14 years of trading. 5 losing months.
Wizard Wednesday #7: Mr. Consistency, the rotting-capital quote, and the edge I’m testing next.
Chapter seven is the one they call Mr. Consistency. Jason Berry: 14 years of audited trading, 5 down months total, no losing years since 1999. No catastrophic gains, no multimillion-dollar pullbacks, just base hits stacked for a decade and a half. If you’ve traded any length of time you know how ludicrous that is.
His best line is the whole chapter in one sentence. If you don’t have an edge but amazing discipline, you are just managing a slowly rotting pile of capital. The trading world has this exactly backwards. Everybody blames psychology, and when you ask for the backtest proving their system works, there isn’t one. Prove the edge first. Then discipline has something worth protecting. Every system I run has a 26-year backtest behind it for exactly this reason, drawdowns included and published.
Where the consistency actually comes from: spreads. Good news that favors the broad market over tech? He buys one index, shorts the other, and profits on the gap either direction. Not directional bets, relative ones. And he treats edges as mortal. They degrade, he retires them, he hunts new ones constantly, and the hunt never stops because the more edges you run, the less any single death matters.
That last part is the steal. Spread trades are new territory for me, everything I run is directional, and it just went to the top of the testing list. If I get one tenth of that consistency, I’ll take it.
If you want the edges I find delivered with entries, stops, and sizing, that’s Stats Edge Pro. $149.99 a month, 30-day money-back guarantee.
Michael Nauss, CMT, CAIA, CDMS