How did he do it?

There’s no doubting Steve Jobs was a brilliant man.

Here are a few examples from the list of “Top 10 Steve Jobs achievements” from Investors Business Daily:

Bringing portable music players to the masses,
Revolutionizing the sale of music,
Shepherding the age of computer animation,
Launching the smartphone revolution,
Kicking off the tablet trend.

Not bad! There are plenty of other achievements we could add to this list too.

His work and vision left a huge mark on humankind and forever changed the way we do some things, so there’s no doubting he achieved a very high level of success. So how did he do it?

Well that’s a really long answer, but Steve gives us a nice clue in this quote (which is one of my personal favourites):

“I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.”

And this doesn’t just apply to entrepreneurs, it can apply to any field, including trading.

A few weeks ago, Tomas and I were recording some special bonus videos for the Advanced Swing Masterclass, and we were talking about building swing strategies for the Wheat market.

I was sharing how I found Wheat the most challenging market to build swing strategies on.

I tried lots of different ideas, including different timeframes, different session times, different exit techniques, different trade management techniques, different strategy logic but the results still weren’t acceptable.

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Even with extensive automation, it took me about 4-5 times as long to build swing strategies in the Wheat market than it has taken for other markets. But, the perseverance paid off when I discovered 2 subtle ‘tweaks’, based on characteristics of the Wheat market, that really changed the results. From those discoveries, I managed to build a bunch of Wheat swing strategies for my portfolio. Here are 2 examples (all out of sample Walk Forward results, 1 contract per trade):

As you can see from the equity curves, the strategies have some periods of low performance and some periods of high performance (which Tomas and I discuss more in the Advanced Swing bonus recordings).

And they’re not super profitable strategies either, you can definitely find more profitable strategies in other markets, but here’s the real power of Swing strategies for the Wheat market:

Extremely low correlations with other markets and strategies.

Adding a Wheat strategy to my portfolio reduced portfolio drawdown while increasing returns, so it was worth the effort persisting with the Wheat market.

Without perseverance, I would’ve missed out on a great opportunity to diversify my portfolio even more (and now I have some extremely valuable knowledge to share with Advanced Swing students so they can build swing strategies in the Wheat market much quicker than it took me).

So, what about you?

Are you struggling to build trading strategies right now? Or, do you want to build better strategies faster?

If so, you could keep persevering with what you’re doing now, or shift that perseverance to leverage the work of others and get faster results.

To get started, you could try the 14-day breakout challenge, where you discover how to start creating profitable breakout strategies in under 2 weeks without spending more than 35 minutes a day.

Or if you want to get even more advanced, check out the Breakout Strategies Masterclass.

Happy trading,

Andrew

PS. For Advanced Swing Workshop students, we’ve got some great bonus videos coming for you, so watch out for the email announcement in the next week or 2.