How to develop a trading edge: nine steps towards trading success

Learn about what moves prices and how prices act. In particular, learn as much as you can about trading strategies that you are interested in, such as scalping, day trading, momentum trading, technical analysis, or fundamentals, for example.

You don’t need to know everything, but to trade successfully, it’s a good idea to familiarise yourself with as much information as possible. For example, a trader who focuses only on one chart pattern needs to have some knowledge on how the price acts before, during and after it is formed. They may then become an expert by reviewing many charts, taking notes, and then practising their approach with a risk-free demo account.

If you are unsure what style suits you, read a wide range of material on trading and investing. When something resonates with you, delve deeper into that topic. Then you can start building your own personal edge with what you learn. It is best to build a personal edge because each person is different, and it may not always be possible to copy someone else’s edge, strategy or trading style.

When you have a clear focus on how you want to trade, begin developing a strategy around it. A strategy is a method or formula that is repeatable and tends to yield favourable results over many trades (as no strategy wins every trade). Consider customising a strategy you have read about or combining other people’s strategies that you think might work for you. This is a form of social trading, which can be observed on our Next Generation platform.

For example, a day trader may look for specific patterns that occur at certain times of the day. They may enter a trade when technical indicators reach certain levels or near the start of the day if they expect there to be strong (buy) or weak (short) price action based on overnight news or price gaps.

A long-term investor may look at the types of fundamentals present in companies that see a significant stock price rise over several years or more. To do this, they might first find stocks that have had big rises over the last five years, for example, and then look at those company’s fundamentals for commonalities.

A strategy includes how and when you will enter a trade, plus when you will cut or take a loss or profit. You will also want to consider the position size, or how much of the asset you will buy or sell at a time.

With a strategy defined, or at least the basis of a strategy, the next step is to test it. Try to find as many examples of the strategy working on charts as possible and then add up its wins and losses. If it was profitable over many trades, the strategy has a potential edge. Test it in a demo account using manual backtesting​ or paper trading​, which involve writing down trades that you would have taken to track the hypothetical results.

For an investor or trader, this means looking at securities that performed well recently, then also looking back at stocks that performed well historically. Would the strategy have captured some of these big winners without also including too many losers?

For a day trader, they will go through many historical days looking for a chart pattern or indicator configuration. Since you know where you will enter and exit, you can add up the potential profit or loss of the trades found.

One of the best ways to test your strategy is in real time, putting your strategy and execution skills to the test with either a risk-free demo account or a fully funded live account, where you can realise the profits of any trading edge you’ve discovered.

A strategy may work well, or you may run into some problems. The strategy may not be profitable, for example, but that doesn’t mean all is lost. Look at how profit could have been made on more trades.

Possibly, slightly expanding the stop-loss order could have kept you in for more big wins, or possibly holding on longer to some big winners could tip the strategy into profitable territory. Perhaps there are too many losing trades, so consider how some of these could be eliminated without also cutting out too many winners. This is where you use what you’ve learnt from testing your strategy to tweak and improve your approach.

With any strategy, risk-management is important. While a stop-loss can help to minimise losses, consider how much you are willing to lose per trade. Many professional traders opt to risk 1% or less of their account per trade. For example, if they have a $10,000 account, this means they won’t lose more than $100 on a trade.

Limits may also be set on how much can be lost in a day, week, month, or the account as a whole. For example, a day trader may stop trading for the day if they lose 3% of their account. Meanwhile, a swing trader may stop trading for a week, for example, if they lose 20% of their account. Such risk-management rules keep a bad day or a losing streak from depleting the account too rapidly.

Having a strategy is important, but a trader must be disciplined otherwise it is useless. Trading psychology is the field of mental performance. Traders need to be able to execute their strategy in changing market conditions. They must act when required and during the rest of the time, avoid placing trades that don’t meet the strategy parameters.

Traders have emotions and these can cause us to miss trades, take too many trades, doubt ourselves, or be overconfident. All can be equally detrimental. To combat this, you could note down the emotions you feel while you are trading and keep track of the ones that seem to cause issues. Consider keeping a journal of why you feel this way and what you could do to stop the emotion from interfering with your profitability. Reading books and watching videos on trading psychology can help to generate more ideas.

A trading journal contains the thoughts and insights of a trader at the time they are trading, alongside the details of each trade; for example, entry and exit prices, stop-loss levels, risk/reward ratios and whether it resulted in a win or a loss. For example, a day trader may write in their trading journal after they finish for the day, noting what they did poorly and how they could improve, what they did well and how that could be leveraged.

A trading journal may also track new strategy ideas or market tendencies that were noticed while trading. It can take on many forms but is usually a personal notebook that helps the trader improve. The format and contents may include anything that aids this improvement and boosts the trading edge.

It is helpful to quantify a trading edge, which can be done using a formula. There are multiple formulas that help quantify a trading edge.

Positive expectancy is one such formula. It determines if, on average, taking a trade with a certain strategy produces a profit.

Expectancy = (win rate x average win) – (loss rate x average loss)

Win rate is the percentage of winning trades, as a decimal. This is ascertained from the testing or trading phase. Loss rate is the percentage of losing trades, as a decimal. Average win is the average profit on a trade. To find this, add up all wins and divide by the number of wins. Average loss is the average loss on a trade. To find this add up all losses and divide by the number of losses.

This formula is useful because, to calculate it, you must know how often your strategy wins and losses (win rate) and your average win and loss size (risk/reward). These statistics on their own are very telling.

If you have a low win rate, your profits must be much bigger than your losses to have a positive expectancy. If you have a high win rate, your wins can be smaller relative to losses and still maintain a positive expectancy. You could tweak and improve win rate and reward/risk to improve expectancy.

Consistently profitable trading doesn’t come overnight. Take steps for your long run to success, using the previous eight tips to find your trading edge. Developing a strategy that works for you may take multiple attempts. Keep researching and coming up with ideas, testing, refining, and working on your mental game. The pay-off will come once you find a strategy that you have a positive expectancy with, and you can keep using it repeatedly.

As you come up with new strategies over time, go through the same process with each one to make sure it provides an edge and the best chance at being a profitable trader.