Greetings from Knoxville Tennessee!
Tomas and I have both spent the last week in Tennessee, attending a retreat in Gatlinburg.
I wanted to share a quick story because it was a good reminder for me and it might be helpful to you too.
The day before we went to Gatlinburg, Tomas and I were having lunch at Red Lobster in Knoxville (Red Lobster is our favourite place to eat when we’re in the States, closely followed by Five Guys and then Arby’s. I guess you can see why we always pack on a few extra pounds every trip we make to the US!).
Anyway, as expected, the conversation turned to trading. I mentioned to Tomas that a couple of my Swing strategies have been struggling recently, and it was clearly due to the change in market conditions.
I had a number of ideas I wanted to test to resolve the issue but there was a problem – HOW could I do it quickly?
I wanted to take my ideas and do some preliminary on the strategies I already had in my database, but retesting all of the strategies again would take weeks, possibly even months. I wanted an answer fast, without having to retest all of my strategies again. And every one of the approaches I thought of would require alot of work.
Then Tomas shared with me exactly how he did it. Within the first 5 seconds of him explaining it, I knew this was the exact solution I needed.
It was simple.
It was effective.
It was like a knowledge-bomb going off in my head.
And it was going to save me weeks or even months of work.
In fact, the solution was so simple and so obvious (in hindsight) that I felt embarrassed and slightly red-faced that I didn’t come up with this solution myself. It was approaching the problem from almost the exact opposite way I was looking at it.
So why am I telling you this?
Well, it was a great reminder that sometimes we like to over-engineer things. We like to make things more complicated than they need to be. Or we get so involved in the details that it’s hard to step back and see the simple solution staring us right in the face.
It reminded me of the quote by Warren Buffett:
“There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult.”
Complexity doesn’t mean better. Complexity can often hold us back.
I’ll definitely be focusing on ways to “keep it simple” in the future.
Is there something you’re working on right now that could be made simpler too?
Happy trading,
Andrew
PS. I think simplicity is one of the reasons why Tomas’ breakout model works so well. There are only 4 components, so it’s super simple and super effective in building breakout strategies. I could explain it my 7-year-old daughter and she would get it. If you’d like to learn more, check out the free video training.
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