Kenny Rogers said “You never count your money when you’re sitting at the table.” That profit is not realized, so don’t mentally take inventory of it until the trade is closed and you have realized that gain. This will create emotion, and you will stay in trades for the numbers rather than the logical reasons. |
Archives of “Education” category
rssRe-Evaluate
Be willing to stop trading and re-evaluate the markets and your methodology when you encounter a string of losses. The markets will always be there. Gann said it best in his book, How to Make Profits in Commodities, published over 50 years ago: “When you make one to three trades that show losses, whether they be large or small, something is wrong with you and not the market. Your trend may have changed. My rule is to get out and wait. Study the reason for your losses. Remember, you will never lose any money by being out of the market.”
Possible Harmful Dispositions of Mind and Feeling
6 Mistakes
Mistake number one: not having any knowledge of the simple visual indications for when to enter a trade based on market behavior and common sense.
Mistake number two: not being on the right time frame at the right time for the current trading opportunity.
Mistake number three: entering trades long AFTER the real entry occurred and exiting way BEFORE the exit occurs.
Mistake number four: no trading plan or direction for a consistent entry and exit strategy.
Mistake number five: following some scam Forex system they recently bought on the internet and using dozens of “proprietary” indicators.
Mistake number six: entering and exiting trades for reasons other than their own trading method. (fear, greed, etc)
Once Kissed, Twice Shy
The markets have a plethora of different structures and associations with numbers. Some examples are:
1. Round numbers
2. Opening & closing times
3. Limits
4. Constantly changing magnitudes and significance placed thereupon (for example there were extended periods last summer when the SPU futures had daily ranges in the mid single digits and now it’s a score (20) per day).
Much work is done splicing and dicing numbers and looking for statistically significant positive expectations based on various past conditionality.
As another part of that, I wonder whether or not the first, or second or third instance of some stimuli is more or less predictive than the other or others.
This has been brought up in my mind by the recent dance of the seven veils of many markets with many round numbers.
As a start, how about this:
1. Is the first break of a round more or less predictive than the second (assuming the market has reversed intermediately)?
2. Are moves of the same magnitude in the same or opposite directions of interest within a given timeframe?
3. More qualitatively, when a market breaks some predefined barrier (a round, a magnitude, a correlation coefficient et al) and subsequently does so again later, is this last move more likely to have the same sign/ opposite sign and will the magnitude be greater or lesser?
Peter Lynch: Investing in stocks is an art, not a science
Capacity of Love
For the past 10 years, Walmart is up 63% while Amazon is up 2700%. Here's WMT vs AMZN in 2016.
Value vs Growth?