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Trading Quotes and Advice

  • ‘Successful trading comes down to this: overcoming your personal psychological barriers and conditioning yourself to produce feelings of self-trust , high self-esteem, unshakable conviction, and confidence which will naturally lead to good judgement and winning trades based on a proven methodology’ – Courtesy of James Buzzard.
  • “If everything feels under control, you are not going fast enough” -Mario Andretti, 1978 Formula One World Champion.
  • “If you sit by the river long enough, a dead body will sooner or later float down there” – Japanese Proverb.
  • ‘Buy High, sell Higher AND Sell low, buy back lower’, – Anonymous.
  • ‘The most important rule of trading is to play good defence, not great offence.’ –
  • Paul Tudor Jones.
  • “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” – John Maynard Keynes.
  • “Holding cash is uncomfortable, but not as uncomfortable as doing something stupid.” – Warren Buffet
  • “Trade the market, not the money…if you exercise your strategy with discipline, the money will follow.” – Courtesy of Umar Ali.
  • “If you ACCEPT the risk of the trade and SHARE SIZE appropriately then you should be able to trade in a relaxed and optimum state of mind.” – Courtesy of Tom Willard.
  • “The trend is your friend” – – Courtesy of Umar Ali.
  • ttitude; Success, Failure, working hard.
  • “Mentally write off the work you do, as soon as you have done it” – Courtesy of Robin Farrell.
  • “There are old traders and there are bold traders, but there are very few old, bold traders.” – Ed Seykota
  • “Falling knives have to land somewhere…..” – Courtesy of Aidan Philipson.
  • ‘The dictionary is the only place where success comes before work!’- Vince Lombardi.
  • “Luck is what you have left over after you give 100 percent” – Langston Coleman.
  • ‘Traders (Leaders) are made, they are not born. They are made by hard effort, which is the price which all of us must pay to achieve any goal that is worthwhile.
  • It’s easy to have faith in yourself and have discipline when you’re a winner, when you’re number one. What you got to have is faith and discipline when you’re not a winner.’ – Vince Lombardi.
  • “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” – Michael Jordan
  • ‘What sets successful traders apart?……Most people think that winning in the markets has something to do with finding the secret formula. The truth is that any common denominator among the traders I interviewed had more to do with attitude than approach’. – Jack Schwager.
  • “There is little difference in people, but that little difference makes a big difference. That little difference is attitude. The big difference is whether it is positive or negative.” – Robert Collier.‘Ours is not to reason why, ours is but to sell and buy.’ – Courtesy of Mark Moskowitz.
  • “Success is the sum of small efforts – repeated day in and day out.” – Robert Collier.
  • “A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.” – Richard Bach
  • “Golf is a game played on a 5 inch Course- the distance between your ears.” – Bobby Jones.
  • “…It’s all to do with the training: you can do a lot if you’re properly trained…” – Queen Elizabeth II.
  • “The person who goes farthest is generally the one who is willing to do and dare. The sure-thing boat never gets far from shore.” – Dale Carnegie.
  • “You are – face it – a bunch of emotions, prejudices, and twitches, and this is all very well as long as you know it. Successful speculators do not necessarily have a complete portrait of themselves, warts and all, in their own minds, but they do have the ability to stop abruptly when their own intuiition and what is happening Out There are suddenly out of kilter. – Adam Smith, The Money Game.
  • ‘“Everyday my trading skills are getting better and better”. I repeat it like a daily mantra’ – Purportedly attributed to Emile Coue.

Trading lessons are simple—but not so easy

1. Be with the trade you are in at the moment.  Stop trying to control anything but your own trade.  The markets are going to do exactly what they want to and when they want to. YOU have the power to control what YOU feel, think, believe and do.

2.  All that matters for you is the trade you are in.  You may never see that trade again.  Savor it, cherish it and be with it for as long as it lasts.

3. Celebrate your victories with yourself.  Celebrate the trade and with the trade.  The instruction is to refrain from boasting or grandiose behavior when you make a winning trade.  The markets will humble you, and pride always comes before a fall. Napoleon said that the most dangerous moments come with victory. Decry and avoid hubris.

Also celebrate your defeats with yourself and the trade because they are mistakes.  Mistakes are our greatest teachers because it is through them that we learn. What do we learn?  Not to make them again!

Constantly strive to look inward, to know yourself, to raise yourself to the highest level of authenticity.  Be rigorously honest about who you are.

See Daily Returns in S&P 500 Since 1928 -Traders Must See

loss aversion

You can see that daily returns in the market are more or less a fifty-fifty proposition. Since loss aversion means that losses make us feel worse than gains make us feel better by a factor of 2:1, this means that if you check the value of your stock portfolio on a daily basis, you will feel terrible every single day.

Every good feeling you get from gains will get completely wiped out by the terrible feelings from the down days.  But lengthen your time horizon and the effects of loss aversion slowly start to fade. (more…)

The 10 Bad Habits of Unprofitable Traders

The 10 Bad Habits of Unprofitable Traders

  1. They  trade too much. A major edge small traders have over institutions is that we can pick our trades carefully and only trade the best trends and entries. The less I trade the more money I make because being picky is an edge, over trading is a sure path to losses.
  2. Unprofitable traders tend to be trend fighters always wanting to try to call tops and bottoms, while they eventually will be right there account will likely be too small by then to really profit from the actual reversal. The money is made swimming with the flow of the river not paddling up stream the whole time.
  3. Taking small profits quickly and letting losing trades run in the hopes of a bounce back is a sure path to failure. The whole thing that makes traders profitable is their risk/reward ratio, big wins and small losses. Being quick to take profits but allowing losses to grow is a sure way to eventually blow up your trading account.
  4. Wanting to be right more than wanting to make money will be VERY expensive because  the trader won’t  want to take losses and he definitely will not want to reverse his position and get on the right side of the market because in his mind that is a failure, in a profitable trader’s mind that is a success if they start making money.
  5. Unprofitable traders trade too big and risk too much to make too little. The biggest key to profitability is to not to have BIG LOSSES. Your wins can be as big as you like but the downside has to be limited.
  6. Unprofitable traders watch BLUE CHANNELS for trading ideas. Just stop it. (more…)
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