Laurens Bensdorp - Automated Stock Trading Systems: A Systematic Approach for Traders to Make Money in Bull, Bear and Sideways

The decade that began in March 2009 was a good one for fundamental investment advisors. Its been easy in recent years for people to make money because the markets keep going up. But lets be clear: do not confuse a bull market with skill. Because its been easy to make money for a while, people grow increasingly confident that the markets will continue like that.

However, our memories are short. Many traders forget what the market experience was like in 2008. And while in late 2018 we had a taste of what a downturn looks like, as of this writing in mid -2019 the markets are brushing up against all - time highs yet again. Sooner or later, bull markets come to an end. There will be a bear market. We do not know when. We do not know how big. But when it arrives, it will be ugly, uglier than most people expect. I am writing this book because I want you to have your investments arranged in such a way that you are protected and can profit hugely in markets of all types. To basically make yourself mentally immune from any kind of market movement, whether up, down, or sideways. Otherwise, its very likely that you will lose some or all of the gains you have experienced over the last eight or ten years. Those gains could vanish in half a year.

The traders I work with have a common fear. You are afraid that you dont know what you are doing. You may be making some money. Sometimes you are up, sometimes you are down, but always you are afraid that the markets are going to turn, and then what the heck will happen? And what the heck should you do? You are afraid of losing what you have. Even when things are going up, you worry that a downturn is coming, and you dont know how to prepare for that.

Many of you who are reading this book have lived through a substantial downturn such as the one you saw in 2008, and while that memory may be fading, its still there. You may have had an investment advisor, but those advisors usually do not outperform the benchmark when the market is rising, and when the market is falling you may well lose more than the benchmark. Yet you pay fees for this performance!

There is an alternative. In this book I am going to show you multiple, noncorrelated, quantitative trading systems that can make money regardless of the type of stock market behavior we are experiencing. If were in a bull market, this approach works, and if were in a sideways or bear market it also works. You do not have to be afraid of what the market is doing; you continue to accumulate wealth no matter what. In 2017, I wrote The 30- Minute Stock Trader , which introduced these ideas. Now, I will take you deeper into how to improve risk - adjusted return regardless of market conditions; and the power of understanding your objectives; and how to build systems according to your objectives, goals, and risk tolerance. In the following pages, I will show you how to lay the groundwork for building the right systems for you. This includes a deep, personal understanding of your own objectives and risk tolerance. By developing a clear view of your objectives, of what you want to achieve in regard to trading returns and risk profile, of how you want to trade long and short, of the style of trading that appeals to you, then you can build a system that suits your personality. That will be a trading system youll stick to. A system that you will be executing consistently, with confidence and without fear or hesitation.

These are quantitative trading systems built on historic price data. Once the systems are built, you will have simple entry and exit rules, and ways to quantify how those rules perform against past markets to develop an exact statistical edge for certain systems in certain market types.

In particular, I will show you how combining these systems and trading them simultaneously improves performance exponentially. What matters is not the performance of individual systems, but the nearly magical effect of combining them for exponentially better results.