Great advices from this Reddit post.

Advices

  1. Don’t quit your job

  2. Don’t write your backtesting engine

  3. Expect to spend 3-5 years coming up with remotely consistent/profitable method. That’s assuming you put 20h+/week in it. 80% spent on your strategy development, 10% on experiments, 10% on automation

  4. Watching online videos / reading reddit generally doesn’t contribute to your becoming better at this. Count those hours separately and limit them

  5. Become an expert in your method. Stop switching

  6. Find your own truth. What makes one trader successful might kill another one if used outside of their original method. Only you can tell if that applies to you

  7. Look for an edge big/smart money can’t take advantage of (hint - liquidity)

  8. Remember, automation lets you do more of “what works” and spending less time doing that, focus on figuring out what works before automating

  9. Separate strategy from execution and automation

  10. Spend most of your time on the strategy and its validation

  11. Know your costs / feasibility of fills. Run live experiments.

  12. Make first automation bare-bones, your strategy will likely fail anyway

  13. Top reasons why your strategy will fail: incorrect (a) test (b) data (c) costs/execution assumptions or (d) inability to take a trade. Incorporate those into your validation process

  14. Be sceptical of test results with less than 1000 trades

  15. Be sceptical of test results covering one market cycle

  16. No single strategy work for all market conditions, know your favorable conditions and have realistic expectations

  17. Good strategy is the one that works well during favorable conditions and doesn’t lose too much while waiting for them

  18. Holy grail of trading is running multiple non-correlated strategies specializing on different market conditions

  19. Know your expected Max DD. Expect live Max DD be 2x of your worst backtest

  20. Don’t go down the rabbit hole of thinking learning a new language/framework will help your trading. Generally it doesn’t with rare exceptions

  21. Increase your trading capital gradually as you gain confidence in your method

  22. Once you are trading live, don’t obsess over $ fluctuations. It’s mostly noise that will keep you distracted

  23. Only 2 things matter when running live - (a) if your model=backtest staying within expected parameters (b) if your live executions are matching your model

  24. Know when to shutdown your system

  25. Individual trade outcome doesn’t matter