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The Four Principles of Trading

  
  Education
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  1. The price has the final say. You may have an opinion on the market, but it is dangerous to marry it to your positions, as famous trader Richard Dennis explained, “You don’t get any profits from fundamental analysis; you get profit from buying and selling. So why stick with the appearance when you can go right to the reality of price and analyze it better?”

  2. Follow instead of forecast. Legendary trader Paul Tudor Jones once declared that he would never hire fundamental traders who frequently tried to outwit the market and got burned, because by the time the fundamentals become clear, the trend is over. You can never know if the next trade wins or not, so simply follow your rules and see.

  3. Preserve your capital. Since the market is impossible to forecast, all great traders agree that you must limit your losses before it gets out of hand, since they have seen a lot of intelligent traders got bruised in a market crash simply because they held on to the losers or even averaged down on the way as the price became “fundamentally” attractive.

  4. Let your winners ride. The other side of the coin is not to cut the profit too soon before it can grow large. Jesse Livermore explained, “I’ve known many men who… began buying or selling stocks when prices were at the very level which should show the greatest profit. And … they made no real money out of it.” Why? They sold too soon.

Why Greater Skill Leads to More Luck

  
  Education
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“Okay, you have gotten the memo on improving skill: 10,000 hours, hard work, deliberate practice, grit, and attentive teacher. We’ve all heard it. you also recognize that in many of life’s activities, the results you achieve combine skill and luck. no debate there. now, what if I told you that in many cases improving skill leads to results that rely more on luck? that’s right. Greater skill doesn’t decrease the dependence on luck, it increases it. If you have an interest in sports, business, or investing, this lesson is for you.”

Read the full piece here.  It’s short and worth the time….

Trade Like an O’Neil Disciple -Book Review

  
  Education
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The CANSLIM enthusiasts, and they seem to be legion if the reviews on Amazon are any indication, have nothing but praise for Trade Like an O’Neil Disciple by Gil Morales and Chris Kacher (Wiley, 2010). I decided to be a little more focused and less ebullient in this post and write about a trade setup not found in the standard O’Neil repertoire. Consider this a follow-up to yesterday’s discussion about the eye of ambiguity.

The setup is alternatively described as a pocket pivot or buying in the pocket. It is “an early base breakout indicator, which is designed to find buyable pivot points within a stock’s base shortly before the stock actually breaks out of its chart base or consolidation and emerges into new high price ground.” (p. 128) The pocket pivot indicator provides direction in what might be seen as an ambiguous situation. It is, the authors claim, particularly valuable in sideways moving markets.

A major virtue of a pocket pivot buy point is that it is a low-risk entry point—relatively close to support and far enough from resistance to be profitable even if the stock can’t break through to higher highs. Or, as the more optimistic authors claim, “the pocket pivot buy point technique can get an investor into a stock at a lower-risk price point and thereby make it more possible for the investor to sit through a pullback if the all-too-obvious new-high breakout buy point fails initially and the stock retrenches, corrects, or sells off.” (p. 129)

What are the characteristics of a pocket pivot buy point? “[A] stock should be showing constructive price/volume action preceding the pocket pivot. … [T]ighter price formations, that is, less volatility should be evident in the stock’s price/volume action as viewed on its chart. The stock should have been ‘respecting’ or ‘obeying’ the 50-day moving average during the price run that occurred prior to the time the stock began building its current base. … Except in very rare cases, … pocket pivots should only be bought when they occur above the 50-day moving average. Ideally, the stock’s price/volume action should become ‘quiet’ over the previous several days, which contrasts with the much larger and stronger volume move that comes on the pocket pivot itself. On the pocket pivot you want to see up-volume equal to or greater than the largest down-volume day over the prior 10 days.” (pp. 132-33)

The authors offer a series of variations on this generic trade setup. For instance, there’s the continuation trade: buying on volume after a pullback to the 10-day moving average. Or the bottom-fishing trade where a stock, after carving out a bottom, pushes through its 50-day moving average. They urge caution if a pocket pivot is too extended from its 10- or 50-day moving average when it begins its move or if a stock has been “wedging” upward instead of drifting downward before a pocket pivot. As they write, “context is everything.” (p. 162)

This setup is certainly not a revolutionary breakthrough in the world of technical analysis. In fact, anyone familiar with the literature might recognize several patterns rolled into one here. In the context of yesterday’s post, it is a “fast-follower” strategy because it requires a volume spike, created by the “first movers.”

Magical thinking

  
  Education
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Magical thinking describes subjective speculation about how markets will act. It is difficult to know for sure how significant a role intuition about the likelihood that investments will do well or poorly plays in peoples? decisions to invest. We are trying to assess innermost thoughts about money and self worth which most people feel they do not have to explain or justify to anyone. However, we can label these patterns of thought as magical thinking. Most investors have occasional feelings or intuitions that certain trading actions will bring them luck even if they know logically the actions can have no effect on their fortunes. Playing a hunch just because it feels right seldom makes traders rich. Yet proof that it’s human nature to indulge in magical thinking abounds:

  1. It has been shown that people will place larger bets on a coin that has not yet been tossed than on a coin that has already been tossed, but the outcome of the toss has yet to be revealed.
  2. If asked how much money they would demand to part with a lottery ticket they already hold, most ticket holders give a figure over four times greater than if they themselves chose the lottery number on the ticket. Apparently, at some magical level people think that they can influence a coin that has not yet been tossed and influence the likelihood of winning the lottery by choosing the number.
  3. People are capable of thinking, at least on some intuitive level, If I buy a stock, then it will go up afterwards or If I buy a stock, then others will probably want to buy the stock, too, because they are like me or I have a hot hand lately; my luck is with me. Such magical thinking is likely, in a subtle way, to contribute to the overconfidence that may help the propagation of speculative bubbles.
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