---
title: "The Key to a Growing Business is Delegation and Leadership"
url: https://stacklist.com/card/f3ee5fe0-0f4c-46c8-b972-69f046296745
source_url: "https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/key-growing-business-delegation-leadership-applies-humans-aferiat/?trackingId=VsFcGBudRW60D08S5BjX7w%3D%3D"
stack: https://stacklist.com/c/education/stack/3701d09f-5d84-426c-aef0-e129d294445b
summary: "Trading automation and AI decision support systems enable traders to execute strategies efficiently and unemotionally while reducing the psychological toll of manual trading. The content chronicles a trader's journey through strategy drift and the transformative potential of automated trading systems like Trade Ideas' HOLLY AI engine."
tags: "trading, ai-automation, delegation, strategy-drift, risk-management, algorithmic-trading"
key_entities: "David Aferiat (person), Sean McLaughlin (person), Michael Covel (person), Trade Ideas (organization), HOLLY (technology), Turtle Traders (concept), trend-following (concept), strategy-drift (concept), Grand Palais, Paris, France (location), Medium.com (location)"
classification: "analysis"
content_hash: "sha256:8fe2c2cd7b06d5fa8f15ed470330200831d645a554e21c5a6caa680277c381c4"
acp_version: "0.2"
token_counts_approximate: 1069
visibility: public
agent_accessible: true
status: "final"
---

# The Key to a Growing Business is Delegation and Leadership

(C) David Aferiat, Grand Palais, Paris, France 2018 " An unemotional, statistically driven trading assistant serving you only the best of the best each trading day. How much would you pay to have such a person working for you? Instead of manually entering and exiting positions and calculating position sizing on the fly, [Trade Ideas] customers will now have the option to automate this entire process, exact to our own custom risk-management specifications. And while we certainly won’t encourage users to just turn it on and leave the office for the rest of the day, it will be an absolute game-changer to be able to watch the system execute with our best intentions — efficiently and un-emotionally — while we stand by to take discretionary action wherever necessary. " Editor's Note: My colleague and friend Sean McLaughlin at Trade Ideas shares a personal trading experience he's carried on his shoulders for years. What the therapy could not fix, I'm proud to say Trade Ideas' innovations in AI and decision support finally resolve. Here's his journey that begins below and finishes at Medium.com "This story for me begins back in my futures trading days. Back then, I embarked on a journey to learn how to be a trend following commodities trader, inspired by the famous Turtle Traders story. I fully immersed myself in the philosophies of trend following and the nuts-n-bolts of how to execute as faithfully to the original core strategy as I could. I devoured every book, article, interview, and video that I could find on anyone and anything connected to the Turtles or trend following. Naturally, I came across Michael Covel’s work on the subject and he became a tremendous resource for me. It was an exciting time in my trading career. It was as if a light bulb went off in my head and I was seeing things clearly for the very first time. After building, testing, revising, then paper trading my strategies for some time, I then launched a small hedge fund to put my money where my mouth was. And it went very well! In fact, I returned 58% to my investors AFTER MY PERFORMANCE FEES in just 18 months before closing the fund down due to external forces. Needless to say, I was hooked on the idea of being a strategy and system-based trader versus the shoot-from-the-hip day trader I was in the equities market in years previous. However, what happened next I wouldn’t wish on anyone. I jumped deep down the rabbit hole of devising and developing new strategies on short and intraday timeframes. I was convinced I can come up with world beating trading plans. Due to the fact that I’ve never been very computer savvy beyond the basics, I brainstormed trading strategies and then backtested them  by hand  — tick-by-agonizing-tick — as far back as I could until my eyeballs bled. And then I forward-tested a bit. At this point I either went back to the drawing board and started over with a small tweak, scrapped the whole plan and started over from scratch, or went forward and committed real capital to the strategy. And if I was lucky, the strategy would work for a while… until it didn’t. And then I was back to square one. Smarter people than me call this circle of insanity “Style-” or “Strategy Drift.” This process has in one form another repeated itself over and over for the rest of my career. I don’t know where I continually found the resolve to get back up off the floor after being kicked in the mouth by Mr. Market time and time again. There were numerous times I looked into the abyss and said to myself: “It’s over. It’s time to give up.” Yet, for some reason I kept dusting myself off and headed back into the salt mine for another round of punishment. Am I a masochist? To this day, I still ask myself this question. And I don’t have a good answer other than  blind stubbornness . I wanted to lay all this out there as a backdrop for why I’m very excited for what’s coming… On the eve of Trade Ideas’ upcoming release of auto-trading for our AI engine HOLLY, it is a good time to reflect on why HOLLY is a powerful game-changer for both Pro and novice traders, and anyone who has gone through a similar trajectory as me." Continued on Medium.com https://chicagoseantrades.com/2019/03/19/turning-a-trading-weakness-into-a-strength/