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The Three pillars of trading

Money Management: You must make your trades as fixed as possible. Trade with the same risk, capital, units, percentage, and in the same type markets to manage risk most effectively.

Methodology: Choose a method that works for you and your personality. (Dow Theory, technical indicators, patterns, price and volume, etc) Once you have a methodology to your trading, test it in the real world, in real time, either with micro trades or paper trade. You need a sample size to judge its efficacy.

Trader Psychology: Manage your hope, greed, fear, and pain to stay in the game.

Three Trading Wisdom

Preservation of Capital

Preservation of capital is the cornerstone of my business philosophy. This means that, in considering any potential market involvement, risk is my prime concern. Before asking, “What personal profit can I realize?”, I first ask, “What potential loss can I suffer?”
…There is one, and only one, valid question for an investor to ask: “Have I made money?” The best insurance that the answer will always be “Yes!” is to consistently speculate or invest only when the odds are decidedly in your favor, which means keeping risk at a minimum.

Consistent Profitability

Obviously, the markets aren’t always at or near tops or bottoms. Generally speaking, a good speculator or investor should be able to capture between 60 and 80% of the long-term price trend (whether up or down) between bull market tops and bear market bottoms in any market. This is the period when the focus should be on making consistent profits with low risk.
…Anyone who enters the financial markets expecting to be right on most of their trades is in for a rude awakening. If you think about it, it’s a lot like hitting a baseball — the best players only get hits 30 to 40% of the time. But a good player knows that the hits usually help a lot more than the strikeouts hurt. The reward is greater than the risk.

Pursuit of Superior Returns

As profits accrue, I apply the same reasoning but take the process a step further to the pursuit of superior returns. If, and only if, a level of profits exists to justify aggressive risk, then I will take on a higher risk to produce greater percentage returns on capital. This does not mean that I change my risk/reward criteria; it means that I increase the size of my positions.

Quotes for Traders

Planning, Discipline & Patience.
  • ‘Predicting rain does n’t count; building arks does’: Warren Buffett’s Noah Rule.
  • “To know and not to do, is not yet to know” – Courtesy of Tom Witters.
  • ‘It’s easy to have faith in yourself and have discipline when you’re a winner, when you’re number one. What you got to have is faith and discipline when you’re not a winner.’ – Vince Lombardi
  • ‘After spending many years in Wall Street and after making and losing millions of dollars I want to tell you this: It never was my thinking that made the big money for me. It always was my sitting. Got that? My sitting tight!’ – Jesse Livermore

Fear

  • ‘Never let fear of striking out, get in your way’: Babe Ruth.

Perspectives

  • ‘It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future,’ – Lawrence Peter ‘Yoggi’ Berra.
  • “go as far as you can see, and when you get there , you will see further.” –
  • anonymous
  • ‘Don’t worry what others think… They don’t do it very often’ – Courtesy of Mark Carstens.
  • “A little learning is a dangerous thing, but we must take that risk because a little is as much as our biggest heads can hold.” – George Bernard Shaw.
  • “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” – George Santayana.
  • “Glory is fleeting but obscurity is eternal” – Napoleon
  • ‘A long term investment is when I break even.’ – Courtesy of David Wong.
  • “There are many truths, but only one reality” – Courtesy of Robin Farrell.
  • ‘It’s not whether you get knocked down, it’s whether you get up.’ – Vince Lombardi.
  • ‘We would accomplish many more things if we did not think of them as impossible.’ – Vince Lombardi
  • “Vision – It reaches beyond the thing that is, into the conception of what can be. Imagination gives you the picture. Vision gives you the impulse to make the picture your own.” – Robert Collier.
  • “If you’re 30 minutes into the game and you don’t know who the patsy is, you’re the patsy.” – Courtesy of Saranjot Dosanjh.
  • ‘Price is observable and objective while value is perceived and subjective’. – John Murphy.
  • ‘In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.’ – Yogi Berra.
  • “As a rule, Panics do not destroy capital; they merely reveal the extent to which it has been previously destroyed by its betrayal into hopelessly unproductive works…. The Failure of great banks… and mercantile firms…are the symptoms incident to the disease, not the disease itself.” – John Stuart Mill (1867).
  • ‘You need three bear markets to know what to do. The first nearly wipes you out, the second you learn how to survive and the third you take by the scruff of the neck and enjoy it.’ – Crispin Odey of Odey Asset Management.
  • “Never in recorded history, has the supply of capital not overwhelmed the supply of opportunity.” – Joseph Lassiter .
  • ‘You only live once but if you work it right, once is enough’. – Joe E. Lewis.
  • “If you really know whats going on, you don’t even have to know whats going on to know whats going on… You can ignore the headlines because you anticipated them months ago” – Michael Steinhardt.
  • ‘Another lesson I learned early is that there is nothing new in Wall Street. There can’t be because speculation is as old as the hills. Whatever happens in the stock market today has happened before and will happen again.’ – Jesse Livermore.
  • “Economic history is a never-ending series of episodes based on falsehoods and lies, not truths. It represents the path to big money. The object is to recognize the trend whose premise is false, ride that trend, and step off before it is discredited.” – Soros.

On Losses (and Profits). 

  • ‘Tradings only real secret is… The best loser is the long-term winner’ – Phantom
  • “Trading is a losing game, the best loser is the long-term winner” – Anonymous.
  • ‘Losses can either be lost money, or tuition in the school of trading’ – Courtesy of Mark Moskowitz.
  • ‘The worst advice I use to get was. – ‘No one went broke taking a profit’’. – Courtesy of John Berra.
  • “It seems that the necessary thing to do is not to fear mistakes, to plunge in, to do the best that one can, hoping to learn enough from blunders to correct them eventually.” – Abraham Maslow
  • ‘“Learn to like your losses”. Why? Because they are small!’ – Courtesy of Stuart A.Brown.
  • “One common adage…that is completely wrongheaded is: You can’t go broke taking profits. That’s precisely how many traders do go broke. While amateurs go broke by taking large losses, professionals go broke by taking small profits.” – William Eckhardt.
  • “Its not about being right or wrong, rather, its about how much money you make when you’re right and how much you don’t lose when you’re wrong.” – George Soros.
  • “The first loss is the best loss.” – Jim Rogers.
  • “Losers average Losers”…Paul Tudor Jones.
  • “You learn nothing from your winners and everything from your losers.” – Courtesy of Jeff Horn.
  • ·“To become a Master Trader, you must first be a successful loser.” – Jeff Horn.

Ego

  • “Don’t be a hero. Don’t have an ego. Always question yourself and your ability. Don’t ever feel that you are very good. The second you do, you are dead.” – Paul Tudor Jones

Personal Responsibility and Self-awarenss (more…)

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