entropy and information of indicators and why it's important to strategy development, How stationarity really impacts trading strategies and what strategy developers can do about it, Using Walk Forward to determine how robust a strategy is in the market, Incomplete Beta Distribution to track strategy deterioration, Bootstrapping, granular Profit Fac

Breakout trading specialist and Hedge Fund manager Tomas Nesnidal joins us to discuss how to increase the returns of trading strategies using "Performance Qualifiers" while also managing risk, including: What is Dynamic Position Sizing (DPS) and how can it improve risk-adjusted returns, How Dynamic Position Sizing is different to classical position sizing (and why DPS is better), Why it’s important for traders to connect position size with what’s going on in the markets, instead of just their equity curve, The 5 groups of Performance Qualifiers and how to use them to identify the probabilities of future trades, Why using filters to improve trading strategies can be dangerous (and DPS is a much better option instead), Plus, Dynamic Position Sizing and risk management, Optimal-f and older position sizing techniques, Dynamic Position Sizing for stocks, forex and other markets, why it’s important for traders to try new concepts, and much more. ► Download the free DPS ebook at https://dpstradingtechnique.com  or

Unknown market wizard Marsten Parker joins us to share how he overcame broken strategies and adapted his trading to deliver a 20-year track record most traders would envy, including: Being featured in the “Unknown Market Wizards” book by Jack Schwager, The impacts of a 45% drawdown and how Marsten got back into trading, How to use a system stop to protect your trading account from large losses, Why it’s important to understand why a strategy works, Mean Reversion short strategies, why they’re dangerous and how to mitigate some of the risk, How to detect and protect yourself from a strategy that’s broken, Uncertainty in the market and the future performance of strategies, Equity curve trading, market speed, diversified strategies, tracking old strategies, indicators, market regimes and much more.

David Steets from Systematic Individual Investor joins us to discuss how to map market probabilities and identify high probability markets using "edge stacking" techniques, including: The importance of mapping market probabilities, How to identify if something really contains an edge, Blending return probabilities across buckets to create a probability map, Classifying markets over multiple timeframes, How to confirm which edges are currently relevant, Using both technical and fundamental in models, The reliability of edges over time, Managing conflicting information and edges, Bear market signals, integrating discretion, weighting edges, VIX term structure, “anti-edges” and much more.

On this BST live show, Ivan from Ivanhoff Capital joins us to discuss “Short-term swing trading techniques”. Here are some of the topics you’ll discover in this episode: The 2 most important factors in swing trading, Why short-term trading is better than longer-term trading, Measuring market environment and detecting changes, How to find the hot sectors in the market, Shorting stocks and adapting to market corrections and downtrends, Swing trading in choppy markets, Stacking the odds in your favour, High conviction setups, breakouts vs dips, protecting profits, trailing stops, time stops, swing trading psychology and much more.

On this BST live show, Rob Carver from systematicmoney.org joins us to discuss “3 ways traders kill trading strategies”. Here are just some of the topics you’ll discover in this episode: What can go wrong with strategies in live trading, The impact of model complexity on prediction error, (and are simple models really better than more complicated ones - the answer may surprise you!), The dangers of overstated backtest performance, The impact of historic costs on backtest results, The 3 types of overfitting, including 1 that most traders don’t even realise they’re doing, and how to reduce their impact on your trading models, Strategy robustness and letting data define complexity, The overfitting "levels of sin", Correcting for the "multiple testing problem", Fitting metrics, sample size, data quality, prediction error and much more.

On this episode of BST Live, Doc Ahrens from Trendline Dynamics joins us to discuss “Effective techniques to identify trends”, including: The Macro-trend Analyzer indicator and 3 ways to use moving averages for macro trend analysis, Why it's important to have simple trading solutions and what failures in aerospace can teach us about trading strategies,  Studies that conclude technical indicators don't work, Using visual confirmation to understand indicator reaction to market scenarios, The 3 types of support and resistance,  How to draw trendlines properly, why it's impossible to “understand the market”, the importance of persistence in trading and loads more.

So, the verdict is in… Afrotechmods says: “I think this is the most informative guest you have ever had! Thank you both.” What am I talking about? On this episode of BST Live, Stefan Friedrichowski from JFD Bank joined us to discuss “how to build Mean Reversion trading strategies”, and it was an absolute cracker! Even if you’re not a mean reversion trader, you have to see this one.  Here’s a small sample of the tips and insights you’ll discover: The "alarm signal" that got Stefan interested in Mean Reversion trading, How to determine if a market is good for Mean Reversion or not, How to reduce noise and increase the information content in trading charts,  The danger of using a Mean which moves too fast, How the distribution of 2 bar combinations gives clues about potential trading edges, Adjusting the Mean length based on the timeframe of the chart,  Stop-loss vs take profit size, trading without a stop loss, degrees of freedom, statistical significance, sample size, entries, exits, and loads more.

Ever wondered how to turn $10k into $100k (or more) in just 2 years (or less)? Many traders have, especially early in their careers… But how do professional traders achieve superior returns while also protecting capital.  On this week’s episode of BST Live, Laurent Bernut from Alpha Secure Capital joined us to discuss “Superior returns from superior risk management”, and a new approach to risk management where you can put risk appetite on autopilot, protect capital and achieve superior returns. Here are just some of the tips you’ll discover: How to turn 10k into 1 million (or more) in just 2 years..., How unrealistic trading expectations set you up for failure, What is "superior" risk management and why investors are like teenage girls, Concavity and Convexity Oscillators for dynamic risk management, Position sizing with small accounts, Why you should let the market dictate the risk for you, How to judge the tradability of a strategy, plus Emotional capital vs financial capital and which is more critical, Ri

With 2020 coming to a close, we’ve got a great opportunity to stop for a breather (phew!), look at some of the craziness that has happened this year, and identify how we can use those insights to improve our trading even more in the future. On this episode of BST Live Mike Grech from Quantopolis.com joins us to discuss 2020 and how we can better deal with market uncertainty. Here are just some of the tips you’ll discover: Why 2020 has produced 5 years of market action in 1 year, How this year has produced outsized returns for some trading styles and what could happen next, Understanding your strategy, how it reacts to markets and when to stop trading it, The future impacts of 2020 on backtesting, re-optimization and quant trading, What could crash an overvalues stockmarket if a global pandemic can't, Tail-risk hedging during volatility environments, The drawbacks and dangers of using indicators in trading, plus… The psychology of gains and losses, the information we don't see as traders, the best risk manage

“Randomness has the greatest negative impact on single entry trading strategies.” – Brian Miller (Optimized Trading). In this new episode of BST Live, Brian Miller from Optimized Trading joins us to discuss “3 under-utilized techniques to build dramatically better trading strategies”.  Brian shared some unique ideas for building (and improving) trading strategies. Here are just some of the tips you’ll discover: Basic market classifications most traders use (that miss the complete picture), Designing models for specific market classifications Managing trades as market classifications change, How to get started building multi-structured strategies, Matching the strategy style to the market, Multi-value, multi-entry strategies, and diversification, Adaptive money management using market classifications, plus… Trade frequency, trending vs mean reverting, intelligent allocation, and much more.

“There are literally hundreds of statistically valid patterns in every market.” – Scott Andrews (Investiquant). So, where are they hiding out, how can we find them and how can we determine the patterns are actually valid and not just random noise in the market? In this new episode of BST Live, Scott Andrews from Investiquant joins us to discuss how to find statistical edges to improve your trading. Here are just some of the tips you’ll discover: How to find potential edges and which markets are best, Why it’s more important to spend time watching and studying the market than actually trading it, The "3 C's rule" to separate genuine signals from the noise, How long can pattern edges actually last and do dead edges ever recover? How to track the health of an edge using t-score, Using "traditional" indicators in patterns, How to deal with drawdowns (and possibly the trading quote of the year!), The "Speed Bump Rule" to manage drawdowns, plus… Allocating capital, edges in stocks, building pattern libraries, ense