If you browse around trading forums or listen to traders talk you will eventually hear that traders fear that their profitable trading strategy stop working if they talk with too many other traders about it. But do you really have to fear that other traders will destroy your trading opportunity if you dont keep it to yourself?

It is true that famous stock market effects such as the January Effect, which describes the fact that stocks tended to rise in January stopped working, or at least changed the way it worked, after its discovery. After the January Effect had been discovered, investors started buying stocks in December to be the first and profit from rising prices in January. The massive stock purchases caused rising prices in December and when it became obvious that the January Effect turned into a December Effect, investors started buying in November until the January Effect had changed into a July Effect and eventually faded away.

The reasons why the January Effect stopped working are as follows:

• It was scientifically verifiable that stocks tend to rise in January
• It was an easy to copy trading strategy and didnt require any previous knowledge about stocks or the way the stock market works
• There are thousands of economic journals that published the existence of the January Effect, which led to an exposure to millions of traders and investors

Copying A Trading Strategy Isnt As Easy As It Sounds

If we take these three requirements that need to be fulfilled in order to change the way an existing trading strategy works, we can talk about the fear of retail traders. If you find a trading strategy that offers profit opportunities, these retail trading methods are usually based on price action, candle patters, technical indicators or similar subjective trading tools which represent the first problem. Even if a trading strategy is profitable for you, it will be very hard for another trader to copy it. Trade entries, stop loss placement, trade management decisions, take profit strategies and so on are all things that are significant influencing factors and decide whether a trading strategy is profitable or losing. The first requirement would be, therefore, to make sure that all traders copy ALL your trades to 100%.

If your profitable trading strategy isnt as easy to copy as a buy-and-hold method, your trading strategy will not stop working.

Retail Trading Is A Drop In The Ocean

The second problem is that it will be very hard to tell enough traders about your trading strategy to impact the markets. Especially if you are a forex trader, this will be an impossible task. The daily market trade volume  of the forex market is $6 trillion, which is a six with 18 zeros: $ 6.000.000.000.000.000.000. Although there are no hard facts about the share of retail trading, in 2007 the share of retail trading was calculated to be at 5%. So even if you find a way to tell all retail traders that exists and make them trade exactly the same way as your trading strategy suggests, it wont be enough to significantly change the markets. Your other possibility would be to find hundreds of famous scientific researchers with a good reputation that would need to publish articles and research papers and so sharing your trading strategy with a bigger crowd.

Even if you find a way to make all the retail traders in the world trade the exact way as you, it will not be enough to impact the markets.

Dont Mistake Changing Markets With Other Traders Destroying Your System

It is true that markets change over time. The reason for this is that prices move because of political and geopolitical events, fundamental developments and because the financial players trade their opinions and expectations. Therefore, if any of the variables changes, the way prices move changes. And inevitably, this will also have a direct impact on the way your trading strategy works. It is a traders responsibility to track all possible statistics about his/her own trading performance to spot potential weak spots and changes in market behavior. But, dont mistake evolving financial markets with the end of your trading strategy caused by too many traders trading the same way.

Conclusion: Dont Waste Your Time Worrying About The End Of Your Trading Strategy