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.”