Your goal is to maximize your profits and thus your return on your trading capital. But how do you know if your trading is truly optimized or if there is room for improvement and more money to be made with it? If it could be better, is it you or your system and how can you tell?
Trading systems, like automobile engines, are never 100% efficient and there are parallels between the two that can be useful to you. There are many concepts from Mechanical Engineering which can be utilized in Trading. One in particular is the Carnot Cycle.
The ultimate engine would convert every joule of the chemical energy in the fuel to work as that is the engine’s primary purpose. In the real world, a certain amount of that chemical energy is lost to heat, friction, entropy and other inefficiencies.
For any given trading system executed perfectly, there will always be a certain percentage of trades that are not profitable and a certain portion that are. Additionally, most systems are based on lagging indicators and even “predictive” systems still rely on historical data. No system out here will pick the exact top and bottom of every market move, so the size of...