The purpose of this book is not to give you the best ready-made systems, but
to show you how to go about developing your own systems—a development process
that eventually and hopefully will allow you to put together a trading strategy that is
a long-term work process as opposed to a series of single, isolated decisions.
The advantage of the concept of a work process, in comparison with decision,
is that rule-based trading can be understood as a form of problem solving, using the
four P’s of speculation: philosophy, principles, procedures, and performance.
The emphasis in this book seems to be on the principles, procedures, and per-
formance, but while reading we also need to at least try to understand the philos-
ophy behind it all, because it is the philosophy that ties it all together and explains
the value of the suggested principles and procedures in the rest of the book. That
is what this book really is about. Good luck with your studying and trading.xx IntroductionStridsman FM 5/27/03 4:39 PM Page xx