Better System Trader

“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

Is the trend REALLY your friend? And if so, why do so many trend traders fail? Global futures trader Brent Penfold joins us to discuss trend trading tactics, including: • Why trend trading is so difficult for traders, • Why traders should be careful using indicators, • How to overcome challenging periods in trend trading, • The surprising robustness of really old strategies, • Why bright people struggle in the markets, • Drawdown, risk, position-sizing, volatility cycles, data mining, and much more.

Quant Trader Alan Clement from Helix Trader discusses momentum trading & strategies, including: Why momentum trading is so popular and how it works, What makes a good trend indicator and the 4 best indicators to identify trends,  Why the moving average is not a good trend indicator, How to rank stocks by momentum and how many momentum stocks to hold in a portfolio, The danger of stops and using momentum for exits instead, How dual momentum protects during Bear markets and market crashes, Filtering out false signals in indicators, Plus, market regimes, shorting weak stocks, position sizing, and much more!

With the US elections just days away, traders are thinking about how the markets may react to whatever news the elections may bring. Will we see a big selloff, wild swings in price, and huge spikes in volatility? Or do the markets typically deliver something else around election time? In this episode of BST Live, Perry Kaufman from Kaufman Signals joins us to discuss how to survive market selloffs, including: Historical returns around election days since 1924, The 2 types of prices shocks and the best approach to handling them,  The link between stock price and percentage change and why you should avoid trading low priced stocks, Should traders hedge to reduce risk, The dangers of Price Shocks on backtesting results (and how to avoid them), How to determine the volatility level where returns are no longer worth the risk, Plus, volatility parity, rebalancing, portfolio volatility, and much more!

Ever had a strategy that looked like it was broken and wondered if you should stop trading it or not? Strategy failure (or periods of poor performance) are just a part of trading, but how you deal with it can have a HA-YUGE impact on your overall results… so how do you detect when a strategy is failing? How do you work out if you should stop trading it or just give it some more time? In this episode of BST Live, trading champion Kevin Davey joins us to discuss how to detect when a strategy is failing, including: • Why looking at a single equity curve is not giving you the full picture, • How to determine the potential ranges of future strategy performance, • Using Statistical Process Control to monitor trading strategies and which metrics are best, • How Probability Cones can give traders a more informed view of strategy performance (and when a strategy could be broken), • What do to when a strategy over-performs (the answer may not be what you think!), • Should you turn a strategy back on if it recovers afte

Are our roles as traders coming to an end soon? Is AI and ML (that’s Machine Learning, not Money Laundering or Meat Loaf…) going to take over the trading world? Trading veteran Bob Pardo from Pardo Capital joins us to discuss these topics plus much more, including: How AI is missing common inputs used by human traders, Modeling the expertise of human traders using Expert Systems, The dangers of using computers to blindly create strategies, Retail edges vs Institutional edges and how private traders can compete, The lifespans of edges (are they getting shorter?), The Dynamic Statistical Profile of strategies and taking strategies offline, Correlations (and how correlation can be a 2-edge sword), Objective functions and when it doesn't matter which one you choose, Using performance feedback and indicators on equity curves, Adaptive trading systems, fitting your process to your objective and much more!

DSP and Cycles expert John Ehlers, joins us to discuss all things optimization, including: Why optimization is a statistical process and how to assess the results properly (including what to look for at “the 50% line”), How much data you should REALLY use for reoptimization and why many traders use way too much data (and the impact it has on trading strategies), The 3 best fitness functions to use in reoptimization and the dangers of a popular metric that can lead to over trading, What the speed of optimization results can potentially tell you about strategy robustness, The only 2 things that count when assessing a strategy (yup, just 2!), Plus, much more. Also, if you want to discover more of John’s Cycles and DSP techniques, John is running his annual workshop for the very last time this year (he’s retiring to go fishing and build model aeroplanes). The workshop is run over 4 evenings (US time – Oct 19-23) and it’s 100% online so no travel or quarantine required. For more info, visit: http://bettersystemt

High-performance trading coach Steve Ward from TradeAtYourBest.com discusses: How to find the best opportunities during challenging times, Why shifting perspective is such a critical skill for high-performance, How to overcome internal resistance to become more adaptable, “Learning vs Earning” and how to improve your chances of longevity in trading, How to integrate being flexible with the “follow the system” approach of algo/systematic trading to be better prepared for whatever the market may hold, Key actions traders should be doing right now to prepare for an unknown future in the markets, Plus, many more practical tips to improve trading performance. And if you want even more practical tips on high-performance trading, you should check this one out: For the first time ever, Steve is running the 6-week "Trade At Your Best Trading Psychology Course" to teach private traders (he usually only works with institutional clients) the mindset and mental skills required to succeed in the markets, and close the ga

Nick Radge from TheChartist.com.au discusses how to achieve consistent equity growth using multiple layers of diversification. For more details about The Empowered Trader monthly newsletter, visit http://theempoweredtrader.com

Cesar Alvarez from AlvarezQuantTrading.com discusses effective Market Regime techniques to improve strategy performance and reduce risk by only trading in the best market conditions.

Details about what's next for BST and the special event being hosted this weekend.

As I'm sure you've realised, I've taken a break from podcasting for the last year or so. I've been focusing on some other trading projects so I haven't released any new episodes for quite a while, but over that time I've received a lot of messages from traders hungry for more podcast episodes. Has Better System Trader finished? Is it coming back? I have some interesting news to share - take a listen.

This podcast episode made me think back to the very first computer I bought in my high school days. We’re talking about the mid-1980, when computers were still relatively new. Actually, my first computer was a commodore 64 (how good were they!), which my parents bought me, but the first computer I actually bought myself was a pretty serious computer at the time. It cost about 3 or 4 thousand dollars, which back then was quite a bit of money. And this computer only had a fraction of the power that we have in our mobile phones these days, but back then it was one of the fastest you could get. Anyway, this computer had a special switch on the front of the case, it was called the 'Turbo' switch. I’m not exactly sure how it worked, but when some programs were running slow, I could flick the turbo switch on and it would accelerate the performance of the computer. And I was thinking, wouldn’t it be great if we could have a ‘Turbo’ switch for trading, where we could just flick the switch and instantly boost our perfo

In this podcast episode we’re going to be talking about something incredibly fundamental to traders. It’s something we have to do all the time as traders, and it can have such a huge impact on our trading performance. In fact, it doesn’t just impact trading, it can impact ALL aspects of our lives. So, what is it? Any ideas? It’s decision making. Now I don’t need to explain the importance of decision making, it’s pretty obvious… I’m sure we’ve all made good and bad decisions over time and had to live with the consequences, but as traders, what can we do to improve our decision making? Well, in this podcast episode we’re joined by special guest Agustin Lebron. Agustin began his career as a trader and researcher at one of the worlds largest market-making firms - Jane Street Capital. Over the years he has traded many different kinds of securities and has created, developed and implemented successful trading strategies. In my chat with Agustin you'll discover: The “laws” traders need to apply to make better decis

Glad you could join us today for a discussion on what is probably one of the most popular topics in trading, and that is entries and exits. Traders love talking about entries, but the truth is, when you dig deeper and test them out, you might just discover lots of entry and exits techniques either don’t actually work very well at all or don’t work as well as expected. So, how do traders know what makes a good entry or exit? How do we go about building effective entries and exits for our trading strategies? Well, in this podcast episode we dig deeper into entries and exits with special guest Kevin Davey. Kevin has just released a book on entries and exits, so we’re going to dig into that a little and discuss a number of other aspects of entries and exits too, including: What makes a good entry – logic, symmetry, indicators, patterns or something else? How to test the effectiveness of an entry to determine if it’s any good, An unexpected way to use entries that could radically improve your trading strategies,

  Our special guest for this episode has done some really interesting work into strategies that manage trading strategies based on their current performance. This can have a huge impact on performance results, but what does it actually mean, how does it work and how can we do it? Well, David Bean from Capstone Trading Systems is joining us to explain exactly that, plus he’s going to share a whole lot more, including: Patterns versus indicators, where they fit in a strategy and which works better, Why market regime filters may not be the best approach and an alternative solution that could be better for you, How to really dig deep into understanding how a strategy and market truly works and the benefits of knowing that, How to determine the best time to start trading a strategy and when to stop trading it, How to plan for, manage and even profit from strategy degradation, Plus much more. So, enough of the delays, lets jump right into my chat with David Bean.

I just want to start by saying happy new year! I know it was a few weeks back, but I hope you’ve had a good start to the year and I wish you all the best for 2019. Now I’m really excited to be sharing this episode with you for a number of reasons. I think it’s very timely considering this is the time of the year where we make new years resolutions. We reflect on where we are and what we want achieve. Perhaps we’ve set some goals and started achieving some of those, or maybe even broken some of them already. In this episode we’re going to be talking about what it takes to be the best, or perhaps I should say YOUR best. We’re going to be talking about high performance trading, what it takes to have a successful trading career over the long term. And joining us for this chat is one of the best, Linda Raschke. As I’m sure you know, Linda has experienced a very high level of trading success throughout her career. There aren’t too many traders around who can say they’ve had the level of performance, success and lon

With so much focus often on the actual trading strategies or investments, portfolio construction can sometimes become an afterthought… or not even considered. However, as we’re going to hear about today, portfolio construction and optimization has the potential for huge increases in wealth... But there are a number of aspects we need to carefully consider if we want to maximise the potential of portfolios. Joining us today as our special guest is Adam Butler, CIO from quantitative asset management company Resolve Asset Management. Adam has published some interesting research on portfolio construction and optimization, and he’s even provided a portfolio optimization framework that can guide investors and traders towards the appropriate optimization method. In my discussion with Adam today, you’re going to discover: How some traders and investors apply rules to portfolio construction based on a flawed premise, How the ‘Portfolio Optimization Machine’ framework can guide investors toward the appropriate optimiz

With recent market stock market actions, talk again is turning to whether this is just another correction. Will the bull market resume or are we in the beginning stages of a bear market? In this episode we have a timely look at the market with Troy Bombardia from investment research firm Fundamental Capital and the website BullMarkets.co. Troy has been working in his family’s hedge fund for 10 years now, and applies a unique mix of Fundamentals, Technicals, and Statistics to his trading models. In my discussion with Troy today, you’re going to discover: Why Technicals alone can’t give an accurate reflection of the long-term market view and what you need to incorporate instead, Why lots of traders that use fundamental analysis are doing it wrong and which fundamentals really drive stock market declines, The difference between a bear market and a “big decline” and the conditions to watch out for in each, Why leading economic indicators are also leading stock market indicators, and how to read them to prepare f

Joining us today as special guest is Michael Grech from Quantopolis. Mike is a quantitative trader with a background in signal processing and computer modelling, and in our chat you'll discover a number of interesting topics, including: Trading based on assumptions and building portfolios of diversified strategies, Why every trader should have some kind of volatility strategy in their portfolio and how to balance risk vs reward in volatility strategies, Mike's latest book on quantitative investing, How concepts from the book "Thinking Fast and Slow" have applications to traders. Plus, Mike is going to let us in on a project he’s currently working on that uses a combination of simple systems and Artificial Intelligence to mimic a human trader and also to calculate market probabilities. We cover a lot in this episode so check out my chat with Michael Grech.