I’m guilty of useless expansion. 

I end up doing it all the time. 

Can’t help myself, you see.

I like to keep exploring new stuff in the market. 

The silver lining is, the even though I might be expanding sideways, there are two good things happening also. 

There is no scaling up happening immediately. Good. 

There is also a lot of discarding going on. Things that don’t work out are eventually abandoned. Great. 

My issue is that I might have between 1 to 2 useless strategies in my repertoire at any given time. 

These strategies are not working. In fact they are dying out. Reasons can be many. A strategy might be sound, but it might not be a fit. 

For a strategy to work for you, it must be practically lucrative in the long run, and it must fit you. 

By the time I realize that a strategy needs to be discarded, money has been lost. Tuition fees? Yes. 

Ultimately, things boil down to a handful of successful strategies. It can even ultimately boil down to one or two successful ones.

Get there. I’m trying too. To do so, useless strategies will need to be discarded, like, now. 

The problem is, you don’t know that a strategy is useless till it has hit you a few times. 

Also, you don’t wish to discard something that you think might just work out for you in the long run. 

Fine. Keep grinding, and ultimately narrow down your sideways expansion, till you’re only working with strategies that are yielding, and show a long-term promise of being around. 

Right. 

You’re there. 

Now you can scale up. Doing so using a yielding strategy that fits is called useful expansion. 

Scale up slowly. 

You can position-size, and scale up using profits. This way you are not putting in extra principal. Let the strategy continue to prove itself by yielding. As long as it does so, you keep scaling up on your positions using the newly earned profits. 

Why is useful expansion not easy to maintain?

We get carried away.

We might scale up too fast, and then baulk at a loss when the size of the loss is too difficult to swallow. Large input can result in a largish potential loss.

Trading is about containing loss, and letting profits run. 

Scaling up too fast makes an early loss look big if we haven’t tasted the corresponding potential profits yet. Such an event can even cause us to abandon a successful strategy because we are disheartened. 

Therefore, try not to scale up by putting in new principal, if you can help it. 

Try scaling up on profits alone.

Position-sizing automatically controls the scale-up-scale-down factors by defining the size of a constant stop as a percentage of the principal remaining between trades.

Position-sizing makes one scale-up and scale-down on auto-pilot in a relatively balanced fashion.

Please incorporate this wonderful ideology (which comes from the stable of Dr. Van Tharp) into your trading strategy. 

🙂