Linda Raschke’s working strategies, over 30 years old
Linda Raschke started her professional trading career in 1981, making options markets as an employee of two exchanges. But she did not become a registered CTA (Commodity Trading Advisor) until 1992.
Since then she has been the primary trader for several funds and in 2002 opened her own hedge fund in which she held the position of CTA (Commodity Pool Operator). Linda’s hedge fund ranked 17th out of 4,500 for best five-year performance, based on BarclaysHedge rankings. And her early successes were highlighted by Jack Schwager in his famous Market Wizards series. Linda retired as an SRO and CTA in 2015. However, she continues to trade daily on her own account.
In the world of professional trading and money management, Linda Raschke stands out from the crowd in three ways: performance, longevity and consistency.
Although it’s been just under 30 years since she stopped trading on the floor, the market principles and analysis techniques she developed at the time remain an integral part of her trading today. In fact, some of the tools she uses now, such as the “3-10” oscillator, are essentially the same ones she learned from her first mentor more than 20 years ago.
Linda says that trading at the higher levels required small adjustments, but at the lower levels, everything followed the same system. Relying solely on “Quotron” (a simple display of price quotes that was common in the 1980s), she traded successfully for 45 weeks. But when she got her first chart analysis software in 1987, she lost almost all her money within three months.
Strategies of Linda Raschke
Failures and problems do not usually grace the history of professional traders, but Linda Raschke is quite wise about past mistakes. She readily admits that she once went bankrupt while trading the stock market, and even today she does not always hit the mark. Like many traders with trading room experience, she focuses on consistency – smaller trades with high probability.
Linda Raschke takes a hands-on approach to trading. Thus, followers of this method don’t quit their jobs after the first tortures of professional trading. She declares that a trader should have a steady job anyway. After all, it then becomes very difficult to trade if the trader is constantly worrying about how the bills will be paid.
Linda Raschke says that she does not design or test a complete system for trading, as most people think. On the contrary, her office is full of notebooks, complete statistical models and market trends, and big pointers that she uses to make trading decisions at certain points in time. Many of her notebooks contain records of market activity, which she records by hand.
Linda is the co-author of Street Smarts: High Probability Strategies for Trading Futures and Stock Markets, co-written with Lawrence A. Connors. In addition, she has been featured in dozens of financial publications, radio and financial television programs. She has also served on the Board of Directors of the Association of Market Technicians and was president of the American Association of Professional Technical Analysts.
Linda has presented her research and lectured on trading to many internationally recognized authorities including: Managed Futures Association, American Association of Professional Technical Analysts, International Federation of Technical Analysts, Association of Market Technicians and Bloomberg.
