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How Stress Produces Trading Losses

  • Nothing is stressful unless it is perceived as being a thread (losing money)
  •  Worry has a great effect on human performance, because it represents conscious mental activity.  Since it is conscious, it takes up processing capacity.
  • Often, the trader is too preoccupied with the potential results of what he id doing, rather than the process of being a trader.
    1. Losses scare me. The model calms me.  Trade your plan.
    2. Concerned about losses.  Preoccupation. Tunnel vision
    3. View losses as negative because fear of not having money.  A loss is a character building exercise that is needed to go through to obtain positive expectancy.
    4. Low Volatility/High Volatility  Multiple Intra-weekly signals
    5. Close at a profit/Close at stop
    6. Nightly distractions (Family, Businesses, Work, Vacation, Lack of Internet)
    7. Greed leads to confirmation bias, other bias in holding position
    8. Money motivated, need results for success, freedom for family
    9. Need to evaluate relationships with parents/money deeper to get to depths of self-esteem
    10. Tasks
      1. Daily Self-Analysis
      2. Daily Mental Rehearsal
      3. Focus and Intention
      4. Developing a Low-Risk Idea
      5. Stalking
      6. Action
      7. Monitoring
      8. Take Profits/Abort
      9. Daily Debriefing
      10. Be Grateful for What Went Right
      11. Periodic Review

Quote from Benjamin Graham (1934)

The market is not a weighing machine, on which the value of each issue is recorded by an exact impersonal mechanism, in accordance with its specific qualities. Rather, should we say that the market is a voting machine, whereon countless individuals register choices which are the product partly of reason and partly of emotion.

Euro Last Support or Hope :136

EURO -WEEKLY CHART

Last week ,The epicenter of many of  questions seems to be southern Europe, where Greece, Portugal, Spain and to a lesser extent the remainder of the so-called PIIGS (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain) have flamed investor concerns that burgeoning public debt may significantly weaken investor demand for sovereign debt and exacerbate an already trouble budgetary crisis.

Many investors have taken to selling the euro is as a means by which to reduce exposure to these problem areas and/or speculate on one or more of these crises spiraling out of control.

-Just look at above chart :Weekly chart includes a powerful rally of Year 2009 and more recently and two-stage selloff, starting in the first half of December and picking up steam over the course of the past 3 ½ weeks as traders looked to capitalize on weakness stemming from the problems in Greece, Portugal and Spain.

ALERT25

Just watch 136 level.Three consecutive close below this level+ Weekly close will take to 131.70-130 level.

-If not breaks 136 & trades above 138 level will create buying upto 140-141 level.

-Best Strategy :Sell on Rise.

-Will update more very soon.

Updated at 13:10/8th Feb/Baroda

Six Rules of Michael Steinhardt

Michael Steinhardt was one of the most successful hedge fund managers of all time. A dollar invested with Steinhardt Partners LP in 1967 was worth $481 when Steinhardt retired in 1995.

The following six rules were pulled out from a speech he gave:

1. Make all your mistakes early in life: The more tough lessons you learn early on, the fewer (bigger) errors you make later. A common mistake of all young investors is to be too trusting with brokers, analysts, and newsletters who are trying to sell you something.

2. Always make your living doing something you enjoy: Devote your full intensity for success over the long-term.

3. Be intellectually competitive: Do constant research on subjects that make you money. Plow through the data so as to be able to sense a major change coming in the macro situation.

4. Make good decisions even with incomplete information: Investors never have all the data they need before they put their money at risk. Investing is all about decision-making with imperfect information. You will never have all the info you need. What matters is what you do with the information you have. Do your homework and focus on the facts that matter most in any investing situation.

5. Always trust your intuition:  Intuition is more than just a hunch — it resembles a hidden supercomputer in the mind that you’re not even aware is there. It can help you do the right thing at the right time if you give it a chance. Over time, your own trading experience will help develop your intuition so that major pitfalls can be avoided.

6. Don’t make small investments: You only have so much time and energy so when you put your money in play. So, if you’re going to put money at risk, make sure the reward is high enough to justify it.

Test yourself

testyourself1Don’t look for easy trades and setups at all times. Test yourself by working hard trades and difficult markets in order to test and improve your skills. For example, if you’re uncomfortable with trading options, spend a month just trading options. If you’re uncomfortable with shorting stocks, spend a month shorting stocks. We only get better if we constantly test what we think is most difficult.

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