Trading strategies

A strategy is not an edge; it's a set of rules that makes your behaviour consistent enough to evaluate. Every approach below can lose. The point is choosing one that fits your temperament, then testing it long enough for the journal to say something.

Trend following

Buy strength, sell weakness, hold while the trend persists, exit on a trailing stop. Wins are occasional and large; losses frequent and small. The psychological cost is watching most trades stop out and giving back open profit at every trend's end. It suits patient traders; it destroys people who need to be right often.

Breakout trading

Enter as price escapes a defined range, stop just back inside. Clean when volatility expands; expensive in chop, where false breakouts hit stop after stop. Filters help — time of day, volume, a retest — but the false-break tax never disappears. Size small: the strategy's maths depends on catching the occasional runner.

Range / mean reversion

Fade moves at the edges of a range, target the middle. High win rate, small wins — and one trending day can return a month of gains if stops are soft. This is the strategy where "it always bounces" thinking kills accounts. Hard stops beyond the range are the whole discipline.

News trading

Trading scheduled releases is the hardest game here: spreads widen, slippage spikes and the first move frequently reverses. Most retail traders do better trading the post-event trend once pricing settles than gambling on the print itself. If you must trade events, guaranteed stops and tiny stakes.

Whatever you choose

Write the rules down — entry, stop, target, size, session. Run them on a demo for at least a month, journal every trade, then review with risk-management eyes: max drawdown and worst losing streak matter more than the win rate. Change one rule at a time, or you'll never know what worked.