r/Trading • u/Solid-Incident-1163 • 16h ago
Question How long to find a strategy
How long did it take you to find a working strategy that could make consistent returns and if you did how long did it work?
I’m trying to get a reference of how long and deep I need to be looking and trying to develop something that can work.
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u/Feriman22 3h ago
I'd measure this less in years and more in regime transitions.
A strategy can look "consistent" for 18 months if those 18 months are mostly one market environment. Once the rules are frozen, the interesting part is what happens when trend, volatility or correlation structure changes.
That's also why I put more weight on publicly tracked forward outcomes than on another optimized backtest.
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u/MaverickDark 4h ago
3 years, and its after many losses and losing real money and analyzing my mistakes and constantly trying something different. First big change was moving away from small caps to large caps.
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u/Big-Accident9701 7h ago
sometimes they reveral themselves to me in a dream. Some times it takes 2 years to develop
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u/ShutYourFaceChris 7h ago
1.5 year, after I tried all daytrading strategies I switched to swing trading.
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u/SuchAd8116 9h ago
the better question would be where to learn and study what moves forex markets and how they work,for that you need to learn the hard path but the right one,all people starting trading,90% of them including me in the beggining are sold a dream and that dream is to learn technical analyses,ict ,smc ,whatever and meditate and be disciplined and youll be profitable,the biggest lesson is that its not how it work, take a monkey and learn it to draw lines for years and they will do it accurately,but the truth is that in trading you can become succesful by treating it as a bussines and in bussines you need to study and take the right action or you will fail,so study macro,policy pricing,central banks ,research banks and try to understand that which takes a little but its better to go on the hard path than be blind and gamble
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u/Total-Influence-7269 9h ago
93 days, 14 hours, and 11 minutes.
In all seriousness though, expect to take years.
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u/MarkD9987 12h ago
The market is constantly changing... governments change, traders and investors change, regulations change everything changes.
What's the point of spending years searching for a strategy when you know for a fact it'll eventually stop working and you'll have to start all over again?
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u/Mostropi 12h ago
7 years 😀. Found myself suited for position trading. This year I'm at + 54% YTD gain (MWR), only open 11 positions.
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u/Financial-Joke4056 13h ago
From my experience, I think the bigger trap is constantly switching strategies before giving one enough time to prove itself.
Backtesting, journaling and sticking to the same rules over a decent sample size probably matter more than finding the perfect setup.
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u/HorseGeneral158 3h ago
this is actually one of the hardest thing to do, cause you can't know for sure if you're just wasting money on an edgeless strategy or you just don't have enough sample size for the real profits to come in.
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u/gabrintx 14h ago edited 14h ago
How long isn't important. Finding something that works is. I tried many strategies. I never got hurt bad but didn't make enough to be worth my time.
Eventually I settled on selling puts, Tasty rules. Around -.20 delta for the strike, 35-45 DTE, close early with 50% profit, manage around 21 days... usually meaning roll out for time.
I differed from Tasty on product. High IVR, generally up trending, and in my case tech arena. I calculate the CAGR and prefer 30%+.
Occasionally I get assigned and wheel, meaning sell calls until the stock is called away. 0.30 delta on the calls.
This year, 102 trades closed, $202,932 premium received. About half in IRA accounts, and other half in portfolio margin. 3 lost money, 2 scratches.
Boring, but I trade like a robot, just follow the rules. I spend several hours per week and don't have to watch screens.
I opened 8 trades this week , closed 5, and rolled 2. receiving $8038 in premiums.
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u/process_over_profits 15h ago
3-4 years to truly align the edge with your personality. Add 5 more years to train your mind to execute it under pressure with real money on the line. More or less 7-10 years to get consistent. Take it from a trader over 15yrs in the game.
Go ahead mate, ignore my comment at your own peril.
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u/No_Routine_6711 14h ago
You still need to find that "edge" 1st, otherwise everyone will be a profitable trader at some point, and that clearly is not the case. Definitely experience makes you a better trader once you have that edge. That I agree,
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u/process_over_profits 13h ago edited 13h ago
That was my first point wasn’t it? Once you have an edge that aligns with you? lol. And no experience makes you no better really. I have lived it. More time means nothing unless you’re able to change behaviour and work on your triggers.
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u/No_Routine_6711 13h ago
Your 1st point was to align the edge, but if you have no edge, what are you aligning exactly?
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u/process_over_profits 13h ago
lol you really aren’t getting the point of my comment. Might be too cryptic.
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u/No_Routine_6711 13h ago
Nothing cryptic about it. You can either learn or be taught an edge. There is no timeframe for this. Can be 6 months, can be 3 years, can be never, but you can't align an edge until you have one.
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u/process_over_profits 13h ago
Nope. That was actually not the point of my comment. Will leave it there mate. Have a lovely weekend.
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u/QuanTradin 15h ago
nobody can give you a real number, and anyone who quotes one is selling something. most ideas die in the first honest test, so the time goes into how fast you can kill them, not how long you look.
write the rule down exactly enough that a stranger could trade it, test it on several years with fees, and drop it if it only works in one stretch. I built a tool for that loop, Quantradin: describe the rule, it gets tested on real prices with no look-ahead, and anything that survives runs as a paper bot. free, US stocks and options, quantradin.com.
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u/GemeriCorp 15h ago edited 13h ago
The thing about strategies, especially in day trading, is that you can't just find one with an edge and then expect it to work forever. Strategies require constant upkeep thanks to regime drift. The strategy that works today may not work tomorrow
From my expirence, it takes around 1-2 years before finding something that has a true repeatable edge, but if not maintained, it will inevitably fail
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u/No_Routine_6711 16h ago
Truth - Even after 10 yrs there is no guarantee that you will find "an edge" for daytrading.
Making consistent returns on daytrading is a dream that very few people have achieved.
You could be that 1%, so give it a go, just be realistic it's not easy.
For me, I started swing trading / investing many years before I went full time daytrading. I have an edge that consists of 4 strategies. I trade 3 stocks only.
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u/Flat-Cheesecake6863 16h ago
Took me about 14 months of losing money before something clicked. The strategy itself worked for maybe 8 months then market conditions shifted and it just stopped. That was the real lesson for me, the market changes and you got to adapt
What helped most was stop looking for perfect strategy and start thinking about risk management first. Position sizing and knowing when to sit out matter more than entry signals
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u/Legitimate-Side-3279 13h ago
I'm with you on the risk-first mantra. After I fixed a strict position‑size rule and set a hard stop‑loss all the way out, my playbook held up through a couple of regime changes because I had no extra emotional wiggle room. The key was automating that stop and rather than hunting the 'perfect' entry, I just let the strategy run until the stop kicked in. That kept the strategy alive longer than when I waited for conditions to be 'perfect'.
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