Beyond Technical Analysis: Developing, Testing and Implementing a Winning Trading System

A bulletproof trading system is essential for trading success. You also need an effective system for trading to implement that trading system consistently. Otherwise, your trading experience will be stressful at best and insanely inconsistent at worst. Though you can always get a "canned" black-box trading system, few traders ever stick with them for long: experts agree that the ideal system for each trader is unique to his or her trading style—proprietary systems created by the individual.

Now acclaimed system developer Tushar Chande shows you how to create "real-world" systems that meet your trading needs. A stimulating mix of cutting-edge techniques, timeless principles, and practical guidelines, Beyond Technical Analysis offers a comprehensive methodology to develop and implement your own system, bridging the gap between analysis and execution.

Chande begins with a crucial first step: assessing your trading beliefs. As he points out, "Your beliefs about price action must be at the core of your trading system. This allows the trading system to reflect your personality, and you are more likely to succeed with such a system over the long run." Once you've pinpointed your beliefs, you can then build effective systems around them.

To help you construct and use these systems, Chande starts with the basics and ends at the state of the art. With easy-to-read charts and numerous examples, Chande explores the following:

• Foundations: diagnosing market trends, the perils of optimization, setting initial stops, selecting data, choosing orders, and understanding the summary test results
• New systems: trend following, pattern-based, trend/anti-trend, inter-market, filtered and extraordinary market opportunity systems, plus variations
• Equity curve analysis: measuring smoothness, portfolio strategies, monthly equity curves, and triggering effects
• Money management: risk of ruin, projecting drawdowns, changing bet size
• Data scrambling: a new method to generate synthetic data for testing
• A system for trading: starting, risk control, compliance, full traceability

To foster consistent execution, Beyond Technical Analysis provides software that enables you to "paper trade" your system. A demo disk of Chande's $ecure trade management software and data scrambling utility will let you test your system on "true" out-of-sample data and track your emotions and P&L as you transition the system from computer table to trading desk.

A complete, concise, and thorough reference, Beyond Technical Analysis takes you step-by-step through the intricacies of customized system design, from initial concept through actual implementation.

Acclaim for Tushar Chande's revolutionary approach for developing and implementing your own winning trading system

"Tushar Chande provides insightful but clear-cut techniques which will enlighten the savant as well as the newcomer. I would urge traders of all levels of experience to apply Chande's tremendously useful strategies!" — Charles Le Beau President, Island View Financial Group Inc., author, Computer Analysis of the Futures Market

"The chapter on 'Equity Curve Analysis' alone will share with you concepts which have cost large trading houses millions of dollars to discover." —Murray A. Ruggiero, Jr. Contributing Editor, Futures Magazine President, Ruggiero Associates

"Tushar Chande is an accomplished quantitative technician, but in this book he's gone far beyond grinding numbers. His coverage of system development is the first thorough treatment disclosing both specific trading systems and the practicalities of their implementation." — John Sweeney Technical Editor, Technical Analysis of Stocks & Commodities magazine author, Maximum Adverse Excursion: Analyzing Price Fluctuations for Trading Management

"For any aspiring CTA, this is a must-read on developing [his or her] trading system." — Rick Leesley Jack Carl Futures

TUSHAR S. CHANDE, PhD, holds nine U.S. patents for creative solutions to flexible manufacturing problems using high-power lasers and optical fibers. A contributing editor to Technical Analysis of Stocks & Commodities magazine, he has been a registered Commodity Trading Advisor and is the principal author of The New Technical Trader (Wiley).