I think it is similar to poker where you are playing odds and making decisions wrt how much to Risk on a given bet. Yesterday KAT (Katanga Mining - TSX) crashed. I don't think anybody would have known that. If you had everything tied up in it, it would have been a 50% loss if you panicked. It has recovered today.
The clip in my last post from Molly's Game showed it well. The guy was playing the odds then he cracked after a bad hand.
My Method involves selecting dividend stocks through stock screeners and looking for solid dividend returns and capital gain were possible. I also do some swing trading.
But in the area of pure trading... I know of a couple of ways to make money by using "Rules" as you say.
- buying at the open on Good News when the Bid/ Ask does not gap up from the close of the previous days trading. That means the news has not been disseminated fairly to all investors as intended. So that is Market Inefficiency. it is possible to make fairly regular 10-20% returns this way. You have to be tied in to News on all stocks of interest. Understanding charting helps as well.
- playing weather patterns. Using Fear and Greed. I had a thought last fall that perhaps Property and Casualty Insurance companies were taking a beating via Hurricane Irma. Sure enough, I found a great insurance company trading near $16 that was valued at $25 prior to the storm season. I bought and sold at $25, making $5k in the process... Greed means selling when things are absurdly high...
Those are the only ways I know of making money via trading... it bothers me when I see those presentations encouraging people to start trading options. If you can't trade stocks fairly well, you can't trade options. To say an Option is "Insurance" is simply a simplification of something much more complicated that would drown most people in transaction fees.
Given that, I am curious what your SLAB Method entails but truthfully I would not spend the $$ on it.
AI
