By Laurens Bensdorp
Currently I am sitting in my private office, enjoying the spectacular view of the Argentinian mountains, right in the heart of Patagonia. One of the biggest joys of being an end of day trader is that I can do my work in less than 15 minutes a day.
Those 15 minutes I can decide myself when to work. I basically just need to download the updated database each day, check if there are new trade setups and if so enter them in the brokers platform.
My name is Laurens Bensdorp and I am a professional stock trader. Since 2007 I have achieved double digit returns, beating all benchmarks. When all the markets were crashing in 2008 I had one of my better years.
I trade simple-to-understand proprietary strategies that aim to make money in all market environments.
I am specialized in trading automated stock trading strategies.
An automated strategy consists of the following:
- My hypothesis of how the stock market works
- A rule based process of entry and exit criteria for what stocks to buy and sell
- This is all converted into an algorithm by my programmer in my backtesting software
- I need an historical data provider to backtest my strategy in order to obtain the scientific results that will prove I have an edge with this strategy
- I optimize the combinations to get the desired results and decide if it is tradable
- Each day I download the daily price updates
- Then I scan with my software and the code that my programmer wrote for stocks that fit the criteria of my strategy
- The software provides me each day with the buy and sell orders
- I enter these orders in my broker platform
As you see the process above can be divided into 3 different areas;
- My beliefs of the stock market and how I can make money
- Programming and testing
- Execution
This looks like a lot of work but it isn’t. At least not anymore.
The process of turning my beliefs into a tradable strategy started in 2007 and took a long time to have it exactly as I like but once you have done it, you can use it the rest of your life.
Now the whole trading process does not take me longer than 15 minutes a day as I just need to do the execution part which is generating the buy and sell orders and enter the orders into the brokers’ platform.
It is my pleasure to share my knowledge of how to trade successfully with the readers of Qwealth and to share that it is easy to generate consistent profits, outperforming all benchmarks, while doing what I love most; travelling in South America, skiing in my backyard in Patagonia, eating the delicious ceviches in Peru or enjoy the sun in one of the many wonderful Carribean islands.
In the following months you will receive a variety of articles about different topics, related to trading, such as;
– Psychology and personality type for trading
– Useful beliefs of top traders
– Different kind of strategies ranging from extremely long term strategies to shorter, day trading strategies
– Combining different type of strategies to enhance performance
Since this is my first post, I would like to give all Q Wealth Members a special gift. If you login in to the member’s here, you’ll find a report that shows you a trading system that only requires 15 minutes a week.
This trading system, which has been rigorously back tested over the last 20 years you get the following:
– 24% Compounded annual growth rate
– Total return since 1995 of 7.778% versus 365% of the S&P 500 index
– Turn 100.000 dollars into 7.8 million
People always think that trading is incredible complex, that it requires a degree in finance and high math skills. In this report I show you the contrary. It has simple and straight forward rules, easy to understand for everybody.
About Laurens: In his younger years Laurens worked as a ski instructor in Austria and a white water rafting instructor in Austria, Costa Rica, Turkey, Israel, Chile, Dominican Republic and Mexico. Working in these different countries helped Laurens to become, besides his mother tongue Dutch, fluent in German, English and Spanish.
A life in which calculated risk taking with tourists was a daily routine for Laurens. Running down class 3, 4 and 5 rapids in the tropics taught him the principals of discipline and performing at peak level. It was during this time when the roots got set for becoming a successful trader, although at that time unaware of this.
In the year 2000, Laurens started to manage the pension funds of his family. Their money was invested at one of the high-profile investment banks in The Netherlands. They used a simple buy and hold strategy on a basket of stocks and initially it made all sense as the returns during the big boom markets in 1999 and beginning of 2000 was very good. Suddenly, it was April of 2000 and stocks started to fall which caused the portfolio to drop about 30%. Laurens convinced his parents to liquidate the whole portfolio which turned out to be a very good call as the stocks in the portfolio would have suffered losses more than 70%.
During subsequent years, Laurens worked 7 days a week to acquire more knowledge and read more than 300 books about investing, trading and risk management. Returns started to get better and although the results were not high, the drawdowns were low as well.
It wasn’t until 2008 when Laurens started to develop a system which contained a suite of non – correlated systems when he started to make consistent double digit returns. He made a hypothesis with a set of fixed rules for entry, exits and risk management and paid a programmer to write this code in a software program which proved the edge and profitability of this system that suited 100% his personality with a custom made position sizing algorithm tailored to his risk tolerance and profit objectives.
Laurens hired an employee to take care of the daily trade management, order entry and monitoring, and he only needed to revise all trades and positions after market close which did not take more than 5 minutes a day.
The combination of a 100% automated system with a clear edge, the leverage of an employee that takes care of the operational part gives Laurens the freedom he likes to work on the fun part which is development of new systems.
In 2013 Laurens started his own money management firm in which he offers through a managed account structure the possibility to trade his strategies for high net worth individuals and institutions. Currently with both private capital and other people’s money his fund trades multi millions of dollars with clients from all over the world generating market beating returns with low volatility and low drawdowns.
Laurens invests for high net worth individuals and provides custom trading strategies for institutional investors through his money management firm Alpha Equity Investments (www.alpha-equity.com).
Additionally he provides one on one mentoring to a few select, very committed traders through his mentoring company Trading Mastery School (www.tradingmasteryschool.com)
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