The Trader's Pendulum: The 10 Habits of Highly Successful Traders

Chapter 9Habit #6: Follow a System

Committed traders are avid learners. We regularly attend seminars, learn new skills from courses, and keep our knowledge updated by reading various publications.

These are all beneficial to traders. However, many are not aware that outside of seminar rooms, training courses, and published materials are other places we can draw practical lessons that will benefit our trading business from.

For example, have you ever wondered the following:

1. Why do servers at a fast-food restaurant always ask you the same questions when you order your meal? How do they minimize the queuing times for you? How do they manage to serve your meal within 10 minutes even during peak hours?
2. How do hypermarkets manage their inventory, when there could easily be thousands to tens of thousands of items stocked in a single store? How do they make sure they do not overstock or understock those items? And how do they even count how many items there are in their stores?
3. How does one of those large online bookstores manage millions of titles? How does it handle the huge number of orders, easily thousands of them per minute from all over the world? How do they deliver the right items to the right customers to minimize re-routing and complaints?

Simply put, how do successful large corporations function when they have so many resources to manage, with so many people getting involved, and the processes getting increasingly complicated? How do they keep track of what works and what ...