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Yes, people tend to think "oh, I'll just trade systematically, and then my emotions will be under control." I thought that too.
Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. Emotions are still there, but they just manifest in different ways.
Maybe my experience will help...
I used to chart my equity every day. As you can imagine, all the ups and downs (thankfully more ups) made me crazy. So, the last few years, I have charted my equity only on a weekly basis. I'll admit sometimes I cheat and still calculate daily equity, but many days I only have a vague sense if I made money or lost money.
The cool thing about this is my focus is different now: not "am I making money?" but "am I trading correctly?" I can't control the money making part, but I can control the doing things correctly part, and by focusing on what I can actually influence I find myself a lot calmer and more in charge of things with this approach.
I still view my P&L daily, but I really should only focus on the charts and the trades. I find that seeing the big red / green block in Interactive Brokers with my daily P&L more of a hindrance than a help.
If I just focus on my excel sheets which track my performance, I just see a % move for the month and I just feel a lot better about my trading. As long as it is positive, I don't care too much about it. Once it gets negative, I scale back my trades and once it reaches -2%, I trade tiny size (less than 1% of my portfolio invested in a stock - total exposure < 10%). At that point it is all about feeling out the market and getting my rhythm back.
However, I never found a way to effectively implement that type of position sizing in my long term systems. Seemed like they caught all the really good trades on reduced size and all the bad trades on normal size.
Well, I think quant trading can be much more stressing then discretionary, the only sure thing is that nothing works forever and nobody knows when that time will come for a strategy. So this add much stress, if something is performing good you expect a drawdown and if it's performing bad you start think it is broken.
The only cure is diversification, I've read in the option selling thread you have 78 strategies running. I'm very very far to be such diversified but I agree with your point. Also diversification has a cost and I think it is useful to have a yearly budget for R/D that do not impact to your performance too much.
Kevin, I don't recall if this was discussed in your book.
What are the primary differences between your personal strategies, and a strategy used for World Cup trading?
Would you say they have a higher risk % and higher risk of ruin? Are they something you throw out there and say "well it will either blow up, or win 1st place".
They were the same strategies that I would use in "normal" trading, but with greatly reduced initial capital.
So, when I won the World Cup, I had a strategies trading 6-10 different markets. A prudent trader would have been trading such a setup with probably $30-45K. I started with $15K. Thus, my returns (and drawdowns) were probably double or more of a typical account.
The big thing to me was I had a goal (>100% return in a year), and I had to get a trading setup (strategies, account size, position sizing) in place to meet that goal. That to me was the most important part - starting with a goal.