Originally published in French on objectifeco.com, August 29, 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.
A trader who spends his life in front of the market sees only one thing: prices.
But prices alone don't get you very far. So he reaches for one method, or several, to make sense of them. Whether it's mathematical (a technical indicator) or discretionary (intuition, or some other reading of the tape), the trader is trying to put a label on the situation the market is actually in.
Most of the time, he skips a step without naming it, and jumps straight to the conclusion: I'm betting up, or I'm betting down.
This is exactly where beginners forget the one thing that matters: context.
When the market's falling, when it's rising, when it's moving a lot or barely at all, when Wall Street is open alongside Europe or isn't, when it's just spent a month falling or a month climbing: the market IS DIFFERENT.
It's simply impossible to trade the same way regardless of conditions. Beyond being a mathematical given, it's trading 101.
And yet it's one of the hardest messages to get across, and one we all keep forgetting anyway.
Just as a trader can't trade every market the same way, I don't believe there's any single strategy capable of trading every market condition.
That famous Holy Grail so many sites sell you, complete with equity curves that never falter.
Sure, if you study the past, you can bend a method, with enough mathematical muscle, into never losing. That part's very easy to do.
But the day you actually follow that strategy, live on the market, you'll quickly discover you'd simply painted a perfect curve onto the past, one that's totally incapable of predicting a single thing about the future.
The opposite, I'm convinced, is true: for a strategy to have the best odds of keeping its gains going into the future, it needs to be as basic as possible, aimed at one single market context or behaviour, so we can be sure its edge was strong enough in the past to give us the best chance of cashing in on it whenever that context shows up again.
Except that if a strategy is good at profiting from one specific situation, that necessarily means that when the market isn't showing that behaviour, it's going to rack up false signals.
Over the long run, testing has shown that the winning phases would more than make up for those false signals, and that the net result would still be trading profit.
Desk note, 2026: this describes what a strategy's historical test has to show before it is traded at all. It is not a forecast: a strategy that passed its test can still lose money live.
EVERY strategy will, sooner or later, run into stretches of market where it simply isn't suited.
It's essential to understand that they lose not because they're bad, but because the market's current behaviour isn't in sync with their comfort zone.
But now you've got it: the important thing is that it will come back round, so you have to be patient.
Part of a series. This article belongs to Market Regime: Every Strategy Is Built for One Kind of Weather. Related: The Sentence That's Going to Transform Your Trading and What I Learned in 2010. 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.
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