Try The Opposite
"What assistance can we find in the fight against habit? Try the opposite!"
— Epictetus, Discourses
Today's meditation is not something that I would think of us doing, as traders. This is because if the strategies you are using are profitable long term, then why on earth would you want to change them?
Having said that, when I started out trading horse racing, I traded horses that were likely to front run in races. I was backing a horse and then laying it off in running and hedging the profit across all runners. This was quite successful, but the problem that I had was when a horse started slowly, the odds would fly out far too quickly for me to control the red at a level that I required, meaning my profits would be wiped out from a bigger loss than I could control! I was pretty much break even or making a small profit at best!
This was when I had my light bulb moment and thought, what if I "try the opposite?" By laying a horse that was historically likely to start slowly/be held up, I could hopefully control any potential losses, before they got to the stage of being unmanageable. Only one horse can win a race of course and it would generally be late in the race before the odds got too low to be able to manage the loss.
This was how my L2b strategy was born and after pretty much 8 months of tinkering and tweaking through trial and error, I came up with the strategy that I still use today.
So if things aren't working, it shows that if you can think outside of the box and try something different occasionally, it can pay off.