Before you consider risking your money in a trading account, it might be a good idea to make sure you have a rule based trading plan in place that works in both up and down markets. The advantage of a static, rule based plan is you can gauge the validity of it before risking money in the market. We call the process of testing a trading method in the different environments markets throw at us "statistical validation". Once you have studied the method and seen the performance first hand, you can gauge the probability that the method will produce desirable results into the future. When we say ... (full story)