About "A" Good Trading System

A good trading system delivers greater profits than losses over a period of time, but even the most carefully designed system doesn’t guarantee success in every trade. No system can assure you of never having a losing trade or even a series of losing trades.

A system is a plan, but as Helmuth von Moltke, a 19th-century German field-marshal, put it: “No plan survives contact with the enemy.” The US boxer Mike Tyson, quoted by The Economist, put it more bluntly: “Everyone has a plan ’til they get punched in the mouth.” This is why risk control must be an essential part of every trading system.

The inability to manage loses is one of the worst pitfalls in trading. Beginners freeze like deer in the headlights while a deepening loss wipes out profits of many good trades. It’s a general human tendency to take profits quickly but wait for losing trades to come back to even. By the time the despairing loser gives up hope and closes his trade with a terrible loss, his account is badly and sometimes irreparably damaged.

To be a successful trader, you need to learn risk management rules and always apply them.

If trading is a high-wire act, then safety demands stringing a net underneath that wire. If we slip, the net will save us from smashing into the floor. The only thing better than a safety net is two safety nets: if one doesn’t catch us as we fall, the other will.

Markets can snuff out an account with a single horrible loss that effectively takes a person out of the game, like a shark bite. Markets can also kill with a series of bites, none of them lethal but combined they strip an account to the bone, like a pack of piranhas. 
The two pillars of money management are the 2% and 6% Rules. The 2% Rule will save your account from shark bites and the 6% Rule from piranhas. Prescribed by Dr. Elder.