Strategy
Strategy
Strategy covers the major retail trading approaches with the same honest framing as the rest of the site. Trend-following, mean reversion, carry trades and their tail risk, breakouts, news trading, scalping versus swing trading, and the harder structural question of why most retail systems fail. Each article presents the academic evidence, the realistic expectations, and the cases where the approach quietly stops working. This section is published as explanation, never as recommendation.
Start here
Why Most Retail Trading Systems Fail
Survivorship bias, selection bias, transaction-cost neglect, regime change, and the regulator-disclosed loss rates: the structural reasons most retail systems do not survive a real market.
Read this first →More in Strategy
Trend Following: The Long-Run Evidence
The academic record on currency trend strategies, why the effect is real but smaller than the marketing suggests, the drawdown cost of capturing it, and what it means for retail.
Read the explainer →Carry Trades and Tail Risk
The long-run carry premium in currencies, the negative skewness that comes with it, the academic evidence on currency crashes, and the August 2024 yen unwind as the canonical recent case study.
Read the explainer →Scalping vs Day Trading vs Swing Trading
The three time-horizon styles compared honestly: what each requires, the friction arithmetic that makes higher frequency structurally harder, and who each style actually suits.
Read the explainer →News Trading: The Honest Take
What news trading actually is, why the retail edge is tiny, what happens in the milliseconds after an NFP or CPI print, and how to think about macro events without pretending you can trade them.
Read the explainer →Keeping a Trading Journal
What to actually log in a trading journal, how to review it usefully, why most traders keep them wrong, and the specific practices that convert a journal from paperwork into an edge.
Read the explainer →