At the very beginning of my own podcasting career, I had a great conversation with Mike Deva,

covering many trading related topics, one of which was the different approaches to trading.

And there was one segment in particular that I really liked and which I would like to share

with you today. And it was a segment where Mike shared his own systematic approach to trading.

And as you listen to it, please keep in mind that Mike was not always a systematic trader.

If you would like to listen to the full conversation, you can do so by just going to top traders on plug.com forward slash zero three and also

forward slash zero four and the benchmark program was that systematic and completely without discretion or did you keep some of the sort of the your discretionary trading in there?

No, we didn't. It was fully systematic. But what we did was look at a lot of the types of trading that I did through the 80s and try to capture that in a systematic fashion.

So, for example, we had a number of strategies that were based on market reaction to news events or reports

because I traded a lot of that type of event reaction in my discretionary trading.

So we systematized the approach, captured it in the best way we possibly could, and included

that in the benchmark program.

So there were a number of strategies in benchmark that were based on sort of that intuitive

or discretionary feel, but instead of relying on, you know, the black box of the brain

to interpret everything correctly each day

it followed you know rigid set of rules to be able to repeat the process you know every time it

reoccurred and and and so in in that sense just just to be clear were you convinced even at that time early on that if you were going to be successful

from an investment management point of view, you had to be systematic. Was that something that just

was obvious at that time? Or was it more an operational issue where you say, okay, what's

actually easier if I can do it systematically?

Because, you know, the systematic side of things are partly, I think, an operational issue,

but it's also an emotional issue in my...

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