The great thing about trading is that if you’re good enough at in, you’ll never have to work again.
But whether you’re working or not; making money or not; the one thing you can’t buy is time. It’s Summer and it’s the weekend, so enjoy what life has to offer.
It’s with sadness that I read about the death of John Noyce. He was a foreign exchange technical analyst at Goldman Sachs and wrote “The Charts That Matter Next Week”. He was 36 and died of cancer last week
The Daily Trading Coach covers just about any psychology or behavioral issue the trader may face. I cannot help but recommend it. There are 101 lessons here divided into 10 chapters. Let’s dig into each chapter and uncover a gem within.
Today again completed reading this Book…Yes 5th time !!
1. The Process and the Practice: “Confidence doesna’t come from being right all the time: it comes from surviving the many occasions of being wrong” (27).
2. Stress and Distress: “Thinking positively or negatively about performance outcomes interfere with the process of performing. When you focus on the doing, the outcomes take care of themselves” (56).
3. Psychological Well-Being: “We can recognize the happy trader because he is immersed in the process of trading and finds fulfillment from the process even when markets are not open” (72).
4. Steps Toward Self-Improvement: “Your trading strengths can be found in the patterns that repeat across successful trades” (105).
5. Breaking Old Patterns: “Many trading problems are the result of acting out personal dramas in markets” (133)
6. Remapping the Mind: “When we change the lenses through which we view events, we change our responses to those events” (168)
7. Learn New Action Patterns: “Find experienced traders who will not be shy in telling you when you are making mistakes. In their lessons, you will learn to teach yourself” (203)
8. Coaching Your Trading Business: “Long before you seek to trade for a living, you should work at trading competence: just breaking even after costs” (230)
9. Lessons From Trading Professionals: “If you don’t trust yourself or your methods, you will not find the emotional resilience to weather periods of loss” (267)
10. Looking For the Edge: “The simplest [trading] patterns will tend to be the most robust” (311).
And a final admonition: “Know what you do best. Build on strengths. Never stop working on yourself. Never stop improving. Every so often, upset the apple cart and pursue wholly new challenges. The enemy of greatness is not evil; it’s mediocrity. Don’t settle for mediocre” (341).
Here is our philosophy around trading rules:
Rule should be designed to promote growth, not create limitations.
Rules should make YOU better.
Rules need to be second nature.
1. The three E’s: enter, exit, escape
Disagree, I can’t explain for proprietary reasons.
2. Avoid trading during the first 15 minutes of the market open
I agree that the first 15 minutes is risky but the most important thing to a new trader is lasting as long as possible. You are going to be better the more time that goes by, but you learn faster by doing. It is a tough balance.
3. Use limit orders, not market orders
Limits keep you out of the market, which is important. But they can also keep you in a market, which is of importance too.
4. Rookie traders should avoid using margin
Agree. Your winning positions should be larger than losing position, but a new trader doesn’t usually know which is which.
5. Have a selling plan
Agree. (more…)
Technically Yours/ASR TEAM/BARODA
Which type of trader?
Please which one of the following belong to you?
there are many type of traders, an awareness of the varieties allows you to avoid the pitfalls.
THE DISCIPLINED TRADER.
This is the ideal type of trader, you take your profits and loses with ease, you focus on your system and follow it with discipline.Trading is usually a relax activity,you appreciate that a loss does not make you a looser.
THE DOUBTER.
you find it difficult to execute at signals, you doubt your won abilities.You need to develop confidence.Perhaps you should paper trade.
BLAMER
All losses are someones else ‘s fault, you blame bad fills, your broker for picking the phone up to slowly , our system for not being perfect, you need to regain your objectivity and self-responsibility.
VICTIM
You blame yourself, you feel the market is out to get you, you start becoming superstitious in your trading.
OPTIMIST.
You start thinking it’s only money , ill make it back later. you think all losses will bounce back to profits, or that you will start trading properly tomorrow.
GAMBLER.
You are in for the trill, Money is a side issue. Risk and reward analysis hardly figure in your trade, You want to be a player, want the buzz and excitement.
TIMID.
You enter a trade, but panic at the sight of a profit and take it far to soon, Fear rules your trading.
Myth #1: Emotions are at the root of trading problems. Yes, emotions can interfere with concentration and performance, but that doesn’t mean that they are a primary cause. Indeed, emotional distress is as often the result of poor trading as the cause. When traders fail to manage risk properly, trading size that is too large for their accounts, they invite outsized emotional responses to their swings in P/L. Similarly, when traders trade untested patterns that possess no objective edge in the marketplace, they are going to lose money over time and experience an understandable degree of emotional frustration. I know many successful traders who are fiercely competitive and highly emotional. I also know many successful traders who are highly analytical and not at all emotional. Trading is a performance field, no less than athletics or the performing arts.Success is a function of talents (inborn abilities) and skills (acquired competencies). No amount of emotional self-control can turn a person into a successful musician, football player, or trader. Once individuals possess the requisite talents and skills for success, however, then psychological factors become important. Psychology dictates how consistent you are with the skills and talents you have; it cannot replace those skills and talents.
Myth #2: Anyone, with dedicated effort, can get to the point of trading for a living. That is nonsense. How many people make their living from acting or musical performance? What proportion of people playing sports can actually make their livelihood from athletics? Many people play chess or poker, but how many can sustain a living from it?Quite simply, to make a living from any performance activity means that you are consistently good at what you do. Not everyone has the talent, skill, or drive to be that successful—in any field. Across the many traders I’ve met in various settings, from home-based, independent traders to professional ones in firms, the best predictors of trading success have been the size of the trader’s account and the resources available to the trader. If a person were to make 30% per year on their accounts year after year, they would be among the world’s most successful money managers. Most money managers of mutual funds, hedge funds, and pension funds cannot sustain such performance. This leads the trader to accept huge leverage and court a risk of ruin when an inevitable string of losing trades occurs. Indeed, such excess leverage is a main cause of emotional distress in trading. Take a look at how the Turtles made their money: they learned a trading method, learned to be consistent with that method, and were given enough money by Richard Dennis that they could trade multiple markets with enough size to scale into positions in each. Even with those resources, not all of the Turtle students could succeed. Talent, skill, and opportunity are the ingredients of success, and these are relatively normally distributed in the trading population, just as they are relatively normally distributed in the population at large. (more…)
