Trading Strategies

Named strategy walkthroughs

Each strategy page explains where the method came from, the market conditions that help or hurt it, the exact steps to follow, a worked numeric example of expectancy and sizing, and the three ways it most often fails. None of them are presented as reliable ways to make money.

Strategies covered

• Scalping — Capturing small price moves on the 1-5 minute timeframe.
• Swing Trading — Holding positions 2-10 days to capture intermediate moves.
• Day Trading — Opening and closing all positions within a single session.
• Dollar-Cost Averaging (DCA) — Buying a fixed amount on a fixed schedule, regardless of price.
• RSI Mean-Reversion — Buying oversold dips and selling overbought spikes using RSI(14).
• MACD Crossover — Trading the signal-line cross on the MACD indicator.

What a strategy is, and what it is not

A strategy is a set of rules describing what you will trade, when you will enter, how much you will risk, and where you will get out. It is not a prediction and it is not an edge by itself. Two traders can follow identical rules and get opposite results over a year purely because one honoured the exit rule and the other did not.

These pages therefore give as much space to failure modes and to the arithmetic of expectancy as they give to the entry conditions. If a method has a 45% win rate, that is not a flaw as long as the average win is comfortably larger than the average loss — and it is fatal if it is not. Understanding that trade-off is more useful than collecting more entry patterns.

Testing a strategy without fooling yourself

• Write the rules down before you start. Rules remembered after the fact always look better than they were.
• Take at least thirty trades before drawing any conclusion, and keep the size constant throughout.
• Record every trade the rules generated, including the ones you chose to skip, and why you skipped them.
• Judge the method by expectancy and drawdown together, never by the best week.
• Expect any method to have losing stretches long enough to make you doubt it — that is the normal condition, not a malfunction.
• Re-test in a different market environment before trusting it; a method tuned to a calm trending month often fails the first volatile one.