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How to Pick Your Money from Trading

There is a famous saying about trading the markets;

“I just wait until there is money lying in the corner, and all I have to do is go over there and pick it up.”

I always thought that it was first said by Jim Rodgers in Market Wizards, but someone told me the other day that it was actually Jesse Livermore who said it (or a version of it) first.

I really don’t care who said it, so for the purposes of this post let’s just say it was Joey Heatherton who said it after a two-week sold out run at The Sands. (more…)

I will not…

1- “I will not alienate my friends and antagonize my family by reminding the world on every possible occasion how right I was about the upturn – or downturn – in steels, motors, airlines, or whatever.
2 – When I buy a stock I will not mobilize all the good news to make it look pretty. I will try to consider both the favorable and unfavorable angles as impartially as I know how.
3 – I will not close out a stock position that is doing well by me for no other reason than that I have a profit. I will not cut short my gains in a good situation.
4 – I will not hang on to a stock that is persistently going against me. I will limit my loss and close out any position that seems to have gone really bad before I am in danger of serious trouble.
5 – I will not be swayed or panicked by news flashes, rumors, tips, or well-meant advice.
6 – I will not put all my eggs in one basket nor will I be swept off my feet to plunge into some unknown or low-priced stock on a purely emotional basis.
7 – I will not attempt to tell the market what a stock ought to be worth. I will try to understand what the market has to tell me about what people are willing to pay for it.
8 – I will never forget that I am not in the market primarily to prove – to my broker, my friends, my wife, etc. – that I am smarter than everybody else, but to protect and, if possible, to augment my capital.”

Clip from -Robert D. Edwards and John Magee, Technical Analysis of Stock Trends, first published in 1948.

“Few human activities have been exhaustively studied during the past fifty years, from so many angles and by so many different sorts of people, as has the buying and selling of corporate securities.  The rewards which the stock market holds out to those who read it right are enormous; the penalties it exacts from careless, dozing, or “unlucky” investors are calamitous-no wonder it has attracted some of the world’s most astute accountants, analysts, and researchers, along with a motley crew of eccentrics, mystics and “hunch players,” and a multitude of just ordinary hopeful citizens.

Able brains have sought, and continue constantly to seek, for safe and sure methods of appraising the state and trend of the market, of discovering the right stock to buy and the right time to buy it.  This intensive research has not been fruitless-far from it.  There are a great may successful investors and speculators (using the word in its true sense which is without opprobrium) who, by one road or another, have acquired the necessary insight into the forces with which they deal and the judgment, the forethought and the all-important self-discipline to deal with them profitably.”

Trading Wisdom – Jesse Livermore

“I think it was a long step forward in my trading education when I realized at last that when old Mr. Partridge kept on telling the other customers, “Well, you know this is a bull market!” he really meant to tell them that the big money was not in the individual fluctuations but in the main movements – that is, not in reading the tape but in sizing up the entire market and its trend.”

In all of “Reminiscences” this crucial idea that the Really Big Money is always earned by prudently riding the large trends over time and not in day trading every minute fluctuation is one of the central themes of the book. Livermore hammers this again and again, attacking it from countless angles and spicing up all of his amazing lessons with his own enthralling personal experiences.

This old and successful speculator that Livermore mentions, Mr. Partridge, would always politely tell the younger speculators who asked him trading questions that it was a bull market. The young speculators were always eager to trade, but Partridge was old and battle-scarred enough to know that no mere mortal could even hope to catch every individual fluctuation so the wisest strategy was just to ride the major trends. His simple reply, which would annoy the youngsters since they couldn’t yet perceive the deep wisdom in it, was to subtly advise them to just ride the primary trend and not worry about rapid-fire trading.

If a particular market happens to be in a primary bull trend, then just be long and don’t worry about trying to interpret and trade upon the essentially random day-to-day market noise. If a particular market is in a primary bear trend, then either sit out in cash or stay short and wait for the trend to fully mature and run its course. Don’t try to frantically outguess the primary trend everyday, just accept it and trade with it and you will win in the end.