Archives of “January 3, 2019” day

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3 Trading Mistakes

  
  Education
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mistake-1) Trading Without Context – Many traders will enter positions with little more than a chart-based “setup” or a hunch that the market is heading lower. They don’t locate where the market is trading with respect to its daily range and often can’t identify where the relevant ranges are located. Is the most recent market move gaining or losing volume/participation? Are most sectors participating in the move? Without context, traders trade reflexively, not proactively.
2) Trading Without Targets – Focused on entries, traders often don’t explicitly identify where they would harvest profits. They hold trades too long, exiting in a panic after reversals, or they take profits quickly, missing opportunity. They don’t factor current volatility into estimates of how far the market could move on their time frame, and they often don’t explicitly look for targets based upon prior moves and ranges.
3) Trading Without Reflecting – The slow times of day are excellent opportunities to review trading for the day, reformulate market views, correct mistakes, and set goals going forward. Many traders, however, never stop looking for the next trade, lured by the siren’s promise of breakout. Without the benefit of reflection, they compound errors, turning mistakes into blowups and blowups into slumps.

Optimism & Pessimism

  
  Education
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Optimism means expecting the best, but confidence means knowing how you will handle the worst. Never make a move if you are merely optimistic.

Optimism can be a speculator’s enemy. It feels good and is dangerous for that reason. It produces a clouding of judgment. It can lead you into a venture with no exits. Even when there is an exit, optimism can persuade you not to use it.
You should never make a move if you are merely optimistic. Before committing your money to a venture, ask how you will save yourself if things go wrong. Once you have that worked out, you’ve got something better than optimism. You’ve got confidence.

4 More Rules to Trade

  
  Education
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1. Average Winners Not Losers.  It is not “don’t frown, average down”; it is applying the discipline to cut losers short and adding to winners that separates the successful from the unsuccessful.  If you have a winning stock then add to it.  If you have a losing stock then get rid of it. 

2.  Never Let a Winner Turn Into A Loser.  Greed is the cause of this mistake.  Let the market tell you when to exit a trade, not whether you have a profit or not.  “If your trade is acting well, as defined by key indicators, and the market activity is supporting your position, stay in.  If not, its go time!” Do not let a good profit vanish into thin air because you want more than the market is willing to give.

3. Never Mix Disciplines.  If you day trade then day trade and do not let a day trade turn into a swing trade.  If you swing trade do not let your swing trade turn into an investment. Follow the rules based on the discipline of your time frame.

4.  Never Try To Trade Back A loser.  In other words, each trade is a new one and should not be used to win back money lost in the last trade.  Always trade in the present not in the past where too many emotional and psychology factors can affect the current trade.  Revenge does not pay in or out of the market. 

13 Things :5 % of Successful Traders Do Differently

  
  Education
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  1. They pursue realistic goals as their returns.
  2. They take decisive and immediate action when their buy or sell signal is hit.
  3. They focus on winning trades and not quantity of trades.
  4. They make logical, informed trading decisions within their system, based on the probabilities.
  5. They avoid the trap of trying to make perfect trades, and instead focus on being profitable in the long term.
  6. They trade the right position size that is within their comfort zone.
  7. They keep things simple and focus on winning trades, not complexity in their trading.
  8. They focus on learning and making small continuous improvements in their trading system.
  9. They measure and track their progress with a trading journal.
  10. They maintain a positive outlook as they learn from their mistakes, and focus on trading with discipline.
  11. They spend time learning from better traders.
  12. They maintain balance in their life by spending time with family and friends.
  13. They love what they do and their passion keeps them going through the rough times.

Markets Like Water

  
  Education

water animated GIF Water is unstoppable. Given enough time, it will defeat all the mortal ingenuity of the best and the brightest.

Two atoms of Hydrogen bonded with one atom of oxygen.

How can something so powerful in one context also be so weak in another. Jump off a high diving board and hit the water abdomen first and tell me it doesn’t hurt, but sit next to the pool and you can effortlessly push your finger into the water.

I think it is very helpful to think of relationships between financial markets in this way.

There are circumstances under which past conditionality allows one market to predict another for a given holding period with much greater accuracy than normal. In this context the weak bonds between molecules that allow you to push your finger into the water correspond to those occasions when leading correlative effects are absent and vice versa for those fleeting periods when regularities are plentiful.

It makes some measure of sense to look at what situations might make the molecules (predictive relations) hold closely together and those times when the mistress collects her dues from market protagonists.

Clearly having the predictive relations is enough. But some measure of ‘meta-understanding’ does not hurt, even if such classification is elusive or futile.

There really is nothing to lose by doing so.

The Disciplined Trader: Developing Winning Attitudes by Mark Douglas

  
  Education
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Intro

  • Reaching the level of success they desire as traders will require them to make at least some, if not many, changes in the way they perceive market action.
  • The markets have absolutely no power or control over you, no expectation of your behavior, and no regard for your welfare.
  • There are only a few traders who have come to the realization that they alone are completely responsible for the outcome of their actions.  Even fewer are those who have accept the psychological implications of that realization and know what to do about it.
  • The nature of the markets made it easy no to have to confront anything that otherwise might be perceived as a problem because the next trade always had the possibility of making everything else in one’s life seem irrelevant.
  • I CREATED MY LOSSES INSTEAD OF AVOIDING THEM SIMPLY BECAUSE I WAS TRYING TO AVOID THEM.
  • Unsuccessful Trading Behaviors
    1. Refusing to define a loss.
    2. Not liquidating a losing trade, even after you have acknowledged the trade’s potential is greatly diminished.
    3. Getting locked into a specific opinion or belief about market direction.  I.E. “I’m right, the market is wrong.”
    4. Focusing on price and the money
    5. Revenge-trading to get back at the market from what it took from you.
    6. Not reversing your position even when you clearly sense a change in market direction
    7. Not following the rules of the trading system.
    8. Planning for a move or feeling one building, then not trading it.
    9. Not acting on your instincts or intuition
    10. Establishing a consistent patter of trading success over a period of time, and then giving your winning back to the market in one or two trades.

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