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IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:If you can dream – and not make dreams your master;
If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools: (more…)
Qantas Explosion– from the Cockpit
This is an absolutely brilliant interview that is full of insights for the market. The interviewee is one of the pilots aboard the Qantas Airbus A380 last month that had an extremely serious uncontained engine explosion shortly after take-off.
In the interview they cover – inter alia – such things as
– The importance of checklists
– Dealing with contradicting signals
– Over-riding systematic considerations in favour of discretionary controls
– Keeping your head during a major catastrophe which constantly shifts its dynamics and has a lot of what we might call negative gamma…rapidly developing, interacting, non-linear issues that can rapidly move beyond your ability to keep up with them
– The importance of training and professionalism
– The importance of excess redundancy and robustness
– The importance of improvisation – and the ability to keep a clear enough head in a panic to ensure your creativity can be brought to bear on the problem.
– Power of teamwork.
Best part are the pictures of the cockpit showing the checklists and procedures they are working through.
As it turns out, this incident was very much more serious than the media ever picked up on. What an amazing story. I’m sure all will benefit greatly from reading this. For myself, I will be referring to this interview many times. A banquet for a lifetime.
Hope it benefits you all as much as it did me. Also hoping Mr. Tucker weighs in with some insights!
29 Instances Of A Major World Stock Market Shutdown
Click to Enlarge !
Eyes Wide Shut
Why does it take so long for a trader to learn?
Like I’ve said before, I’ve seen as much so-called wisdom over the years that I’ve eventually learned to hold as inviolate truth, as that which should be thrown out with yesterday’s garbage. Yet why does the eventual accumulation of pertinent knowledge translate so slowly into one’s trading results? If we are capable of weeding out the good stuff from the bad, why doesn’t the good stuff just take over and guide us directly towards success?
Aside from the fact that I might just be a dumbass, one thing I’ve figured out is that the distance between the brain and the finger might not be so close as you’d think — if you’re not careful. I know I’m not the only trader who has a tendency to repeat the usual mistakes, or variations of same, despite having berated myself 10 times in the previous week to make an effort not to do it again. My contention is that old habits die hard. Real hard. And only if you go out of your way to kill them outright. (more…)
Are You One of the Average Trader ?
Profitability -Market Timing
How often you are right on a trade is only half of the equation. The other half is how much do you make when you’re right and how much you lose when you’re wrong. You can remember that with this formula: Probability (odds of it going up or down) x Magnitude (how much it goes up or down) = Profitability. “Market timing is the art of making investment decisions using indicators and strategies to observe and determine the direction of prices. Many believe that market timing involves predicting the future, when in reality, the goal of market timing is to participate in periods of price strength and avoid periods of price weakness.? |
Have a Goal
There is no reward without risk, and there should be no risk without reward. Knowing this, there’s absolutely no reason why each trade shouldn’t have some favorable objective associated with it, so set a goal for each trade. A realistic one that could quite feasibly be reached during the course of the trade.
Perhaps you’ll set a hard target and book profits once that level is reached regardless of how strong the momentum seems at the time. Or perhaps you’ll plan to book partial profits at intervals along the way.
At the very least, having some idea of a level where your stock could move to is still going to help you formulate a game plan, even if you don’t choose to leave a resting order in that zone to book profits.
If you know your stop and you have some kind of upside expectation, then you’ll have a far better grasp of just what your risk is on a given trade and whether or not it should be taken.
Naked Truth -Since 1947
A story of how honesty cost one trader his job.
With the current climate surrounding the investment banking culture in the wake of the Barclay’s Libor scandal, it is interesting to read about the story of Steve Clark taken from his interview with Jack Schwager in the Hedge Fund Market wizards.
Clark is a highly successful hedge fund manager, running the Omni Global fund which during the period since inception in 2001 has returned almost 20% per annum, with a maximum peak to trough drawdown of just 7% and not a single losing year. However during the 90s he tells a story of how he was forced out of a major investment bank purely for being honest.
The excerpt from the interview goes as follows:
‘Nomura ended badly for me because there was a change in management. The new guy in charge wasn’t straight. He had a convertible book, and all he was doing was buying illiquid convertible bonds and every month pushing the price up. He was the market because he owned most of these issues. So all he had to do was buy a few hundred bonds every month to push the price up. (more…)