Archives of “January 2019” month

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The Heart and Mind of Trading

  
  Education
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Your heart has a mind, and your mind has a heart. In trading we need to bring heart and mind together. We need to feel intelligently and think with informed emotion.  The mind has intellectual emotion and the heart has emotional intellect.

It has been proven through heart transplants that the heart really does have a mind. Heart transplant recipients take on many characteristics, connections, habits, and hobbies of their donors. One woman who had never cared about dancing began to take ballroom dance lessons six weeks after her transplant. She became fascinated with ballroom dancing and became quite good at it. It turned out the donor of her heart had been a ballroom dancer. One child who had received the heart of another child upon seeing the dead child’s mother cried out, “Mommy, I’ve missed you!” And there are many other such reported instances.

It could even be assumed for the sake of this column, that the entire body, cell structure, and so forth are informed by both mind and heart. This is a column about trading, so let’s look at how mind and heart impact trading. We can start with the metaphors of mind and heart.

What is the heart of your trading? Is it analysis? Is it intuition?  Is it thought corrected by feeling or feeling balanced by analysis? Is it an outside system created by you or someone else that you employ with emotional or thoughtful action?

Do you trade with heart?  Do you put your whole self into it? And does that work for you?

Do you trade with an intellectual detachment? And does that support your chosen results?

What would happen if you brought the two together? What if you traded committed to your heart’s desire but also retained an intellectual remove from immediate results?  What if you committed yourself to replicating a verified and trusted method in the market and retained an optimistic view of the final results even while you observed with curiosity the current unfolding of the market?

We need balance in life and in trading. By bringing heart and mind and even body into the trading, we can seek to bring all of ourselves into the equation. We can do it mindfully with heart and clear purpose.

20+20 Trading Wisdom From Ed Seykota

  
  Education
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Ed Seykota wisdom:

  • “If I am bullish, I neither buy on a reaction, nor wait for strength; I am already in. I turn bullish at the instant my buy stop is hit, and stay bullish until my sell stop is hit. Being bullish and not being long is illogical.”
  • “Fundamentalists figure things out and anticipate change. Trend followers join the trend of the moment. Fundamentalists try to solve their feelings. Trend followers join their feelings and observe them evolve and dis-solve.”
  • “The feelings we accept and enjoy rarely interfere with trading.”
  • “Systems don’t need to be changed. The trick is for a trader to develop a system with which he is compatible”
  • “It can be very expensive to try to convince the markets you are right.”
  • “There are old traders and there are bold traders, but there are very few old, bold traders.”
  • “I would add that I consider myself and how I do things as a kind of system which, by definition, I always follow.”
  • “Systems trading is ultimately discretionary. The manager still has to decide how much risk to accept, which markets to play, and how aggressively to increase and decrease the trading base as a function of equity change.”

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Emotion Is More Important Than Intelligence In Trading

  
  Education
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Human EmotionThere is nothing new on Wall Street or in stock speculation.
What has happened in the past will happen again, and again, and again.
This is because human nature does not change, and it is human emotion, solidly built into human nature, that always gets in the way of human intelligence.
Of this I am sure.

Jesse Livermore

Marc Faber's Must Watch 2010 Presentation

  
Analysis, Economy, Education, Video
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As someone once said, the only man who can tell a room full of people they are doomed and get a standing ovation, Marc Faber, gives a terrific hour long presentation to the Mises Circle in Manhattan on May 22, discussing the economy, interest rates, markets, why having massive output gaps (see previous post for Bernanke’s most recent dose of lunacy on the matter) and hyperinflation can easily coexist, why the Fed will never again implement tight monetary policy, why Greenspan is a senile self-contradictor, why Paul Krugman is a broken and scratched record, and the fact that pretty much nothing matters and we are all going to hell. Little new here for long-term economic skeptics, but a must watch for all neophytes who are still grasping with some of the more confounding concepts of our dead-end Keynesian catastrophe and not only why the world can not get out of the current calamity absent a global debt repudiation, but why gold is the asset to own, even though one must not be dogmatic and shift from asset class to asset class in times of tremendous currency devaluation (i.e., such as right now). 2010’s must watch Marc Faber presentation.

One thing we disagree with Mr. Faber on, is that Asian banks did not buy CDOs during the housing bubble – this is patently wrong. As a detailed perusal through the Goldman discovery will confirm, Goldman looked increasingly eastward, first to Europe, and then to Korea, Japan and Taiwan, when finding the dumbest money around to invest in monstrosities such as Timberwolf, Abacus and others. If Mr. Faber is investing based on the assumption that Asian banks are free of this relic of the credit boom, we urge him to promptly reevaluate his investment thesis as he will certainly lose money here.

Learn to trust yourself

  
  Education
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Trust your plan and trust your powers of judgment. Furthermore, keep this sense of confidence in yourself throughout the duration of your position in the market. Loosing confidence in yourself and your trading plan while holding a market position most often results in losses. If doubt is haunting you and you cannot control, it is best to simply offset your position and be clear of the market. Reversing or altering your trading plan in mid-trade is the last thing you should do.

The most important thing to remember about trading with confidence is this: No matter how diligent or thorough your research into a particular trade, you may still end up wrong about the direction of the market. This is true for everyone, nobody is right every time. You might be wrong this time, but your trading plan (with clearly defined loss thresholds) will save you. So, in the final analysis, it isn’t always being right about the direction of the market that will make you a success. Instead, it is having the discipline to stick to your trading plan that will.

Be Imperfect

  
  Education
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As a trader – or an investor – you will not be right all of the time. If you can accept your imperfection, and work within it, you will be much more successful:

If you have a perfectionist mentality when trading, you are setting yourself up for failure, because it is a “given” that you will experience losses along the way. You must begin to think of trading as a game of probability. Your losses ( that you hope will return to breakeven) will kill you. If you cannot take a loss when it is small ( because of the need to be perfect), then you will watch that small loss grow into a larger loss and so on into a vicious cycle of more and more pain for the perfectionist. Trading on hope does not work. The markets can remain irrational for a lot longer than you can remain solvent.

The object should be excellence in trading, not perfection. Moreover, it is essential to strive for excellence over a sustained period, as opposed to judging that each trade must be excellent. This is a marathon…not a sprint.

The greatest traders know how to take cut losses and let winning positions run. Perfectionists often do exactly the opposite. They get in at the wrong time, stay in too long and then get out the wrong time. Perfectionists are always striving and never arriving. The market will find the flaw in a perfectionistic trader and exploit it day after day.

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