Trading as a side- or core-hustle makes for one of the best lifestyle businesses to run, simply because of how it can fit into the lifestyle of any type of person who is economically active in the modern day. All you really need is your laptop, but if you really know what you’re doing then perhaps even just your smartphone will do!

Sure, your quad-screen desktop trading setup in your “command centre” perhaps represents the tools deployed by the Hollywood-style trader (or hacker), but at the core of every trading success story is a very simple application of a trading strategy. When you’ve mastered a good trading strategy there’s no need to entertain all manner of bells-and-whistled masquerading as useful trading tools.

In focus today is a specific trading strategy, which is indeed that of tracking the performance of the market you’ve targeted and then taking up positions based on a few interlinked indicators. We’re going to go through the dynamics around market-performance trading with the view of demonstrating just how intricately you have to assess the links you’d be looking for in making your trading decisions. These links are indeed very intricate, but you only need to get the measure of only about two or three of them and, for the most part, the positions you take up will yield positive results for you.

Establishing a core niche-focus

We’ll make use of a very specific example to drive the point home, which is that of property. If you’re going to be trading the property niche on the stock markets then you’ll have to think about property as the core niche focus, but you’ll also have to realise that there are some influencing factors which essentially drive the prices of that core niche.

Identifying the primary influences of your core niche-focus

First up are those influences which affect the chosen core niche-focus more directly, such as how the vibrant property market of the Idaho city of Boise would perhaps have its valuation affected by factors which directly affect the underlying property market (not just the listed property stocks). You’d have to look at something like the Boise pest control scene and keep an eye on activities around that market, because something like an out-of-control pest infestation would almost be guaranteed to affect the core niche property market.

Keeping an eye on the secondary and tertiary influencing factors

Those are the links you need to factor-in to your trading strategy and once you actually start looking for those links you’ll soon realise that there are very few primary influencing factors you can almost always bank on to guide you in the right direction when you take up positions. Secondary and tertiary influencing factors on the other hand usually exist as periodic events, some of which could even be unusual, but they should also be kept in check.

A temporary spike in pest problems could make for an example of such a tertiary influencing factor, to expand on our example, but what you’ll usually find is that as a result of a stable primary influencer (like the pest control market), when such tertiary events come to pass, it only serves to strengthen the share price of the core stock (property), simply because it demonstrates that core niche’s resilience.