When in doubt, automate it.
I think of that as my personal slogan that has served me well over my career.
Nowhere is this more true than in trading.
Over the last week or two, I’ve been extremely busy with non-trading stuff. I’m temporarily in a situation that requires my total focus and 100% of my time. I haven’t been able to think about my trading at all.
And yet I was able to take 11 round trip trades yesterday and make a profit.
I was only able to do that by spending countless hours ahead of time systematizing my trading.
Sure it was a lot of work to get to that point – there were dozens of decisions I had to make to automate aspects of my trading and research routines. Many of these decisions would from the outside seem like a waste of time.
That simple calculation you do to compute your position size – it’s not hard – in fact, it’s trivial. So why go through the effort to automate that? Why not just do it in your head?
In the short term, all of these decisions seem like a lot of work compared to the benefits you’ll receive.
But every aspect of your trading that you are able to systematize will start to pay off immediately and then continue to compound over time.
And the payoff will be in ways that you can’t imagine as you’re doing the grunt work.
When in doubt, automate it.
