《道氏理论：顶级交易员深入解读》 作 者：Robert Bhea（原著） 魏强斌（译注）

Trading Method" is sweeping across the entire country. The core of Turtle Trading Method lies in two factors :first, the philosophy of trendy trading implied in “Weeks' Rules";second, the philosophy of mechanical trading and systematic trading implied in fund management and risk control. The so-called “Weeks ’ Rules" can be simplified as simples rules that going long at high and short at low within N weeks since price breakthrough. While Trading as breaking illustrates trend following trading. If we go deeper, we will find that “Weeks ’ Rules" is a trading system in nature. It tells us the principle of systematic trading and the principle of mechanical trading. Well, let's just put these two principles aside and look at some amazing facts in the first place.

The greatest representatives of fundamental investment and speculation are undoubtedly Warren Buffett and George Soros. The former claimed the title of richest man in the world in 2007 again. You can imagine how powerful he is; the latter is accredited as “ the only civilian who has independent diplomatic policies in the world”. The two masters win these glamorous titles because of their possession of enormous wealth. In essence, it is due to unparalleled financial trading that makes them admired by the whole world. Fresh with his feet in the field of investment, Buffett was regarded by the guru of Information Theory as the richest man in the future world for this guru considered that the practice by Buffett of Probability Theory is unparallel by anyone; Buffett ’ wife even made his investment secrets public. It is not hard to see that the trading system of Buffett is really powerful that even those technical speculators famous for quantity theory have to bow before him. Buffet said

himself that 85% of his ideas are inherited from Benjamin Graham who is a representative of investing in a accountant's actuarial method which requires probability and systematic thinking. The interesting thing is that Buffett is a good player of bridge and his partner is Bill Gates! Playing bridge requires mentality of strict probability which is systematic thinking,no wonder that Buffett conquered the guru of Information Theory on bridge table and then conquered the whole financial world. From these facts we can see that even in his early plays of bridge, Buffett had shown his ambition to become king of the financial world.

Soros has written a large bucket of books among which the most famous is The Alechemy of Finance. In this book he tried to build a system of speculation. His teachers are Karl Popper and Hayek. The two thought that human perception has some inherent flaws, so their students Soros consequently deems that emotion and limited rationality lead to “ Boom and Burst Cycles" of market; while if a man wants to become a great trader, he must overcome influences of such flaws and furthermore take advantage of them. Soros tried to build a systematic framework for trading based on economic ideas of Hayek and philosophic thoughts of Karl Popper. Reflexivity is the very core of this system.

I may still tell you so many financial gurus taking systematic trading and mechanical trading as their principles, for instance, Bernstein （master of short line trading）, Bill Williams （master of Chaos Trading）, etc. Too many. Let's just forget about them.

Well, from the abstract perspective, why shall we take the road to systematic trading and mechanical trading? Please let me show you some very obvious reasons.

First. A man’s perception and action are easily affected by market and participating groups. When you are staying in market or a group for more than 5 minutes, you will be hypnotized by ambient setting and ever since that your decisions will be affected by irrational elements.

Second. Any trading is composed of situation analysis and account management. It involves not only entrance but exit which may be either exit at profit or exit at a loss, and there are problems such as selling out and buying in. All these require multiple decision -makings, particularly in short line trading. Complicated and frequent decision -making is beyond the average brain of emotional and busy people. I bet every short line player of forex or gold knows it well that decision -making in fatigue and anxiety usually leads to failure.Well, systematic trading and machanical trading are able to manage these procedures repeatedly in a process and thus can save lots of time and energy.

Third. People make decisions in a quite casual manner. A more important factor is that people use different strategies in varying degrees in trading. This makes it difficult toevaluate the performance of such trading because in that way you will not know how much a specific factor plays in the N tradings. And the player can not improve his skills consequently. This is the very reason that many domestic retail investors make no progress at all for many years. Evaluation of trading techniques and strategies shall be based on plenty enough trading samples while it's simply impossible for tradings casually made for every trading adopts a variant strategy and samples accordingly derive from a different totality which can not be used for calculating and analysis. On the contrary, systematic trading and mechanical trading adopt the same strategy every time so they have applicable samples for performance evaluation and it’seasier to pinpoint problems, for instance, a player may in first, second ... twenty-first tradings used strategies A, B , C , D. He himself could not make effective evaluation of each strategy for he used them in varying degrees in these tradings,but systematic trading and mechanical trading can shoot this trouble completely. Therefore,if you want to evaluate your trading strategies rationally and make quicker progress, you have to take systematic trading and mechanjcal trading as principles.