To pull the trigger and take your new system, certain things have to be in place. First is understanding the rules of my system completely, to be consistent with the paper trading process to know I’m doing the right thing every day, not fumbling, and not making mistakes. Moreover, I also need to be confident that I am doing my position sizing correctly so I don’t make a mistake and buy too much or too little, I also need to figure out how much money I’m going to trade with and how much I will allocate to this first system, so I don’t go too heavily into one system because I didn’t think about that.

Thus, you need to think about all those things you need to be sure of before going live, and list them down, because they might be different for you than for someone else. And then go through the process of ticking them off. While it’s all undefined, you need to be more confident so you can go live and what you need would be to have a checklist, and you can tick those things off one at a time and feel like you’re moving closer and closer to going live rather than just being a paper trading hero. I’m not telling you now is the best time. Typically, my approach is to go live whenever I’m ready with the system.

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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.