Archives of “January 11, 2019” day

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Trading Lessons

  
  Education
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Trading lessonsThe market is always right–except at significant tops and significant bottoms.

Keep and open and flexible mind. When in doubt, get out.

If you must have a guru, take him or her with many grains of salt

Do not add to losing positions.

Try every day to make yourself stronger, better and more integrated as a person.

Stay true to yourself. Lying to yourself and others, and trading on hope and prayer do not work

Most importantly, accept and recognize that you are not perfect. You are human and are going to make mistakes. Trading is the only profession where losing is actually winning. BUT— unless you accept mistakes as mistakes and learn from them, you will not progress and be upside down. Unless you are able to get your trading brain out of the cave you will not accumulate regret. It is only through the true acceptance of a mistake as a mistake that we accumulate regret. This is how we learn and grow as traders and human beings.

Biggest Bubble Ever? 2017 Recapped In 15 Bullet Points

  
Analysis, Education
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Here are his 15 bullet points that show why in 2017 we may have seen the biggest bubble ever (and why we can’t wait to see what 2018 reveals).

  1. Da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi” sold for staggering record $450mn
  2. Bitcoin soared 677% from $952 to $7890
  3. BoJ and ECB were bull catalysts, buying $2.0tn of financial assets
  4. Number of global interest rate cuts since Lehman hit: 702
  5. Global debt rose to a record $226tn, record 324% of global GDP
  6. US corporates issued record $1.75tn of bonds
  7. Yield of European HY bonds fell below yield of US Treasuries
  8. Argentina (8 debt defaults in past 200 years) issued 100-year bond
  9. Global stock market cap jumped1 $15.5tn to $85.6tn, record 113% of GDP
  10. S&P500 volatility sank to 50-year low; US Treasury volatility to 30-year low
  11. Market cap of FAANG+BAT grew $1.5tn, more than entire German market cap
  12. 7855 ETFs accounted for 70% of global daily equity volume
  13. The first AI/robot-managed ETF was launched (it’s underperforming)
  14. Big performance winners: ACWI, EM equities, China, Tech, European HY, euro
  15. Big performance losers: US$, Russia, Telecoms, UST 2-year, Turkish lira

As Hartnett summarizes, “2017 was a perfect encapsulation of an 8-year QE-led bull market”

  • Positioning was too bearish for either a bear market or a correction in risk assets.
  • Profits were higher than expected (global EPS jumped 13.4%) this time thanks to a synchronized global PMI recovery.
  • Policy was aggressively easy, as the ECB and BoJ bought a massive $2.0tn of financial assets; fiscal policy also easy (e.g., US federal deficit up $81bn to $666bn).
  • Returns were abnormally high in 2017 (Table 3); corporate bonds and equities soared, but the biggest surprise was stubbornly low government bond yields: thematic leadership of scarce “growth” (e.g. tech stocks), “yield” (e.g., HY, EM and peripheral EU bonds) and “volatility” once again remained the core of the bull.

For peace sake!

  
Education, Humour, Life
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Two Palestinians boarded a flight out of London. One took a window seat and the other sat next to him in the middle seat.. Just before takeoff, a rabbi sat down in the aisle seat. After takeoff the rabbi kicked his shoes off, wiggled his toes and was settling in when the Palestinian in the window seat said, ‘I need to get up and get a coke. ”Don’t get up,’ said the rabbi, ‘I’m in the aisle seat, I’ll get it for you.’ As soon as he left, one of the Palestinians picked up the rabbi’s shoe and spat in it..  When the Rabbi returned with the coke, the other Palestinian said, ‘That looks good I’d really like one, too.’ Again, the rabbi obligingly went to fetch it. While he was gone the other Palestinian picked up the rabbi’s other shoe and spat in it.  When the rabbi returned, they all sat back and enjoyed the flight. As the plane was landing, the rabbi slipped his feet into his shoes and knew immediately what had happened. He leaned over and asked his Palestinian neighbors: ‘Why does it have to be this way?  How long must this go on? This fighting between our nations? This hatred? This animosity? This spitting in shoes and pissing in cokes?’

Light, Taming the Beast

  
  Education
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Larry Light’s Taming the Beast: Wall Street’s Imperfect Answers to Making Money (Wiley, 2011) is perfect summer reading fare. The author, a financial reporter and editor, is a skilled storyteller. In this book he explores a range of investment strategies and instruments, traces their development, and in the process profiles some of the best-known investors and academics.

He covers value investing (Benjamin Graham and Warren Buffett), stocks (Jeremy Siegel), indexes (John Bogle), bonds (Bill Gross), growth investing (Thomas Rowe Price), international investing (John Templeton), real estate (Donald Trump), alternatives, asset allocation, short selling (James Chanos), hedge funds (Alfred Winslow Jones and Steve Cohen), and behaviorism (Daniel Kahneman and his followers).

Light’s thesis is that “investing success does not come in one flavor” and that “the trick is to be sufficiently flexible to dip into any or all of [the approaches he describes], but by the same token, to know their limitations.” (p. 254) He does a good job of spelling out these limitations. Even for more experienced investors who are well aware of many of these limitations, Little’s prose is so quick-paced that the book should be read, not skimmed. (more…)

Review: Little Book of Sideways Markets

  
Analysis, Education

The Little Book of Sideways Markets: How to Make Money in Markets That Go Nowhere (Wiley, 2011). Vitaliy does a great job at telling simple stories that teach complicated lessons within the financial markets, while embedding value investing wisdom within those stories, so that we may capitalize when the markets are caught in a range, which he calculates to be 50% of the time.

From a trader’s perspective “Sideways Markets” also provides real world advice for active traders that I can utilize within my trading plan tomorrow, while filling in any gaps that technicians may lack in the fundamental analysis department. As an active trader my biggest concern when reading an investing book is what can I take away from this book and use right now. Whether Vitaliy wants to admit he has a little active trader in him or not, it’s quite apparent when you analyze the markets in hopes of gaining an edge from future direction, while adjusting your strategy along the way…that is described as trading. It’s really just a question of time frame at this point.

My two favorite lessons for short-term traders in this book are brilliant in their simplicity. Vitaly tells a story about a farmer named Tevye and his cow Golde, that anybody can understand, illustrating the concepts of value investing, margin of safety, and the pitfalls of speculation. At the end of this fable was a very insightful concept that is more applicable to momentum investing than he probably realizes. “That’s why I stopped bidding on sunny days when everybody’s got a smile on their face.” We all know about over exuberance and how it suckers most traders in at the exact wrong time.

The other lesson comes in the chapter Vitaliy recalls an experience he had at a casino. It’s been well documented by many the similarities of professional gamblers to that of traders and the need to “spend more time focusing on the process, not on the outcome.” Both need to protect their bankroll and they do that through a rigid system, and the personal discipline to follow that system no matter what their emotions are telling them. Traders and Gamblers both know when to follow through with the big bet while keeping their losses small to fight another day. If you allow your system to play out over the course of many trades and you have a profitable edge, you put the odds in your favor and you become the house, as long as your emotions are kept in check. (more…)

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