Tag Archives: Risk Management

Protecting Trading Profits: What to Do When You’re Well Ahead of Target

Protecting trading profits

Picture the situation. You are a pair trader with a 2% monthly target, roughly 25% a year. You have just posted three months in a row above +4%. It is August. You sit at +27% for the year, and you have already cleared your annual goal with four months still to run. So what is the correct course of action? The honest answer starts with a warning. Protecting trading profits at this stage is mostly a test of psychology, not strategy. This moment is more dangerous than it feels.

Being well ahead pulls you two ways at once.

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Trading for Beginners: How to Start Without Getting Wiped Out by the Next Bear Market

Trading for beginners

 

Between 2020 and 2024, the number of UK adults using an investment platform jumped from 4.4 million to 7.9 million — an 80% leap in just four years (Investment Trends / FCA data). At the same time, mandatory FCA risk disclosures show that 71% to 79% of retail CFD traders lose money at the UK’s largest brokers (IG 71%, CMC 76%, eToro 77%, Plus500 79%).

Two numbers, one uncomfortable question for anyone asking how to get into trading: if so many people are piling in, why are so many losing — and what are the survivors doing differently?

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Kalman Filters vs. PairTrade Finder®

Why We Keep It Simple (On Purpose) Kalman filters

From time to time, experienced traders reach out and ask:

“Why doesn’t PairTrade Finder® use a Kalman filter to calculate dynamic hedge ratios?”

It’s a fair question. Kalman filters are widely used in quantitative finance and are often presented as a more advanced way to trade pairs.

So this post explains our thinking clearly.

PairTrade Finder® is designed to capture most of the statistical edge—without the complexity that often reduces real-world performance.

In practice, as a rule we seek to target a platform that delivers 80% of the benefit of institutional grade models with around 20% of the complexity.

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