1What Is a Trading System?
Traders are constantly asking us “What exactly is a system?” The purpose of this article will be to give you that information as clearly as possible. First, we’ll go through some background information to help you understand what a system is outside of the context of trading. You’ll learn how different people relate to systems according to how they relate to money. The second part of this article will focus on clearly defining what a trading system is. The third part of this article will focus on the broader picture of your system—your trading plan. Finally, we’ll focus on some key elements in system development.
Business Systems
In Robert Kiyosaki’s book, Cash-Flow Quadrant, he distinguishes two types of people who work for money and two types of people who have money working for them. In each case, one of the major distinguishing characteristics is how they deal with systems.
First, let’s look at the idea of business systems. McDonald’s, as a major franchise, is basically a large set of systems that one buys. In fact, a person who buys a McDonald’s franchise must go to Hamburger University for about six months (I believe that’s the length of it) to learn the systems for operating the franchise. There are systems for food delivery, preparing food, greeting customers, serving them within a minute, cleanup, etc. And all of these systems can easily be carried out by a manager who has a college degree and employees who might even be high school dropouts. In other words, a system is something that is repeatable, simple enough to be run by a 16 year old who might not be that bright, and works well enough to keep many people returning as customers.
Now, knowing that definition of a system, let’s look at how people in the four cash flow quadrants relate to systems.
The Employee: Employees are basically motivated by security. They have a job and they do their work to get money. Employees basically run the systems. They don’t necessarily know that they are running a system, but that is their function. For example, one employee at McDonald’s will greet customers and take their order. This employee is basically running the “customer-greeting” system.
Most employees do not understand systems. Instead, they just know what their job is. And this is typical of employees who become traders or employees who work as traders. They typically ask questions such as “What stocks should I buy?” “What is the market going to do?” Or “How do I go about doing this?” We see it all the time in the questions we get. For example, a gentleman just called into CNBC, as I’m writing this, and asked the guest, “What direction do you think the market may go with respect to 'the war' and how might one profit from it?” These are typically employee questions. And they amount to saying, “I don’t really understand anything, please tell me what to do!” The financial media thrives by answering the questions of the employee investor/trader.
The Self-Employed Person: The self-employed person is basically motivated by control and doing it right. Notice that I have often talked about how these motivations constitute some of the biases that most traders have—the need to be right and the need to control the markets. The self-employed person is the entire system. They are basically running on a treadmill only they don’t know it. And the more they work, the more tired they get.
Like the employee, the self-employed are working for money. However, they like it a little better, because they are in charge. They think working harder will make them more money—and to a certain extent it does. But mostly, working harder gets them tired. Nevertheless, they continue to plough forward thinking that they are the only ones who can do it right.
As I said earlier, the self-employed person basically is the system. And quite often they cannot see the system because they are so much a part of it. They are stuck in all the details. In addition, they have a strong tendency to want to “complexify” things. They are always looking for perfectionism and they believe that the perfect system must be complex. They are always asking, “What will make my system perfect?”
A lot of people come into trading from the self-employed mentality—doctors, dentists, and other professionals who had their own small business in which they were basically all of the systems in one. This is all they tend to know and they approach trading the same way. They keep adding complexity “until it works,” even though this strategy seldom works. The self-employed person would be likely to have a discretionary system that is constantly being changed.
The Business Owner: A good business owner should be able to walk away from the business for a year and come back to find it running better than before. While this is an ideal type of statement, it has some theoretical truth to it. This should occur because the job of the business owner is to design a group of systems to run the business so well that his employees can do the job by themselves (or at least with a manager in place). In other words, the business owner is someone who designs systems and these are usually simple systems.
The business owner usually does very well in the trading arena if they approach the process the same way that they’ve run a business before. And, of course, the business owner would usually hire someone to run their trading system, at a much lower wage.
When Tom Basso,1 who is interviewed in The New Market Wizards, did workshops with me, he always described himself as a businessman first and a trader second. Part of Tom’s perspective was to look for repetitive tasks that a human being in his organization has to repeat over and over again. When he found such tasks, his job was to develop a program to take that task out of human hands. Routine computer programs are great examples of simple systems.
The Investor: The last person on the quadrant is the investor. The investor is someone who invests in businesses and his/her most important criterion should be, “What is the rate of return of the business?” In other words, this person is continuing to ask, “If I put money in this investment, what kind of return will I get on it?” High return investments (e.g., high returns on equity) are typically good businesses in which to put your money.
Robert Kiyosaki describes this as the quadrant in which money is converted to wealth. Rich people, according to Kiyosaki, derive 70% of their income from investments and 30% or less of their income from wages.
Most traders are probably not investors by this definition. They buy low or sell high, trading stocks. As a result, there is something they must do to generate their money. Investors, in contrast, are people who typically look for places where they can put their money that generate rates of returns of 25% or higher without them doing anything. If you know how to get those types of returns, then you want to hold onto those investments as long as possible. Many high tech stocks were showing earnings growth rates of well over 25%, and when they did, the prices went up dramatically because this is what investors want. The problem with such investments is they are not guaranteed to continue forever. Many of you have probably discovered that in the last few years.
