The days of Richard Dennis and his “turtles” with their alleged 100% per year profit are long gone, but their mystique lives on. And with it comes one attempt after the other to emulate them, to create trading systems that will knock the socks off the competition.
Robert Carver is more modest—and more realistic. At the same time he has more to offer the investor or trader who has a spark of creativity and intellectual curiosity. Systematic Trading: A Unique New Method for Designing Trading and Investing Systems(Harriman House, 2015) is a thoughtful, and thought-provoking, journey through the process of creating modular rule-based portfolios.
Although the book addresses three classes of traders and investors—the staunch systems trader, the semi-automatic trader, and the asset allocating investor, Carver is at heart a systems guy. He himself runs a futures trading system with around 45 instruments, eight trading rules drawn from four different styles, and 30 trading rule variations. But this doesn’t mean that he is writing only for those with large portfolios who can code. It does mean, however, that his book will be of value only to those who either already think systematically or are open-minded about learning how to analyze and assess the ingredients of a model investing framework. I would wager to say that this group should include every investor and trader, though in practice of course it encompasses but a tiny fraction of people who have money in the financial markets.
Here I’m going to be decidedly unsystematic and pluck out two ideas that are illustrative of the topics covered in the book.

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