Originally published in French on objectifeco.com, August 27, 2014. The site was purged in 2016; this text survives only in the Internet Archive (Snapshot). Translated, not rewritten: what follows is the original argument as it was made, including what time has since proven wrong. Where that happens, you'll find a note from the desk, dated 2026.
I've spent ten years trying to put a sentence into words, and Charles just handed it to me, in his latest article:
You're not betting on price levels. You're betting on the persistence of price behaviour. That's not the same story.
Desk note, 2026: Samuel names the author only as Charles, and the archived page does not link Charles's article, so the line cannot be traced to its original source.
Ever since I started writing about trading strategies, I've been trying to explain that what matters most isn't what they do, but the context in which they do it.
I wrote three other pieces on improving your trading a few weeks back:
- Short-selling, to find more potential in your trading and protect the rest of your positions.
- Making sure your trading always has specific filters for hunting down the rare cases that pay off.
- The only way to win with an exit, a decision that shapes your gains and losses more than any other single element.
For instance, I've often used this kind of explanation:
If a strategy is built to win when the market falls, and the market only ever climbs, it can't win. That's not the strategy's fault. It's the market's fault, for not currently suiting it.
Put that way, I can see it clearly myself: I've spent ten years failing to get the message across.
Charles found the sentence that sums it all up, and I'm sure it'll let everyone finally understand:
"You're not betting on price levels. You're betting on the persistence of price behaviour. That's not the same story."
A trading strategy is a mathematical edge, proven on a given market. Meaning: by doing the same thing, over and over, in the same CONTEXT, you'll eventually come out with more gains than losses, and you'll make money.
What matters most is that one word: CONTEXT.
It's exactly what Charles so brilliantly captured with the word behaviour, and it sums up everything.
Part of a series. This article belongs to Market Regime: Every Strategy Is Built for One Kind of Weather. Related: You Always Have to Trade the Same Way: True or False? and The Value Added by a "Filtered" Strategy. Background: trend following in the Ouinex glossary.
About the author. Samuel Rondot has traded since 1995, self-taught. Between 2009 and 2017 he published around 300 articles on objectifeco.com, abcbourse.com and his own blog, many of them drawn from what he saw in hundreds of client accounts. Objectifeco wiped its archive in 2016; the Internet Archive kept a copy, and every article republished here links to its original. He now runs the Strategy at Ouinex.
Trading leveraged products carries a high risk of loss.
