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4 Steps to Changing Your Bad Trading Habits

  
  Education
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1. Understand the benefit of change. First, ask yourself if you need to change. Then, ask yourself what you need to change. Identify your current habits and ponder the benefits of changing them. Perhaps while trading you are feeling negative emotions such as stress, anxiety, temptation, or frustration. And ultimately, these emotions cause you to make poor, impulsive and self-destructive decisions. Write down what would happen if you were no longer feeling such negative emotions. That is, what would happen if you were able to remain calm and clear-headed while trading?

2. Dissect the proposed change and benefits. Find as many holes in the prospective change as you can. Don’t just convince yourself that things will become better if you change. Make sure the grass actually is greener on the other side of the fence. Be clear about what you want to change and how you will go about it. Write down the benefits that will take place if you do indeed change.

3. Recognize the situation that triggers your self-destructive action. Write down those all-too-familiar conditions, or circumstances, that lend themselves to activating negativity within you (e.g., all the things done, or said, that push your buttons). Also, write down how you are going to consciously recognize them during the day as they happen. Now, next to each item, write down what systems and processes you will implement to avoid letting that situation become emotional. (more…)

10 Trading Books -Every Trader Must Read

  
  Education
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“If there was easy money lying around, no one would be forcing it it into your pockets.” – Jesse Livermore

There is so much garbage out there concerning trading online and the temptation for easy money that many new traders are lured into childish beliefs about getting rich quick, following a guru that can predict the future, or confusing a salesman for a trader. Contrary to popular belief, trading is not about picks, predictions, or personal gurus. Trading is really about entry signals with an edge, following price action, and learning to trade a system that fits who you are as a trader. Real long term profitable trading is about, risk management, robust trading systems, and mental and emotional discipline. I would not trust anyone that did not have those three things at the core of their trading. Here is the right reading path for a new trader to follow to avoid all the hype, foolishness, con-artists, and childishness that arises from ignorance of a solid understanding of the subject of trading in the real world in real time.

Trade Like a Casino: Find Your Edge, Manage Risk, and Win Like the House (Wiley Trading)  “If we are properly managing the risk and adhering to a positive expectancy model, the act of trading a position should be boring.” – Richard Weissman

Trading Without Gambling: Develop a Game Plan for Ultimate Trading Success “If all your decisions were made during nonmarket hours with timing and execution being your main concern during market hours, you will dramatically increase your chances of success.” – Marcel Link

Trend Following (Updated Edition): Learn to Make Millions in Up or Down Markets “Trend followers are the group of technical traders who use reactive technical analysis. Instead of trying to predict a market direction, their strategy is to react to the market’s movements whenever they occur. This enables them to focus on the market’s actual moves and not get emotionally involved with trying to predict direction or duration.” – Michael Covel

Market Wizards, Updated: Interviews With Top Traders “The most important rule of trading is to play great defense, not great offense.” & “Don’t focus on making money; focus on protecting what you have.” – Market Wizards (more…)

DON’T FIGHT THE MARKET

  
  Education
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Fighting the market is not good for two reasons.  First, we lose money.  How much we lose depends on how well we are managing our money and controlling our risk.  Second, fighting the market affects our judgment, and causes us to try to confirm that our judgment is correct. Some very high level market analyst will persist in fighting a trend so that we will eventually be proved to be correct.  They figure that if we persist long enough, no matter how long it takes, we will eventually be right. In some cases the “technical price” level is so far away that by the time the forecast is negated, the inventor following the advice will have lost a large sum and missed a fine opportunity on the other side of the forecast!

By analogy, there is a reason for leaving your car downstream, launching your canoe upstream, and paddling downstream.  It is much easier and eminently more fun to go with the flow and paddle downstream.  We could do the opposite and paddle upstream, eventually we may even get to our destination, but the cost would be substantial.  It would take much more time, more physical and emotional stamina, and we would be constantly fighting the current.  Reaching the goal would not be worth the cost.

From a system trading point of view, it is seen from a different set of constraints. The technical or priced based strategy that gets you into a trade also has a priced based signal that says “the strategy is wrong get out ” or “the strategy is wrong reverse your positions”. The problem with relaying on price to tell you that you’re wrong is that the market does not care. So like the unmoved market analyst that says “it’s only a bear market rally”, at some point money management, risk manage has to come into play, It is a necessary evil.

Self-Beleif – Inspiration Poem. – 'The Man Who Thinks He Can'.

  
  Education
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In the constant battle for success in trading, there are many qualities needed to overcome the many hurdles put up by both the market and ourselves. People may possess these qualities in varying measures and differing degrees, however there is one quality which all people need to possess: ‘Self belief’. – Without this, you are almost certainly beaten already, and when you lose this, the perils are many. 
‘Self-Belief’ is a quality shared by winners across all fields, from sports, to business, to trading. There is a wonderful poem, written about 100 years ago, which nicely captures and summaries this point. – I advise many of my trading clients to print this poem off and keep it close to hand:
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The Man Who Thinks He Can.
By Walter D.Wintle.  
If you think you are beaten, you are
If you think you dare not, you don’t,
If you like to win, but you think you can’t
It is almost certain you won’t. 
If you think you’ll lose, you’re lost
For out of the world we find,
Success begins with a fellow’s will
It’s all in the state of mind. 
If you think you are outclassed, you are
You’ve got to think high to rise,
You’ve got to be sure of yourself before
You can ever win a prize. 
Life’s battles don’t always go
To the stronger or faster man,
But soon or late the man who wins
Is the man WHO THINKS HE CAN!

Andrew W. Lo ,Adaptive Markets -Book Review

  
Analysis, Education

Andrew W. Lo first proposed the adaptive markets hypothesis (AMH) in 2004 as an alternative to the efficient markets hypothesis (EMH). Four years later, in Hedge Funds: An Analytic Perspective, he reiterated his hypothesis. Few people did cartwheels over it. This past year he wrote a more popular, though nearly 500-page, book to advance his view, Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought (Princeton University Press).
The first third of the book—dare I say the best third of the book?—is a stroll through, and critique of, competing hypotheses and an introduction to evolution, with the mantra “It’s the environment, stupid!” emerging as a dominant motif and the notion of evolution at the speed of thought becoming an organizing principle. (“We can use our brains to test our ideas in mental models, and to reshape them if they’re found lacking. This is still a form of evolution, but it’s evolution at the speed of thought.”)
As Lo repeats more than once, it takes a theory to beat a theory. His hypothesis is, he suggests, “the new contender. But these are still early days for the challenger—the incumbent has had a five-decade head start—and a great deal more research is needed before these ideas become as immediately useful as the existing models of quantitative finance.” This is indeed the problem for the AMH. It’s just not immediately obvious how to use it in a way that is neither trivial (e.g., market regimes change) nor supportive of far too many alternatives.
According to the AMH, “market behavior adapts to a given financial environment.” The EMH, in Lo’s view, describes an abstraction, an idealized market. “An efficient market is simply the steady-state limit of a market in an unchanging financial environment.”
Lo offers a new investment paradigm to replace or modify the five principles of the traditional investment paradigm.
1. The risk/reward trade-off. Although during normal market conditions there’s a positive association between risk and reward, “when the population of investors is dominated by individuals facing extreme financial threats, they can act in concert and irrationally, in which case risk will be punished.”
2. Alpha, beta, and the CAPM. “Knowing the environment and population dynamics of market participants may be more important than any single factor model.”
3. Portfolio optimization and passive investing. “Portfolio optimization tools are only useful if the assumptions of stationarity and rationality are good approximations to reality.” As for passive investing, “risk management should be a higher priority.”
4. Asset allocation. “The boundaries between asset classes are becoming blurred.”
5. Stocks for the long run. “Over more realistic investment horizons, … investors need to be more proactive about managing their risk.”
Lo is a good enough scientist to realize that “between theory, data, and experiment, the Adaptive Markets Hypothesis will survive, perhaps be replaced with an even more compelling theory in the future, or fall short and be forgotten.” I hope it’s not the last alternative because, even though I have my doubts about its efficacy, the hypothesis has some very attractive features.

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