Forex Trading Strategy - Three Steps of Development

By Albert Schmidt

Emotions

Mechanical trading strategies do not have any emotions or intuition. It can be both beneficial and detrimental. Probably emotional control is the main reason traders are looking for a successful mechanical trading system. How many times you violated the rules of your system just to find out that if you followed it you would be in profit? Psychological pull between fear and greed can be quite exhausting. That's why many traders would like a computer to pull the trigger in trading.

Emotions and intuition cannot be calculated mathematically. Mathematics is the only thing a trading system has to work with. So the first and most fundamental principal of trading system development is that every rule to enter or exit the market must be mathematically justified.

Complexity

The second principal of trading system development must be KISS (keep it stupid simple). Our natural tendency is to make a trading system too complex. Systems that start off with a few simple rules end up transforming into complex system if you keep adding new rules to include or exclude some special situations. You should be able to memorize the rules of your system. If you can't keep the rules in mind to immediately recognize a trading signal then your system is too complex.

Trading systems grow into more and more complex ones by including rules that take into account more and more parameters. I believe that excessive amount of rules can ruin the successful trading system.

Testing

This is the absolutely necessary step. You need to have historical price data to test your system. Usually trading platforms come with such data. In the course of development of a trading system you will come up with new ideas. Those ideas must be tested on the data you have. Each time you introduce a new rule you have to test you system from the beginning. This testing should give you an answer to the question if this new rule makes your system more profitable. It is necessary to test your system in all market conditions. It is not logical to test it only in trending market or only in ranging market.

You want the trading system that would work efficiently in the market conditions that you have developed for and survive in any other market conditions. Not every day will bring you profit using that system. Successful trading system is the one that sustains itself by covering small losses and accumulating significant profits on your account. If your goal is to find a system that would make you profit every trade you take you will never find such a system and probably will give up on a system that was reasonably profitable.

Albert Schmidt is a part-time currency trader. After quite a long time of struggle he learned to make consistent profit trading in Forex. Review a trading strategy he successfully uses in his trading Forex.