The premise
Trading has a strange property: past a very low threshold, additional complexity makes results worse. More indicators mean more curve fitting. More strategies mean thinner samples and shallower skill. More screen time means more trades, and more trades mean more mistakes and more costs. The traders who last are running something almost insultingly simple, and their entire edge is that they actually run it.
So the playbook is short. Seven steps. None of them are clever. All of them are harder than they look, because each one asks you to give something up: novelty, action, the feeling of being smart.
Step 1: Pick one strategy with published evidence
Don't invent. Borrow from the small set of effects that have survived decades of public scrutiny: trend following (the 200-day filter, the golden cross), momentum (52-week highs, dual momentum), or plain structure (horizontal levels). One. Not a portfolio of five. One market, one setup, one timeframe until you've earned a second.
Step 2: Write the rules on one page
If your plan doesn't fit on a page, it isn't a plan; it's a mood with footnotes. The template:
| Section | One or two lines each |
|---|---|
| Market | What you trade, and the one condition under which you're allowed to trade it |
| Entry | The exact if–then trigger a stranger could execute |
| Stop | Where you're provably wrong, decided before entry |
| Size | The 1% formula: size falls out of the stop, never the other way |
| Exit | How winners end: trailing stop, target, or opposite signal |
| Review | When you review (weekly) and when you may change rules (quarterly, with data) |
Print it. A plan that lives in your head renegotiates itself in real time.
Step 3: Risk 1% per trade, no exceptions
The 1% rule is the load-bearing wall of the whole playbook. It makes losing streaks survivable, makes every trade emotionally small, and makes your results a statistics problem instead of a survival problem. "No exceptions" includes the trade you're most sure about, especially that one, because conviction is where accounts die.
Step 4: Trade daily or weekly charts
Slower timeframes give you fewer decisions, cheaper costs, wider margins for being human, and a strategy that coexists with a job and a family. Speed is a professional's game; patience is the retail trader's only structural advantage. Use it.
Step 5: Journal every trade
Seven fields, two minutes, a spreadsheet. The journal is how you find the two habits leaking most of your money, and it's the only honest scoreboard for step 7.
Step 6: Review weekly, change quarterly
Thirty minutes a week to check execution and trail stops. But rule changes happen on a slower clock: quarterly at most, only with a written reason and a real sample behind it. This gap between reviewing often and changing rarely is what kills strategy-hopping, the most expensive hobby in retail trading.
Step 7: Grade yourself on execution, not money
Over any given week, P&L is mostly noise; whether you followed your rules is fully yours. Count rule-adherence like a batting average and let the hundred-trade sample judge the system. Paradoxically, the traders who stop obsessing over money are the ones who end up making it, which is the whole argument of Trading in the Zone.
What to delete
Simplifying is mostly subtraction. Safe to remove today:
- Every indicator past the second. They're all transformations of the same price series; the third one is décor.
- Financial news during market hours. It's entertainment engineered to feel actionable. Your system doesn't have a "pundit" input.
- Other people's live trades. Signal groups and chat-room callouts are how you end up trading fifty systems badly instead of one well.
- The four other strategies. Archive them. They'll still exist in a year when you've mastered the first.
- Leverage you don't need. If 1% sizing says the position is small, the answer is a small position, not more margin.
Go deeper
The blog covers each strategy in detail; the books are where the evidence lives.