The Universal Key to Improvement: Seeking and Implementing Feedback

When I first published online, I didn’t feel ready.

But just getting started — in the simplest way I could: Qullamaggie stream notes, published on Substack and shared on 𝕏 — was the best thing I could’ve done to begin developing an online writing habit. From there, I gradually improved my work.

Many obsess over the ‘perfect’ start, when in reality, just taking action today would put you in a far better position.

All momentum starts with action, however small.

But once you have some momentum going, you want to quickly iterate. Build on that habit.

However, as Mark Minervini says: only perfect practice makes perfect. The person moving the fastest and in the right direction wins — otherwise, you’re just reinforcing bad habits.

So, how do you make sure you’re practising in the right way?

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Proactive feedback examples

All top traders — in fact, all top performers — have a proactive attitude towards feedback.

David Ryan famously sliced his account in half, spent a weekend studying his trades from that year, and realised he was chasing stocks. Seeing he’d made all his money on one type of setup, he told himself he was going to be extremely disciplined and only trade that setup — not chase the breakout — and went on to win three US Investing Championships (USICs) in a row.

Mark Minervini religiously cut his losses after performing a loss adjustment exercise on his journal, and discovering that his hypothetical compounded return changed from -12.05% to 79.89%, over just 20 trades, by simply cutting all losers at an arbitrary -10%.

Christian Flanders performed a similar loss adjustment exercise, studying what would happen to his results if he never lost more than -5% in a month, and had his lightbulb moment: “No matter how much I made during good periods, large losing months would kill my ability to compound.” After that, he dramatically cut size once his trades stop working, and returned >400% in USIC 2024.

For all these traders, the key was to seek feedback and implement it. After all, if you don’t know where you’re going wrong, how are you going to course correct?

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Learning from the best

When chatting to top USIC performers (who have been guest posting on The Trading Resource Hub lately), their lack of ego is evident.

They just want to figure out what they need to improve, then figure out how to make it happen.

The other pattern among the USIC competitors I’ve spoken to is that they express frustration at having a friend they’re mentoring, but who simply won’t do any of the things they advise — probably because it involves hard work.

I knew exactly what they meant, because people frequently ask me for writing advice.

I’m always happy to give it. Often, that means I look over someone’s publication, then I point out that they need to use more paragraph breaks, or use more lists, or format their headings properly, or similar ‘quick wins’.

However, when I revisit their publication after a few months, the feedback often hadn’t been implemented.

Even though I made sure to keep it simple, the person reached out to me, and said they found my recommendations valuable, they didn’t act on them.

If writing is just a hobby to you, fair enough.

But if you’re treating it as a business (or plan to), you need to be proactive about feedback. Otherwise, how will you improve?

Coming back to trading, if you’re lucky enough to have a top USIC performer among your ‘real-life’ friends, and you’re serious about wanting to make money in the markets…

…why on earth aren’t you taking their advice?

The root cause could be any number of reasons:

• Ego — a refusal to believe you could be mistaken
• Discomfort at staring your mistakes in the eye
• Not truly wanting success
• Simple laziness
• Etc.

But those prepared to try, fail and learn will succeed, if they can stick with it for long enough.

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Bottleneck analysis

The fastest way to improve is to always be working on the right issue: your bottleneck.

So, make sure you have ways of consistently figuring out your biggest blocker. If you’re always solving your biggest challenge, you’ll keep moving the needle.

The best place to look is hard data.

As they say: what gets measured gets improved.

For a systematic trader, this means extensive backtesting. Discretionary traders should look towards their journal: where are they falling short within their trading statistics?

• Risk-reward ratio?
• Average win?
• Average loss?
• Win rate?

Analysing your patterns among your winners and losers can help, too. Do you find that you perform poorly in biotechs and/or China names, for example? Or that most of your winners are large or mega caps?

What about setups — do you make most money going long or short? And is your expectancy for setup A higher than for setup B?

As Tom Dante says: curiosity is the basis for improvement.

Asking questions to identify what to improve, and how, means you can’t help but get a little better each day — and many small wins compound.

After hard data, the best feedback comes from other humans. If you have access to a good mentor, treasure them. Also find your ‘tribe’ — not just in terms of people ahead of you, who can advise on how you can get better, but also non-traders pushing to improve.

Surround yourself with (future) high performers, and you’ll be inspired to keep pushing, too.

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We take feedback seriously

Feedback is a core part of how base.report operates.

To quote tonyjimtrading (whom we recently featured in our user roundtable Q&A):

We want to create the best possible platform for you.

So, why not give us a try? You can use our screener right away here — no strings attached.

Want to learn more about base.report first? Check out this interview with Shan (e0), the founder and developer of base.report.

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Please email us at [email protected] or join us on Discord. Whether you want to share feedback or have a question, we’re always happy to help :)