In finance, a trading strategy is a fixed plan that is designed to achieve a profitable return by going long or short in markets. The main reasons that a properly researched trading strategy helps are its verifiability, quantifiability, consistency, and objectivity. The development and application of a trading strategy follows eight steps: (1) Formulation, (2) Specification in computer-testable form, (3) Preliminary testing, (4) Optimization, (5) Evaluation of performance and robustness, (6) Trading of the strategy, (7) Monitoring of trading performance, (8) Refinement and evolution.