Guidelines for Designing and Building a Unique, Powerful, and Profitable Trading System

Successful trading is more than just a series of single, isolated activities, each fighting its own battles in a dog-eat-dog marketplace. It is instead a system, in which all components work together to ensure that each trade is well protected, easy to implement, and capable of generating a steady stream of low-risk trading returns.

Trading Systems That Work shows you how to combine today's best available information and techniques into a simple system that works for you­­across all markets and market conditions. Look to this clear, step-by-step book for:

• Guidelines for implementing a consistent money management program
• Portfolio composition techniques to ensure maximum profit potential­­while minimizing exposure to unnecessary risk
• Strategies to exercise proper risk management through stop losses, profit objectives, and more

Whether you are a multimillion-dollar institutional investor or an independent trader with a $10,000 account, your trading system­­and your comfort with that system­­will spell the difference between long-term success and failure. Let Trading Systems That Work help you design a strategic, well-thought-out trading system, one that puts you in complete charge of your trading fortunes.

When it comes to designing a trading system, serious traders don't have time to reinvent the wheel. Instead, they generally incorporate the proven, time-tested systems and techniques of others into their own­­a personalized system that takes into account their trading budget, risk tolerance, action requirements, time horizon, and abilities to accept market- and system-specific anomalies. Trading Systems That Work is the first book to evaluate many of today's most influential techniques and, emphasizing trading software programs TradeStation and Excel, cover all aspects of researching, building, understanding, and evaluating your own trading system.

After covering the logic and reasoning that underpin a successful system, international trading consultant and writer Thomas Stridsman uses a set of proven system-building tools, plus his own highly innovative analysis techniques and findings, to provide:

• Step-by-step techniques for researching and building a mechanical (100% rule-based) trading strategy
• Clear step-by-step techniques to evaluate the true performance of any system
• Methods to measure drawdown, both within individual trades and for entire strategies
• All computer coding, along with spreadsheet formulas and equations
• Optimal exit techniques regardless of the market or current market conditions

Trading Systems That Work is the book for traders who have taken a few gut-punches, realize the game is not as easy as it seems, and want to pinpoint exactly what it is they need to solve the puzzle. More than just another cookie-cutter book extolling ready-made technical analysis indicators or a foolproof trading system, it instead examines the entire trading process, the importance of fully understanding that process, and the necessity of employing sound, sensible, fixed-fractional money management strategies to consistently profit from that process.

Manageable system building protocols, money management and portfolio composition guidelines, basic entry and exit techniques­­Trading Systems That Work shows you how to tie the many different stages and strategic decisions of trading into a unified, profitable system. Whether you are looking to design and use a fast, intraday, market-specific trading system or one that is steady, long-term, and universal, its many valuable insights and innovations will­­once and for all­­put you on the right track to an understandable, profitable methodology.

Thomas Stridsman is a senior editor for Active Trader magazine, trading consultant, and popular speaker at industry seminars and conferences. Previously, he wrote for Futures magazine. Before moving to Chicago in 1997, Stridsman operated his own Web-based trading advisory service in Sweden and was chair of the Swedish Technical Analysts Federation.