Persistence Pays Off
Why persistence, not novelty, pays in trading: find a strategy with acceptable trade-offs, then give it enough time to work for you.
The immortal Bruce Lee once said, “I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.” Much later, in 2008, Malcolm Gladwell wrote in “Outliers: The Story of Success” about the 10,000-hour rule behind success. The gist is that mastering a complex skill takes a certain amount of intense practice, and once mastered, it can change your life.
Success does not come easy, and there is a lot of grind behind it. Failures are inevitable chapters behind successful pages. If we have found the one thing we love, care to do, and wish we could make our vocation, failures are just another step towards success. Each failure carries a lesson about how not to do things. The important thing is to stay on course, and persist until we achieve what we set out for.
Glenn McGrath picked up 563 Test wickets mostly by putting the ball around the same spot on a 22-yard cricket pitch. He was not express pace, and he did not swing the ball prodigiously either, but he persistently probed the batsmen around a certain point.
As traders, we should be able to persist with a strategy once we have found one with acceptable trade-offs. It is fine to try different things, but once identified, a method needs sufficient time and effort on our side to work for us. More often than not it becomes difficult to trust something blindly, and so difficult to persist. In an age where information is everywhere, it can truly get confusing.
This is why we recommend objective results to back a trading plan. It is why our flagship product, TrendShikari NTS, comes with a strategy file to backtest the system from 1990, drilled down to year, month or date. It is the objective data spanning three decades that gives us the confidence to persist with the system’s signals. When we persist with a well-rounded and tested strategy, it pays off handsomely.
