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20+20 Trading Wisdom From Ed Seykota

  
  Education
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Ed Seykota wisdom:

  • “If I am bullish, I neither buy on a reaction, nor wait for strength; I am already in. I turn bullish at the instant my buy stop is hit, and stay bullish until my sell stop is hit. Being bullish and not being long is illogical.”
  • “Fundamentalists figure things out and anticipate change. Trend followers join the trend of the moment. Fundamentalists try to solve their feelings. Trend followers join their feelings and observe them evolve and dis-solve.”
  • “The feelings we accept and enjoy rarely interfere with trading.”
  • “Systems don’t need to be changed. The trick is for a trader to develop a system with which he is compatible”
  • “It can be very expensive to try to convince the markets you are right.”
  • “There are old traders and there are bold traders, but there are very few old, bold traders.”
  • “I would add that I consider myself and how I do things as a kind of system which, by definition, I always follow.”
  • “Systems trading is ultimately discretionary. The manager still has to decide how much risk to accept, which markets to play, and how aggressively to increase and decrease the trading base as a function of equity change.”

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Emotion Is More Important Than Intelligence In Trading

  
  Education
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Human EmotionThere is nothing new on Wall Street or in stock speculation.
What has happened in the past will happen again, and again, and again.
This is because human nature does not change, and it is human emotion, solidly built into human nature, that always gets in the way of human intelligence.
Of this I am sure.

Jesse Livermore

Marc Faber's Must Watch 2010 Presentation

  
Analysis, Economy, Education, Video
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As someone once said, the only man who can tell a room full of people they are doomed and get a standing ovation, Marc Faber, gives a terrific hour long presentation to the Mises Circle in Manhattan on May 22, discussing the economy, interest rates, markets, why having massive output gaps (see previous post for Bernanke’s most recent dose of lunacy on the matter) and hyperinflation can easily coexist, why the Fed will never again implement tight monetary policy, why Greenspan is a senile self-contradictor, why Paul Krugman is a broken and scratched record, and the fact that pretty much nothing matters and we are all going to hell. Little new here for long-term economic skeptics, but a must watch for all neophytes who are still grasping with some of the more confounding concepts of our dead-end Keynesian catastrophe and not only why the world can not get out of the current calamity absent a global debt repudiation, but why gold is the asset to own, even though one must not be dogmatic and shift from asset class to asset class in times of tremendous currency devaluation (i.e., such as right now). 2010’s must watch Marc Faber presentation.

One thing we disagree with Mr. Faber on, is that Asian banks did not buy CDOs during the housing bubble – this is patently wrong. As a detailed perusal through the Goldman discovery will confirm, Goldman looked increasingly eastward, first to Europe, and then to Korea, Japan and Taiwan, when finding the dumbest money around to invest in monstrosities such as Timberwolf, Abacus and others. If Mr. Faber is investing based on the assumption that Asian banks are free of this relic of the credit boom, we urge him to promptly reevaluate his investment thesis as he will certainly lose money here.

Learn to trust yourself

  
  Education
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Trust your plan and trust your powers of judgment. Furthermore, keep this sense of confidence in yourself throughout the duration of your position in the market. Loosing confidence in yourself and your trading plan while holding a market position most often results in losses. If doubt is haunting you and you cannot control, it is best to simply offset your position and be clear of the market. Reversing or altering your trading plan in mid-trade is the last thing you should do.

The most important thing to remember about trading with confidence is this: No matter how diligent or thorough your research into a particular trade, you may still end up wrong about the direction of the market. This is true for everyone, nobody is right every time. You might be wrong this time, but your trading plan (with clearly defined loss thresholds) will save you. So, in the final analysis, it isn’t always being right about the direction of the market that will make you a success. Instead, it is having the discipline to stick to your trading plan that will.

Be Imperfect

  
  Education
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As a trader – or an investor – you will not be right all of the time. If you can accept your imperfection, and work within it, you will be much more successful:

If you have a perfectionist mentality when trading, you are setting yourself up for failure, because it is a “given” that you will experience losses along the way. You must begin to think of trading as a game of probability. Your losses ( that you hope will return to breakeven) will kill you. If you cannot take a loss when it is small ( because of the need to be perfect), then you will watch that small loss grow into a larger loss and so on into a vicious cycle of more and more pain for the perfectionist. Trading on hope does not work. The markets can remain irrational for a lot longer than you can remain solvent.

The object should be excellence in trading, not perfection. Moreover, it is essential to strive for excellence over a sustained period, as opposed to judging that each trade must be excellent. This is a marathon…not a sprint.

The greatest traders know how to take cut losses and let winning positions run. Perfectionists often do exactly the opposite. They get in at the wrong time, stay in too long and then get out the wrong time. Perfectionists are always striving and never arriving. The market will find the flaw in a perfectionistic trader and exploit it day after day.

25 Trading Truths

  
  Education
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Seeing an opportunity and acting upon it are two different things.
•  Price has memory. Odds are what price did the last time it hit a certain level will be repeated  . . .
•  Pay attention to price action, regardless of what the charts are saying.
•  Look for a reversal at the same place you’re expecting a breakout or breakdown.
•  Price action sets up against the majority; the best profits are often in the opposite direction of the way you’re planning to go.
• Add to your winners and cut your losers. ’nuff said.
•  Opportunities come along all of the time. Wait for the best ones.
•  Don’t overly anticipate or see things that aren’t there. Wait for your signals.
•  The day isn’t over until the closing bell ring. The way it ends may be vastly different from how it begins.
•  Your first job isn’t to make money. It’s to protect capital.
•  Don’t rush to buy the lowest price or sell the highest price; It could get much lower or much higher before turning around. (more…)

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