Hi Ray,

you mentioned that you had integrated swing trading back into your life. Do you have a system that you have developed that traders can buy or do you use a system for that? I am interested in multi day trades using end of day data. Thanks for your help.

Brian

Hi Brian,

Thanks for the question…

This is a bit of a tough question to answer… no, I don’t have a product that addresses swing trading specifically, yet each of my products kind of addresses swing trading.

So to clarify…

I’ve always tended to be a discretionary trader. In other words, I don’t use a hard and fast set of rules to trade. That doesn’t mean I don’t have a set of rules and guidelines, they just aren’t black and white.

Instead I focus on analyzing the market, accessing where things are, and where they may go, and trade accordingly.

This doesn’t make a great “system” to be distributed (at least from my own experiences).

You see, of my courses, each one got progressively more and more conceptual.

What do I mean?

Well Market-Millions was released and was a very rules based, black and white trading system. I think this is perfect for the beginner trader, as it outlines exactly what needs to be done every step of the way. Through this regimented approach, proper habits are developed like trading with the trend, risk management and knowing your entries and exits all in advance.

This is a good approach, overall… but after following the markets for some time, and applying a strict approach, you begin to wonder if there are ways to tweak the system.

And you can… the thing is, many “tweaks” tend to become more and more subjective. Saying I’ll exit at $x is different from saying I’ll exit at the previous swing low, is different to saying I’ll exit as the momentum decreases.

In each example we get potentially more and more subjective.

Is there anything wrong with subjectivity? I don’t think so. The major issue with subjectivity is that you could start running into the potential of blaming yourself for bad trades (which may be the case) instead of accepting that the markets do what they do, and that’s just how it is.

Starting with a rigid method kind of protects you from this self-criticism until you absorb the experience of losses as just a part of the game.

As you move more into the realm of discretionary trading, (at least how I see it) you move away from rules and more towards concepts.

Giving you rules to follow versus giving you concepts to follow is night and day.

A rule will define as precisely as it can the conditions you’re looking for, while a condition will describe the intent.

Buy when price breaks a trendline drawn over the last 50 bars versus, buy as you see prices moving up strongly from a low.

The first instruction will get you in at some point, while the second can get you in both earlier and later or not at all. Knowing when to apply rules and when to apply concepts is I guess the challenge.

I discovered this challenge as I was working on codifying a set of rules for the trading robot I was working on over the past few years, and that was an interesting experience because it made me realize that a bunch of decisions were unconsciously being made by me in terms of entering and exiting trades…

But here’s why most robots fail…

They are given jobs they do well AND given jobs they do poorly.

The key is leaving them to do the jobs they do well, and not giving them the jobs they do poorly.

Well this was a rather long reply just to tell you no I don’t have a swing trading product… I guess not writing for a while must have caused a backlog of stuff in my brain.

Thanks again for the question and Continued Success!

Ray

Categories: Trading

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