The tenth commandment of profitable trading is the most interesting. Most people look for the holy grail. What is the best strategy, the best set of rules, the best stock to buy, and the best that will make people rich. However, that search is a fool’s errand because you spend so much time searching for perfection that you don’t make money. If you’ve got a good trading strategy and follow it consistently with discipline, you’ll make money immediately. Yet if you spend years searching for perfection, you make nothing, but you could have made quite a lot of money and built your wealth with a good strategy. Therefore, you need a good, profitable strategy and to follow the commandments, and you’ll do well—any profitable strategy.

Once you find a strategy, you don’t want to keep tinkering with it, fine-tuning it, optimizing it, and trying to make it perfect because it will never be perfect. There is no ideal because the markets are very uncertain. This comes from a non-trading world, like the corporate world or education, university, or school. It’s hard to accept that there’s no correct answer. “Should I buy when the stock moves to this level or that level? Should I sell or set a stop-loss at 10% or 15%, or 20% below the entry price?” I said, “Well, there’s not one right answer for that. It’s all just trade-offs and probabilities.”

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Adrian Reid Founder and CEO
Adrian is a full-time private trader based in Australia and also the Founder and Trading Coach at Enlightened Stock Trading, which focuses on educating and supporting traders on their journey to profitable systems trading. Following his successful adoption of systematic trading which generated him hundreds of thousands of dollars a year using just 30 minutes a day to manage his system trading workflow, Adrian made the easy decision to leave his professional work in the corporate world in 2012. Adrian trades long/short across US, Australian and international stock markets and the cryptocurrency markets. His trading systems are now fully automated and have consistently outperformed international share markets with dramatically reduced risk over the past 20+ years. Adrian focuses on building portfolios of profitable, stable and robust long term trading systems to beat market returns with high risk adjusted returns. Adrian teaches traders from all over the world how to get profitable, confident and consistent by trading systematically and backtesting their own trading systems. He helps profitable traders grow and smooth returns by implementing a portfolio of trading systems to make money from different markets and market conditions.