[To be a pro trader, you must be willing to get your hands dir | The Real Rayner Teo

[To be a pro trader, you must be willing to get your hands dirty]

Now:

Just because you came up with a hypothesis to your question, doesn’t mean it’s correct.

That’s why as a professional trader, it’s your job to validate your trading ideas (or hypothesis).

You’ve got to get your hands dirty and do the work like backtesting, forward testing, etc.

For example, you might wonder:

“Is a 10-week breakout better than a 50-week breakout in terms of returns relative to risk?”

Well, to find out you can do a backtest across a universe of stocks using these two parameters, and see which offers a better result.

To make your life easier, here are some tools you can use for backtesting…

Amibroker – A backtesting platform

Norgate Data – Data feed

Upwork – A marketplace to find programmers

Still, most of you won’t do it because it’s easier to solicit an opinion than to actually do the work.

The problem is, you’ll never know if it’s true, or not—that’s why you must be willing to get your hands dirty and do the work!