Developing Profitable Systems from Discretionary to Mechanical by Fred Shutzman

Teacher

Chairman

About Course

When trading on a discretionary basis, most traders look at many different tools and indicators and combine these into a logical decision making process. However, in developing mechanical trading systems, these same traders will optimize some combination of technical indicators based upon past performance and call that a trading system. This results in a mechanical system that does not represent the trader’s subjective approach to markets. The trader’s goal should be to build a system that reflects his or her discretionary trading.

In this seminar, Fred shows you how to transform your discretionary approach into a mechanical trading system. Fred uses TradeStationTM to demonstrate the steps required to turn your ideas into computer code. He shows you how to develop a breakout system, a congestion system, and a combination system (one that has characteristics of both trend following and counter-trend).

He provides you with examples of EasyLanguageTM code, which can easily be modified for use with other software packages. This talk is especially designed for those traders who can often accurately predict market direction, but still find that they are losing money. In situations like this, it is usually the trader’s emotions that get in the way and prevent him from making money.

Mechanical trading systems allow you to keep the positive features of your approach (for example, your ability to predict direction). While minimizing the emotional content by exercising machine-like discipline. Fred incorporates money management principles into his discussion and demonstrates the importance of diversification. He shows you how to test a system to see if it warrants being traded with actual money in real-time. He explains how to analyze TradeStationTM’s performance reports and explains which statistics he feels are most valuable. You will also learn how to customize a trading system to fit your own unique personality.