What Makes a Successful Trader? by Nick Radge

In this share trading video, Nick Radge from The Chartist answers the question “What Makes a Successful Trader?” If you enjoy this video why not trial Nick’s service – trading systems and advice for short term traders and active investors.

Transcript

“Men stumble over the truth from time to time, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing has happened.” – Winston Churchill.

The truth is here. Trading to me is incredibly simple. I don’t say that from an arrogant perspective. It’s just easy, and it can be easy for anybody if they know what to do. Successful trading is about looking in the right place for the profits.

I’ve been trading since 1985. I’m a trend trader. I trade three different trend following systems. I’ve done it all my life. I’ll continue to do it for the rest of my life. I was teaching my children how to do it as well but they stopped listening to me when they became teenagers. That’s not to say that trend trading is the Holy Grail; the Holy Grail is something contained within trend trading. It’s contained in all parts of trading.

The truth is not where you think it is with successful trading. Firstly, let’s define two facets of trading: quantitative and qualitative.

Quantitative

Let’s use the analogy of driving a car. What are the quantitative parts of driving your car? You put your foot on the accelerator to go forward, turn the steering wheel left to go to the left, put your foot on the brake to stop, shift the gears to reverse to go backwards, etc. These are quantitative parts of driving a car. They are teachable.

Now, I pose a question to you. Have you done an expensive course or seminar on trading? Perhaps, two or three expensive courses on trading? If you have done those courses why are you reading this text? Surely you know how to trade?

When you do a trading course you are learning the quantitative part of trading. You haven’t been taught, and I’m not sure that it can be taught, the qualitative part of trading. That’s what we’ll discuss here.

If we go back to our driving analogy, what are the qualitative factors when driving a car?

You need to understand the flow of the traffic, anticipate what other drivers around you are going to do. It’s gaining a sense for dangerous situation.

Michael Schumacher said “The most successful drivers are those that understand what’s going on around them.” In other words, he’s talking about the qualitative part of driving, not the quantitative part. And so it is with trading. We go to all these seminars and these conferences and we buy books. We do all this stuff and we still go around and around trying to become successful. The reason that we’re not gaining success most of the time is because we’re learning just the quantitative part and not the qualitative part.

I can’t teach you this stuff but I can plant the seed in your mind. Because that seed was planted in my mind many years ago, I get it now; I understand it. Once you get it, it will be your light bulb moment.

So, thinking quantitative and qualitative, what would be some quantitative facets of trading? Entry patterns, trailing stops, trading plan, indicators, stop loss, all the stuff we find in books. That’s all the part of quantitative.

What would be some qualitative parts of trading? Psychology. Can you teach the psychology of trading? I don’t think so. So, absolutely that’s a qualitative part of trading.

Qualitative

Another qualitative factor is understanding our ability to trade and our limitations. Most people suffer from the Lake Wobegon Effect; that we overestimate our ability to be good at something, to be successful. We believe we should be successful without any effort. People study for years to be doctors, lawyers, nurses, teachers and yet for some reason they believe they can do a weekend trading course and be a successful trader by Monday.

Let’s talk about sample significance.

Turtle System

This is a Turtle System. I had lot to do with the turtles in the ‘90s. I started trading the Turtle system in 2001. It’s now a part of my service, and this is the equity curve. It’s got a 29 percent annualize return. Win rate is only 48 percent. Max drawdown, 11. So it’s a long only equity system, this one, okay? You can see the results go all the way through to October, 2009. So, there’s 9 months to 2008 collapse there or anything like that. Would you be interested in trading this? Would you want to trade this? It’s not a trick question.

I remember doing a talk back in Sydney about 2000. I did the same kind of things and I had actual account statements. And I gave the gentleman in the front row the account statement and ask them to read the balance and the date. It was $50,000 and whatever date and then I asked him read out the next one and tell him to count six months later and the date, the account balance is about $87,000 dollars, real account statements. Who would like to trade the system, of course everyone goes, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, no problem at all.” But it turned out in that particular experience that probably 50 percent of those who had a hold of the system actually continue to do that. This is what happens here. Now most of you had said yes you’d like to trade this.

I received an email the other day, stating that:

“All the recommendations (and stops) were blindly followed.” Well, there’s a problem right there. “The results are not good; eight closed trades, 4 loses, 4 breakeven, 4 open trades, not a single win for the month. Don’t want to be impolite but is it a bad period or just setups are just for study, not for trading?”

Well, I don’t know that you like trade to trade rather than trade for study.

“Is anyone having the having the same experience? I notice your VAMI is heading done.” A VAMI is called Value Added Monthly Index. I show all my subscribers my positions on a daily basis. They get to see what positions I go into and why I go into them, and I also pluck my equity curves so they can see what my accounts are doing. And that’s what a VAMI is. And he’s going, “Well, your VAMI is going down.”

So problem is, he’s talking about that system I just showed you. He’s talking about that. Now you’ve all said you wanted to trade. It’s all pretty easy, yet that’s the kind of email I get occasionally. Remember, we’re talking about sample significance here. So here’s talking about 12 trades.

So what I thought I’d do very simply is I went back to 1997, ran the system. It produced 1,950 trades. And basically, I divided 12 in 1,950 and there are 161 compilations of that. But I mean this is very simple. We’re just looking at the losing trades at the top there. In other words, if I was to pick 12 trades, random trades, how many in that 12 would be losers, how many would be profitable, and how many will be breakeven?

You can see there that there is a chance out of this 161 selection that you can actually have 11 losing trades in any 12. Who’d be happy with that? You go, “Radge, you are a crap. I’ve just done 12 trades. I’ve had 11 loses. Give me my money back.” That’s what you’d say, right? That’s what we’re trading and that’s what basically it will look like in any given sample. So you could actually have, on the winning side, there is or has been a series of 10 winners in a row.

I want you to imagine this. There is a random number generator. They’re just generating random numbers. The statistics are in here, exactly the same as that Turtle system. Just tell me which one you don’t want. What we’re looking at here is 12 trades. You don’t want that. You understand what’s going on here? We’re looking at a subset of a bigger sample. And this is what the sample significance I’m talking about. People will take a very small sample of trades and they will make their decision based on that very small sample of trades.

So this is what happens. This Michael that sent me the email, I hope he’s not here. He has looked at this 12-sample trade. So he has looked at this 12 period of trades and he’s now made up his mind that it’s crap that won’t work.

You do the same thing with a book. You buy a book. You follow the rules. You buy John’s book or Dave’s book or something like this and you follow the rules and you’ll have an average period of time and you think, “This is crap. It doesn’t work.” You go and buy the next book and then we finish up with 200 books.

So my point is a small sample of trades is an insignificant amount to determine what happens in the longer term. So that’s the first thing, sample significance. You can’t judge your success on 12 trades.

Losing streaks.

I’ve been trading for 24 years; I started when I was 18. So I’ve been doing it more than half my life. My best run of losing trades in a row is 22, and I’ve done that twice now. I’m not a fan of losing trades but it’s a function of life; it happens. It’s a function of trading; you got to have it. You don’t like having losing streaks in a row. But the probability of having losing streaks can actually be calculated. So that’s how we calculate losing streaks basically. Simply it’s down to your win percentage. If we use a trading system that has a winning percentage of 50% over a sample of 50,000 trades, there is a chance that we will have a streak of 16 in a row. This is mathematical fact. This is not back testing. It’s a mathematical fact that it will happen and some stage. It might not happen this week, it might not happen next month, it might not happen next year, but it sure, if you trade long enough, it should happen. One of my philosophies is that if you trade long enough, everything’s going to happen. You’ll see things. I started trading in ’85 and that’s scary to think what I was doing back then.

I’ll tell you what I was doing back then. I was trading. Don’t laugh. I was 18. I was trading a 5 and 10-day moving average crossover system on the spy features when it was 100 bucks a tick. That’s just crazy. But I have no idea what I was doing. And really, 1987 fix that out. I learned then and that’s never to happen since.

The other thing I would say is I’m not the world’s most profitable trader and I certainly don’t put myself out to be the most profitable trader, but I’ll never go out the backdoor. So I just look for good annualize returns of, you know, 30 or 40 percent and that’s it. I’ve got mates who make unbelievable returns. But that’s just not me. But these same mates, one of them, he lost 80 percent in one night. So that’s not going to happen to me. But what I do respect is the probability of a losing streak.

If we work it out, if we do a little table, you can see that even if you have a win rate of 9 percent, there’s still a chance you can have five losing trades in a row. There’s a very big education firm. It used to be based in Queensland; I won’t mention names, that recommended that you place 10 percent of your equity on each trade. Now by my calculations, they would have to have a win rate of something like 94 percent, because chances are at some stage, they would have five losing trades in a row, and they would lose 50 percent of the capital.

And the problem is two things happen when you lose money. No one likes losing money. But more importantly, psychologically, it can be devastating for you. There is nothing worse than not being able to pull the trigger. You’re always going to be able to stand up the next day and pull the trigger and do it again the next day. But if you lose a lot of your capital, you’re going to find it very, very difficult to do that and you’re going to go back into that beginner’s cycle. You’re going to go and find something else to do. So keep in mind this little table here. You can see 50 percent and your probable streak will be 16 losing trades in a row. Even 90 percent, you’re going to have five losing trades in a row.

Equity Curve

Now, that’s a real equity curve. That’s a Hang Seng System I developed and that equity curve starts in 2001. That’s real trades; 2001 through till I think that was mid-last year, late last year. That big explosion, the equity curve, was because of the volatility in the stock indices around the world. Real trades.

At the top corner is the back testing, the historical back testing. Win percent of 33, win loss ratio of 2.9, losing streak, 14, okay? Down the bottom right-hand corner, they’re the real stats; 354 grand net profit. You can see the win percentage there is 34 percent. It’s had 18 losing trades.

Here’s a question, maybe for help. If you go and develop a trading system using AmiBroker or TradeStation or Charles’ System that he uses, and you did a back testing and you have 14 losing trade, you think, “I can deal with that, no problems at all.” Real-time trading comes along when you’re at 14 losing trades in a row. At what point do you stop?

So the question post is if you do your back testing, you’ve got a robust…you’ve done your back testing, your forward testing, and it says 14 losing trades. At what point in real-time trading would you stop trading the system?

Assuming that these results are coming from an out of sample test and not an in sample test, then there’s reasonable expectation that the real-time trading follows the out of sampled results in back test. And we can compare the real-time trading to the out of sample baseline and we would look for statistical deviation between the real-time results and the baseline results.

Now, if we’ve got 10 trades in the row where the average of those 10 trades is less than zero in an expectancy or profit, or if the mean to standard deviation ratio of the last 10 trades is less than one to four, we should take the system off line.

When we just stop trading the system? And it’s some real question. You go and do your testing. You have 14 loses in the row and you have another one and then you have another one, and you think, “Something’s going wrong. The markets change.” The markets don’t change. The only change is change itself.

Remember our little table up here. The table says, with the winning percentage somewhere between around the 35 percent mark, we should have somewhere between 25 and 30 losing trades in a row, okay? So we’ve got 18. Our testing shows four. We’re a little bit nervous. Real-time trading, this is a real account. Twenty-nine. But that’s where our formula said would probably happen at some stage. So you could call this a black swan event if you like, but we all know the tales are a lot broader than what’s put out there.

Same with option trading. You have these people telling you about all these nice little strategies of selling coals and puts and naked shorts and all this kind of stuff. Look, it works for five years, and then one day it’s all over; completely all over. So it’s just a matter of when, not if. It’s a matter of when. If you trade long enough, these things will happen eventually. So you’ve got to be prepared for this kind of eventuality. It’s not nice but I’m not glossing over the reality of trading.

Immediately on from losing streaks is risk tolerance. We hear a lot about the two percent rule. Don’t risk more than two percent of your account. But unfortunately, two percent is not for everybody because everybody has a different risk tolerance.

I get people coming to me saying, “Nick, I only make 25 percent a year but I don’t want to lose more than five percent.” Yeah, right. Here are some facts. The only thing you can control is how much you’re willing to lose. That is the only thing you can control when it comes to trading.
Who thinks I’m a professional trader? I’m not a professional trader. I am a professional manager of bad trades. That’s all I do. Just put trades on and manage the crap ones, because the good ones will look after themselves. So it’s my job to look after the bad ones. And that gives me the positive expectancy. It’s pretty simple kind of stuff; how much you win when you win and how much you lose when you lose. So the only thing you can control is how much you’re willing to lose. Regardless of how good you are, you will have losing streaks.

Real Trader Story

Last year, only a short term swing trading, discretionary trading, we made 171 trades; we were up about 157 percent. During that period of time, equity dropped 11 percent. I got an email saying, “Thanks, Nick. The pain is too much.” “Okay. Right.” So the problem is, you should never get to the point where the point is too much. This particular guy, his account was down 10 percent but the pain was too much. I said, “What are you doing?” “Here’s what I’m doing, everything you’re telling me to do.” I said, “What about risk management? What risk are you putting on each trade?” He goes, “I’m putting on two percent.” I said, “Well, hold on a sec. The probability of what we’re doing here is we’re going to have at least 15 losses in a row. You’re risking two percent of your account”, which is what he read in a textbook which is not only talked about. So the chances are he was going to, at some stage, have a 30 percent draw down, but he was only willing to deal with the 10 percent draw down. In other words, he was trading way over his risk. It wasn’t the system; it was his risk. It was the fact that he was using two percent. He should have been using about 0.5 percent, half percent. That way, he’d never get to his risk threshold.

The one thing with trading is if you lose all your money, you actually can’t trade anymore. So the point is, even if you lose a lot of your money, psychologically, as I said before, you’re not going to be able to pull the trigger again and you never ever, ever, ever want to get to that position. It doesn’t matter how bad the market is. So, the textbook two percent rule that is always talked about is not really appropriate for everybody.

The last known fact is the more you risk, the more volatile your account will become. It’s simple as that. If you want to go and ride a roller coaster, go to Dream World or go and bet five or ten percent on each trade. These are simple facts.

So if we head down our Lake Wobegon Effect, remember that we overestimate our own ability, my advice is think about the maximum amount of money you are prepared to lose and then harbor. Because according to the Lake Wobegon Effect, you are overestimating your own ability to take a loss. Well, not take a loss but take an account drawdown. So if you think you can handle a 30 percent decline in your account, just to be sure, so you never hit that pain threshold.

The point I try to make to a lot of people is you have to trade so loss just doesn’t hurt. You don’t even think twice about. Bang, loss. Go on. Forget it. No problem. If you lie awake at night or you get up early and you run downstairs and find out what the Dow Jones is doing overnight, you’re probably trading too much risk.

I trade. It’s just a loss. It’s just a trade. Move on. It’s no big deal. One of my core philosophies is, “Next thousand trades.” One trade is not going to make or break me. It’s like a professional golfer, right? If you think about a professional golfer, he plays 72 holes in a tournament. One shot is not going to win the whole tournament, but one shot can make sure he loses the whole tournament. And it’s the same with trading. One bad trade and it can cost you. So whatever you think you can handle, you can do a Jack Nicholson. “You can’t handle the truth!” You can do that. So that’s my point.

Here’s the S&P 500.

Law of Seven Years.

Will Eckhardt, I believe is one of the best traders in the world. That’s his equity curve: $10,000 to 448,000 after fees. Remember, this guy takes 20 percent of the profits. So this is net of all his fees. It kind of the flat line the S&P 500 in that time. That’s what a 25 percent annualise return looks like. But what does it really look like? Here’s his month to month data going back to 1987. Most people think a professional trader wins day in, day out; month in, month out; year in, year out. Who wants 25 percent a year return? Yeah. Who’s willing to do the work to get there? That’s why we go and do the $25,000 courses so we don’t have to work.

The red boxes are all four consecutive or more losing months in a row. The blue circles are his end of year return. Who would have thought that a guy that returns 25 percent per annum over the last 20 years would actually have a losing year? You wouldn’t think that. And he’s got three complete and one on the way.

Who would think that a professional trader that manages 450 million dollar fund like this could possibly get away with having five losing months in a row? You only have losing trades in a row. Five losing months in a row! The far right-hand corner down here is his maximum drawdown. So that’s equity peak-to-trough drawdown. His first year, 28 and a half percent. That was his maximum drawdown and that happened in two months. He subscribed to a Chartist or someone like that and he start with a 28 percent drawdown. What he’s going to do? So that is Will Eckhardt’s trading for 22 years. That, to me, is quite an impressive picture because it actually shows the reality of long-term track record.

Now, he does a 1019 round turn trades per year. A round turn is a buy and a sell. So he does a thousand trades in and out. That’s a lot of trades. Twenty trades a week, four trades a day.

That’s per million. Yeah, thousand round turns per million. That’s a heck of a lot of trading, isn’t it? But he’s making 25 percent a year. Now you all put your hands up. You all just told me you wanted to do 25 percent a year, but would you really be prepared to do all these trades? A lot of people wouldn’t. The Turtle System that I run is pretty active. It doesn’t do half that amount of trades but it’s still pretty active. And even I get emails going, “You’re bloody kidding at me, Nick. I can’t change all these orders every day. It’ll take me five minutes.”

Bill Dunn.

You guys know about Bill Dunn, wouldn’t you? Bill Dunn manages about five billion dollars. He’s a trend follower. He started back in 1973. You know what? He still uses the same system today that he created back in 1973. Compound annualise rate of return after fees is 18.8 percent. The blue line is his equity curve. Not quite as good as Eckhardt. But have a look at those draw downs. He’s just had a 60 percent drawdown. Look what he started, the year after he started. No, two years after he started, he had a 50 percent drawdown. That is pretty amazing. When you think about it, he just stands up to the plate again regardless of what’s happening and does it again, has a drawdown again. He does it again. Closes the next trade and the next trade. He keeps going. Why? Why can he do that? Why can Eckhardt do that? He has five losing months in a row. He’s down 21 percent and he takes the next trade. Why?

It comes down to confidence. Where do you think he’d got that confidence from? Because he knows intimately…intimately he knows he has a positive expectancy. The only way he’s going to fail is if he doesn’t place the next trade. That’s the difference.

My accountant told me I lost four percent last year. That’s alright because I’m up 52 percent since February this year. So swings and roundabouts. I’m happy to take a losing year. Four percent? Not worse. Next trade, please. That’s the difference. I’m just happy to wake up and go, “Let’s put another trade on and let’s see what happens.” This is Bill Dunn. And he actually is noted for his, “I just ride the bucking bronco,” I think is what he says. “I just get on my horse and go for it.” He doesn’t care about risk adjusted returns. All he cares about is his positive expectancy that he knows, intimately knows he can create by following trends and that’s what he does.

Another analogy we could use…

Investment Manager A returns 40 percent per annum. Investment Manager B returns 40 percent per annum. Which one would you invest in? You’d be happy with both of those, 40 percent per annum?

What if you knew that Manager B made all this money in December? Oh, no. Hold on. You just told me you are happy with 40 percent return. So what you’re not happy with is how you got there. That’s the thing, right? This is one of the qualitative traits that differentiate a successful trader to someone who’s struggling, the journey being trailed. We all want to be an Eckhardt. We all want a 25 percent annualize return, but back end if we actually want to go through the pain to get there. And Bill Dunn, I mean, actually he’s the wild. These are new equity highs now, I think. He has new equity highs now. That’s big balls, you know. I mean, people get annoyed after three weeks. Six years.
Your equity curve can’t rise every day, okay? It just doesn’t go up linear. It’s a fact of life. Flat periods, down periods, bad periods, they’re going to happen. It’s a fact of life. You have to be able to get through that stuff. It’s like another analogy I use about driving from Melbourne to Sydney. I don’t know how long it takes. It doesn’t take twelve hours. You’re going to need a rest break. You’re going to need to go to the bathroom. You’re going to need to get some lunch or dinner. You might get tired. And if you do, what they tell you is you pull over and have a rest. Chances are, as soon as you get in New South Wales, there’s going to be road works. So you have to take a detour.

My problem is, you know this stuff, right? You know this. You are prepared for it and you go ahead and do it and you hopefully arrive safely in Sydney. Correct? But when it comes to trading, we don’t actually know what’s going to happen, and that’s what causes all the problems. So, once you fully understand at what potentially can happen, you accept that. You can then execute it and facilitate it anywhere you go.
I’ve got some mates who run a big hedge fund and you look at their office and they plastered it all around their office. I mean, these are guys who manage more than seven figures. And they got this little bloody yellow stickers everywhere; on the computers, on the door when you walk out on the bathroom. “Next thousand trades.” They’re everywhere, next thousand trades. Next thousand trades. That’s just a reminder. One trade just doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t matter.

Example
I bought GrainCorp and the bust just came out two days later and do a nine for 10 equity rising. Things happen. If you trade long enough, things happen. People send me emails, “Nick, you got to send the GrainCorp. How did you know that?” I didn’t know that was going to happen. It just happened. But get over it and get on with it.

Think of trading in terms of a process, not in terms of the monetary value. We place too much emphasis on money. That’s the kind of society we are these days. Fast. Want it now. Don’t want to do any work, and I want to make money. What I tell my subscribers, especially with the longer term trend following models that I run, don’t even look at your account equity. Don’t look at it. Place the trade, walk away. Let it do what it’s got to do. If you don’t let it do what it’s got to do, then you’re not going to achieve what you set out to achieve. It’s as simple as that. So think of trading as a process of I know how to create a positive expectancy.

Positive expectancy

Cut your losses, let your profits run. Simple, just do it. Buying something that works, validate it, do it. That’s it. So think of trading in terms of a process of creating your positive expectancy. Forget your money; it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter about the money, right? That’s just the by-product of following the process properly. Remove yourself from the trading environment. Place your trades, turn your computer off, and go away. Let it do what it’s going to do. You can’t control it, so there’s no point watching it.

I don’t live to watch the screen all day, okay? Place your trades, close the computer, and go fishing. That’s it, right? That’s what you got to do. Remove yourself and just let it happen. And understand that sometimes, it’s not going to be fun. Sometimes, you’re not going to make money, but over the longer term, you can’t fail. You can’t fail. Allow the account to flow rather than forcing it. Who does that, “Go up! Go up! You go up!” But at the end of the day, just go with the flow. Let it happen. Understand over the long term, your positive expectancy will look after you. All you have to do in the short term is be there for it.

Q&A

Thank you very much. (inaudible) 0:53:10 had a really, really good points. You showed some charts where there’s some pretty precipitous draw downs and I’m curious…like one of the things we looked at, you showed a lot of very technical analytical tools that allocators use when they make allocations to manage it out there.
NICK RADGE
Yeah.
MALE
And within the systems you use, do you chart the drawdown versus the maximum or the sharp ratios behind the systems you use to pay attention to figure out maybe which system is more suitable or which one is giving you more edge on the market? I’m looking at those drawdown like how much money you’re making versus how it comes back in your favor?
NICK RADGE
I used to run around the hedge fund and I was trying to be smart, but now I just trade it.
The best indicator is the value of my account.
I’m tipping if it’s going up, I’m going okay. If it’s going down, well, it must be tough period. Now I don’t. I know you’re a CTA and that’s all very important. And when I was a very CTA, that was all very important to me as well. But now, I’m too old for that. I’m running 42 now.
MALE
One other question as well. Looking at Eckhardt and Dunn’s performances, it’s interesting if we just talk it out loud super imposed their charts on top of an S&P chart from the beginning of the bull market of 1974 and do a comparison in terms of what the S&P did from ’74 rallying high. I think the S&P will set back at 80 or 100 or something and then rallied up to 1500 during that time.
Right, right, right.
NICK RADGE
That’s a semi-log scout chart there, okay?
MALE
Sure, sure, sure. It clearly are performing; clearly picking about, I guess, the sharp ratio or the drawdowns within the regard get interesting.
Absolutely. I mean, what John is talking about here is he’s coming from a professional fund manager’s perspective which is what I’ve based my trading on all my life. It’s not about absolute return, okay?

Another Example:
Think of someone like Toby Crabel. Toby Crabel has an annualize return of eight, nine percent. The guy manages about five billion dollars. Eckhardt manages 450 million and he’s got an annualize return of 25 percent. Why is this so? Because the big allocators, the big boys out there with all the money, “I don’t want to go to the casino. I don’t even want to a roller coaster.” They want a low risk adjusted return. They like what a super charge cash management account. They’re happy to have 10 percent annualize returns that’s non-correlated to the stock market in their particular instance with very small deviations from that. Whereas with Eckhardt, you can see it’s a bit more of a roller coaster. And Dunn, I mean, that’s just crazy.

So when you get into the big money, the big professional money management, it becomes more about risk adjusted return. And that’s the way I’ve been brought up specifically. I don’t go for an absolute return. I’m not trying to make 200 percent. But if I can compound 40 percent a year and do it in less than five minutes a day, I’m pretty happy. And that’s how long it takes. Because once you’ve got your system, and I use AmiBroker, you just push the button and away you go.