Archives of “January 5, 2019” day

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Trading Wisdom by – Jon Tait

  
  Education
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One of the most puzzling paradoxes of trading is that you have to show up every day, but most days your best move is to do nothing.

I don’t day trade, but I do look at a lot of time horizons, sometimes as short as 1 minute bars. But I’ve learned to focus my attention on shorter time horizons only when longer time horizons are at a critical juncture. My trading life became much simpler when just owning a stock was no longer a reason to look at a shorter time horizon than daily bars. I don’t even load up the quote streamer until I’ve made the decision to buy or sell a stock that day based on daily and weekly charts.

It can be more optimal to trade extremely short time horizons, but the benefits of trading very short term don’t scale linearly due to transaction costs becoming more difficult to beat. 

For me, it is important to not have to grind for every dollar. I don’t want a full time job from the markets, but I do want to make high returns on my money, so I consistently reform my trading to be in line with these goals.

I start off every campaign in a stock very fickle, weak handed. As a position works for me and I pyramid into a larger position, I become a strong hand; I’m dug in.

Keys for Successful Traders

  
  Education
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mentalstrengthThe biggest obstacle to successful trading is failing to recognize that losses are part of the game, and, further, that they must be accommodated. The perfect trading system that allows for only gains does not exist. Expecting, or even hoping for, perfection is a guarantee of failure. Trading is akin to batting in baseball. A player hitting .300 is good. A player hitting .400 is great. But even the great player fails to hit 60% of the time! Remember, you don’t have to be perfect to win in the markets. Practically speaking, this is why you also need an objective money management system.

experience

It takes experience to succeed. Now, some people advocate “paper trading” as a learning tool. Paper trading is useful for testing methodologies, but it has no real value in learning about trading. In fact, it can be detrimental, because it imbues the novice with a false sense of security. “Knowing” that he has successfully paper-traded during the past six months, he believes that the next six months trading with real money will be no different. In fact, nothing could be farther from the truth. Why? Because the markets are not merely an intellectual exercise, they are an emotional one as well. Think about it, just because you are mechanically inclined and like to drive fast doesn’t mean you have the necessary skills to win the Daytona 500.

 

Buffett Adds Another 3.9 Million Apple Shares, Cuts IBM, Wells Fargo Holdings: Full Q3 Holdings

  
Analysis, Education

Traditionally one of the most boring, and telegraphed 13-Fs, today’s update of Berkshire holdings did not contain any major surprises, well maybe with one exception: while it was already well-known that at the end of June Buffett converted roughly 700 million Bank of America preferred shares into common, which now appear on Berkshire’s 13F, there were two notable changes.
First, Buffett continued to dump his IBM holdings, and as of the end of Q3, he held only 37 million IBM shares, down 31.5% from Q2, amounting to a little over $5 billion in notional value as of Sept 30. Berkshire also cut its stake in Wells Fargo (its biggest) modestly to 464 million shares, which is still just under $26 billion, and also trimmed his Charter Communications position.
On the other end, Buffett added to his Apple holdings, increasing the total by 3.9 million shares to 134 million from 130.2 million at the end of last quarter. Buffett also added to his Synchrony Financial and Monsanto holdings.
Finally, Berkshire exited its entire Wabco position.

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