INVESTING APPROACH

Seven questions,
asked from where a private trader actually stands

A fund asks what its portfolio returned this quarter. Someone trading their own money asks something narrower and much harder to answer honestly: should I buy this, now, at this price, and how much. Almost nobody asks the second question out loud — so these do. They go in order, each one forced by the answer before it, and several of the answers are no. The no’s are the point: what a private trader most needs is to know which popular ideas do not survive contact with their account size.

  1. 01THE FIRST QUESTION · 6 min readCan the next candle be predicted?No. And the shorter the timeframe you were sold, the more impossible it gets.Read →
  2. 02THE REFRAME · 5 min readIf not direction, then what does persist?Distance does. Markets forget which way almost at once, and remember how far for weeks.Read →
  3. 03WHAT BREAKS · 5 min readWhy do tuned indicator settings stop working?Because picking the winner of the past turns out to be worse than picking at random.Read →
  4. 04THE MISSING NUMBER · 6 min readWill a limit order at that price actually fill?Nobody shows you. It is the number that decides whether a plan happens at all.Read →
  5. 05A PROMISE, CHECKED · 7 min readWhat does a 95% stop actually promise?Less than it says, and it overstates most at the setting that looks most careful.Read →
  6. 06WHERE IT FAILS · 6 min readWhat happens to a stop on earnings day?It stops being a stop. The one night a year retail holds and funds do not.Read →
  7. 07WHERE WE STAND · 12 min readSo which school of quant is this?The map of where an edge has been found, and the honest place for a retail trader on it.Read →

More are being written, along the same chain of questions.