When Waiting Makes You More Money

As a trader, the temptation to do something is very high. But there’s something to resist because the money is not made by trading, but by sitting and doing nothing. That’s important because once you’re in a trade, you’ve got to wait. It’s only by waiting until you get the exit signal that you’ll make money. When you’re not in a trade, you’ve got to wait until you get the right entry signal to make money. But if you’re being impatient and start doing something because you want activity even if you don’t get an entry signal, then you’re going to do the wrong things and lose money. We’ve got to wait because there will be times when your portfolio is not giving you much action.

What do you do with that time? You’ve got all this time allocated because it takes you five minutes a day to run your trading. Use that time for learning and development. You can check what is the weakest link in your portfolio, what type of market behaviour are you most exposed to? Or what is happening now that is hurting you, that you could develop or modify a system to profit from to improve the portfolio’s performance. That’s what you put the time into.

As a systematic trader, keep yourself busy through learning and development, it is not taking trades. It’s by considering your portfolio, diversifying and adding systems to cover different market behaviours. That’s what you want to be doing with it, so use that time to build confidence in the systems you’ve got, test hypotheses, satisfy worries that you’ve got about existing systems or close gaps in your portfolio with new systems.