Adrian Reid: What do you do with all your trading ideas? I’ve had a bunch of traders asked me recently how do you manage the idea flow and the conversion of those ideas into trading systems and trading plans you can actually make money from. Now, I’m still in the petrified forest. I’ve done two other videos today already. I don’t know why this has stimulated my brain to want to do videos. But I guess petrified trees is something I’ve wanted to see for a long, long time. And so it’s got me a little bit excited, a bit nerdy. I know. But anyway, here we are.

So what do you do to manage the flow of ideas that you have in your daily life and turn them into viable trading systems? So here’s my method. Here’s my process that I do. So I use OneNote, Microsoft OneNote to keep track of all of my trading notes, because it means that everything is synced to all of my devices, my computer, my phone, my iPad, everything is all synchronized. And in OneNote, I’ve got a section called trading system development. And in training system development, in that section, I keep a number of different tabs. One of those tabs is called trading ideas untested. The second tab is called trading ideas in progress. And the third tab is called trading ideas complete. And then the final one is trading ideas discarded. Now.

Arielle: He’s got a lot of sections, a lot of [inaudible] and a lot of notebooks.

Adrian Reid: That’s correct. I do. Because I have a lot of trading ideas and I do it constantly. I’ve been doing it for a long time. That was [Arial 00:01:28], my daughter, by the way, who’s a budding young trader. She’s going to be awesome when she’s older. But one of the most important things for you to do as a trader is to capture your ideas. Because it’s your creativity that is going to generate your profits in the long run. It’s not data mining, it’s not, well yeah, maybe reading some books, but it’s really about the thoughts that come to you in moments of inspiration.

And so I use OneNote to capture all of those thoughts, no matter how crazy they seem or no matter how fully or partially foamed are as they occur to me. So I’m out about in the petrified forest right now and I’m writing down my trading ideas. So I’m thinking about a chat or a system ID or something like that. I formulate it in my head and I write it down in the untested system, a section of my OneNote. That’s where I go when I’m looking for ideas to test, to turn into systems.

When I sit down at my computer, I go straight to that section of my notebook, my OneNote, and I pull out an idea that I want to test or convert into a trading system. And that’s where I work first. And so I take that idea and I formulate it, I create the trading system code around that idea and I test it. Now, testing doesn’t always happen all at once. Sometimes, you might do a bit of work and then you to come back to that idea.

So I move it. As soon as I start working on, I move it to the in progress section. And I keep a running log of my investigation around that idea. Now, if you’ve watched my course, if you’re in the Trader Success System, you would see that one of the things that I push for trading system development is the use of the scientific method. If you think back to high school, in chemistry class, you might’ve hated chemistry class, but I loved chemistry because I’m a bit of a sciencey, sort of nerdy, experimental, analytical kind of person.

But one of the great things that chemistry taught me in high school was how to structure an experiment. And when you’re doing trading system development, you want to structure it as an experiment with what is your hypothesis? What are you trying to test? What’s your equipment? What are you using? What’s your method that you’re following? And then, what was your results that you recorded and what was your conclusion?

And I follow that process over and over again as I work through my new trading system ideas. This is all well in progress section of my OneNote notebook for trading systems. Then it’s really important to keep these notes. Because if you do some trading system development work but you don’t complete it, you didn’t finalize that idea, you have to have documented where you got up to. Because when you come back to it, guaranteed, you will have lost momentum on that idea, and the creativity, the inspiration is gone. So you need to document as you go so that you can pick up where you left off and keep moving forward when you come back to it.

And even I’ve come back to trading system ideas years later. Years later. Because something else occurred to me, and I remembered the piece of analysis I did and I went back to my notes and I picked up the rules that I discarded and converted them into something profitable. And you can do that too, if you keep the right records.

So even when I finished that initial piece of analysis, if I decide that the system is no good and I throw it away, I don’t throw away the notes, I move those notes to trading systems that have been discarded or trading ideas that I’ve discarded. Because then I can still search for those ideas. And that gives to really substantial benefits. The first benefit is what I mentioned before. When you have a new idea that extrapolates on what you were working on before, you can come back to those old notes even though you threw away that system idea in past, maybe this new idea can convert it to something profitable. So that you’ve got that record.

The second thing that it does for you is it prevents rework. It prevents wastage. Because I don’t know how many times I’ve come up with an idea and thought, “Hang on. I’m pretty sure I’ve tested that in the past.” And I go to my notes and I search for those terms and I find the analysis that I did and I say, “Right. I’ve already done the analysis. I know what the conclusion was. I can move on from there rather than repeating that work and wasting time.”

Doing that over time accelerates and accelerates your progress as a systematic trader. Because the more investigations you’ve done, the more you learn and the more you can build off your previous pieces of analysis. So when I’ve done that investigation, if I’ve discarded the idea that needs to be discarded, I move it into the discarded notebook. If I haven’t discarded, if I’ve put it into action, then I move it to the trading systems completed folder. Now, all of this might seem a little excessive, but if you want to succeed in the markets, you go to remember this as a competition. And this is the biggest competition in the world.

And if you want to succeed, then you have to prepare yourself to win. And this structure will prepare you to create great trading systems by capturing that inspiration when it hits and structuring those ideas so that you can push them through to completion. And by ensuring that when you sit down at your computer to do some work, to create something amazingly profitable, you’ve got a whole list of ideas that you can use to guide your investigation work.

Now, if you need help to put all of this into practice, and to come and to give you some structure for developing your trading system, then you need the Trader Success System. And what I want you to do right now is click the link below and fill out the application form for the Trader Success System. Because in that mentoring program, what I do is I guide you step by step through setting up yourself, your life, your thinking, your analysis, your systems so that you can be successful as a trader.

And that makes all the difference. This journey took me over three years to get profitable. But right now, working with my mentoring students, it’s taking two to three months to get them profitable in the market and fully confident and fully independent as a trader. So if you’ve been taking a long time, if you’ve been learning about trading for a while, it’s time to finally bite the bullet and take that action. Join the mentoring program, the Trader Success System mentoring program and I will guide you through the process, and finally get you profitable, confident in the market, ready to go.

It’s not about dependence on me, it’s not about using my ideas or my systems. It’s about turning you into a profitable independent trader. And the Trader Success System is designed to do exactly that. My name is Adrian Reid. This is in line to stock training. If you want to improve your trading, click link below and apply for the Trader Success System and I’ll see you on the other side. Bye for now.