“Successful traders constantly ask themselves: What am I doing right? What am I doing wrong? How can I do what I am doing better? How can I get more information? Courage is a quality important to excel as a trader. It’s not enough to simply have the insight to see something apart from the rest of the crowd, you also need to have the courage to act on it and stay with it.”
Archives of “January 2019” month
rssRISK -Quotes
- The more risk we take because we believe the environment is low-risk in character, the less the environment continues to be low-risk in character.
- How can investors deal with the limitations on their ability to know the future? The answer lies in the fact that not being able to know the future doesn’t mean we can’t deal with it.
- The future should be viewed not as a fixed outcome that’s destined to happen and capable of being predicted, but as a range of possibilities and, hopefully on the basis of insight into their respective likelihoods, as a probability distribution.
- Many possibilities exist today…this uncertainty as to which of the possibilities will occur is the source of risk in investing.
- It’s not reasonable to expect highly superior returns without bearing some incremental risk.
- While I don’t think volatility and risk are synonymous…in the short run, it can be very hard to differentiate between a downward fluctuation and permanent loss.
- Thinking risk control is easy is perhaps the greatest trap in investing, since excessive confidence that they have risk under control can make investors do very risky things.
Read this. Every day.
Bla Bla by Blue Channels & Promises by Politicians :Best Idea
Mastering the Art…
“You have all these people trying to come up with formulas to beat the market. The market is not a science. The science may help increase the probabilities, but to excel you need to master the art of trading.”
– Mark Minervini, Stock Market Wizards
“After a certain high level of technical skill is achieved, science and art tend to coalesce in aesthetics, plasticity, and form. The greatest scientists are artists as well.”
– Albert Einstein
To achieve trading greatness, one must first become an artist. To become a true artist, one must first master the art.
What does it mean to “master the art” of trading? What kind of nuances and subtleties are involved? What range of experiences, processes, and deep situational knowledge is required?
Trading Without Ego
The Gravitational Constant of Markets
The gravitational constant, G, is 6.7 x 10^-11 N-MM/kg. Is there a similar G in financial markets for the super hot stocks? It is conventional wisdom that information is analyzed faster and better today than 20 years ago. If that is true, then G has increased. But is it true? Or is the constant really human nature?
Developing A Method is Hard Work
Shortcuts rarely lead to trading success. Developing your own approach requires research, observation, and thought. Expect the process to take lots of time and hard work. Expect many dead ends and multiple fail-ures before you find a successful trading approach that is right for you. Remember that you are playing against tens of thousands of profession-als. Why should you be any better? If it were that easy, there would be a lot more millionaire traders.
9 rules, lessons
1. Find and trade markets where your edge is the greatest.
2. Avoid markets were the probability of rule changes and lack of transparency is present.
3. Think of and imagine market scenarios others fail to.
4. Fundamental macroeconomic forces will ultimately prevail.
5. Trading time frames and profit objectives though must coincide with what the market is giving you at any one time.
6. Quantify risk with a multidimensional perspective, not just by one or two measures such as VAR or a price stop.
7. Be deadly serious, as Gichin Funakoshi said “You must be deadly serious in training”. If you have a position make it a meaningful size and monitor it carefully. I recall many comments from fellow traders the past few years saying something like “I am long EuroSwiss just to have some on but not really watching it.”
8. Define and use a trading methodology that incorporates a process and framework that works for you. Inclusive in this should be a daily routine that includes diet, exercise, family time, etc.
9. Seek out catalysts for CHANGE in markets. Where are the forces, in a Newtonian like law of motion, building up the greatest to cause a CHANGE and movement in markets?
Errors by Traders
1. Placing a limit order in and then leaving the screen and not canceling the limit when you wouldn’t want it to be filled later or some news might come out and get you elected when the real prices is a fortune worse for you
2. Not getting up or being in front of screen at the time when you’re supposed to trade.
3. Taking a phone call from an agitating personage, be it romantic or the service or whatever that gets you so discombobulated that you go on tilt.
4. Talking to people during the trading day when you need to watch the ticks to put your order in.
5. Not having in front of you what the market did on the corresponding day of the week or month or hour so that you’re trading for a repeat of some hopeful exuberant event which never happens twice when you want it to happen.
6. Any thoughts or actual romance during the trading day. It will make you too enervated or too ready to pull the trigger depending on what the outcome was.
7. Leaving for lunch during the day or having a heavy lunch.
8. Kibbitsing from people in the office who have noticed something that should be brought to your attention.
9. Any procedures that violate the rules of the British Navy where only a 6 inch plank separated you from disaster like in our field.
10. Trying to get even when you have a loss by increasing your size and risk.
11. Not having adequate capital to meet any margin calls that mite occur during the day, thereby allowing your broker to close out your position at a stop while he takes the opposite side. What others do you come up with?
Speculation by definition requires some amount of loss otherwise the game is fixed. However, I believe loss can be broken down into avoidable loss and unavoidable loss. Unavoidable loss is, well, unavoidable. But in my personal experience (and based on pretty much all speculative loss I have seen or read about) all avoidable speculative loss is traced back to some core elements/violations: not being disciplined (many interpretations), getting emotional and all of the associated errors and mistakes that brings, sizing positions too big so that regardless of odds you eventually have to reach ruin, not being consistent in your approach (the switches), not managing your risk adequately either via position sizing or stop losses, finally you have to be patient for the right pitch whatever that may be for you.