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Trading is simple. The trader is complicated

Here is a very short list of comments from very reliable sources—successful professional traders.

From my collection of Books

 John F. Carter: “It is important to remember that there is no need to spend wasted years looking for complicated setups or the next Holy Grail.  There are very simple setups out there to use.  Some of the best traders I know have been trading the same setup, on the same time frame, on the same market for 20 years. They don’t care about anything else, and they don’t want to learn about anything else.  This works for them, and they are the masters of this setup.  They have nothing else coming in to interfere with their focus” (p. 31, Mastering the Trade: Proven Techniques for Profiting from Intraday and Swing Trading Setups).

Clifford Bennett: “While there have been some spectacular front-cover traders, the ones who amass fortunes year after year tend to stay in the background. At the very least, they display a simple and down-to-earth approach to markets if they are ever interviewed” (p. 117, Warrior Trading: Inside the Mind of an Elite Currency Trader).

Mark Douglas: “What you want to do is become an expert at just one particular type of behavior pattern that repeats itself with some degree of frequency. To become an expert, choose one simple trading system that identifies a pattern, preferably one that is mechanical, instead of mathematical, so that you will be working with a visual representation of market behavior. Your objective is to understand completely every aspect of the system-all the relationships between the components-and its potential to produce profitable trades.  In the meantime, it is important to avoid all other possibilities and information” (pp. 208-09, The Disciplined Trader: Developing Winning Attitudes).

Marcel Link: “Systems should be kept as simple as possible. Overdoing things doesn’t make a system better; on the contrary, it can take away from a good system.  Trying to make a system too complicated with too many indicators and variables is a common mistake with some traders: some of the best systems are the simplest. As a rule of thumb, a system should fit on the back of an envelope and be easily explained so that someone can understand what every indicator does and every rule does.  Otherwise it’s too complicated.  Always remember the old adage ‘Keep it simple, stupid’ and you’ll be okay” (p 249, High Probability Trading).

George Angell: “One observation I’ve made over the years, which is especially notable on the trading floor, is that everyone who truly succeeds is a specialist. Unlike the novice trader, who may dabble in as many as a dozen different futures contracts, the professional floor trader is identified with just one kind of futures and one specific type of trading…moreover, the professional is identified by his specialty-scalper, short-term trader, spread trader, or whatever.  He does the same thing every day (pp. 10-11, Sniper Trading).

John Murphy: “My work has gotten better due to simplifying my approach.” (KEY TO SUCCESS)

Dennis Gartman:Keep your technical systems simple. Complicated systems breed confusion; simplicity breeds elegance.” (From Dennis Gartman’s Trading Rules List, Rule #12).

Oracle-George Soros

George Soros
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“Soros” redirects here. For other uses, see Soros (disambiguation).
George Soros
George Soros at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2010
Born August 12, 1930 (1930-08-12) (age 80)
Budapest, Kingdom of Hungary
Alma mater London School of Economics
Occupation Entrepreneur, currency trader, investor, philosopher, philanthropist, political activist
Net worth ▲ $14.2 billion (Forbes)[1]
Religion None; Atheist[2]
Spouse Twice divorced (Annaliese Witschak and Susan Weber Soros)
Children Robert, Andrea, Jonathan, Alexander, Gregory
Website
www.georgesoros.com
George Soros (Hungarian: Soros György) (pronounced /ˈsɔroʊs/ or /ˈsɔrəs/,;[3] HungarianIPA: [ˈʃoroʃ]; born August 12, 1930, as Schwartz György) is a Hungarian-American currency speculator, stock investor, businessman, philanthropist, and liberal political activist.[4] He became known as “the Man Who Broke the Bank of England” after he made a reported $1 billion during the 1992 Black Wednesday UK currency crises.[5][6]
Soros is chairman of Soros Fund Management and the Open Society Institute and a former member of the Board of Directors of the Council on Foreign Relations. He played a significant role in the peaceful transition from Communism to Capitalism in Hungary (1984–89),[6] and provided Europe’s largest ever higher education endowment to Central European University in Budapest.[7] Later, his funding and organization of Georgia’s Rose Revolution was considered by Russian and Western observers to have been crucial to its success. In the United States, he is known for donating large sums of money in an effort to defeat President George W. Bush’s bid for re-election in 2004. He helped found the Center for American Progress.
Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker wrote in 2003 in the foreword of Soros’ book The Alchemy of Finance:
George Soros has made his mark as an enormously successful speculator, wise enough to largely withdraw when still way ahead of the game. The bulk of his enormous winnings is now devoted to encouraging transitional and emerging nations to become ‘open societies,’ open not only in the sense of freedom of commerce but—more important—tolerant of new ideas and different modes of thinking and behavior.
Family
Soros was born in Budapest, Kingdom of Hungary, the son of the Esperantist writer Tivadar Soros. Tivadar (also known as Teodoro) was a Hungarian Jew, who was a prisoner of war during and after World War I and eventually escaped from Russia to rejoin his family in Budapest.[8][9]
The family changed its name in 1936 from Schwartz to Soros, in response to growing anti-semitism with the rise of Fascism. Tivadar liked the new name because it is a palindrome and because it has a meaning. Although the specific meaning is left unstated in Kaufmann’s biography, in Hungarian, soros means “next in line, or designated successor and in Esperanto, it means “will soar”.[10] His son George was taught to speak Esperanto from birth and is a native Esperanto speaker. George Soros later said that he grew up in a Jewish home, and that his parents were cautious with their religious roots.[11]
George Soros has been married and divorced twice, to Annaliese Witschak, and to Susan Weber Soros. He has five children: Robert, Andrea, Jonathan (with his first wife, Annaliese); Alexander, Gregory (with his second wife, Susan). His elder brother, Paul Soros, a private investor and philanthropist, is a retired engineer, who headed Soros Associates, an international engineering firm based in New York, and established the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships for Young Americans.[12][13] George Soros’ nephew Peter Soros, a son of Paul Soros, is married to the former Flora Fraser, a daughter of Lady Antonia Fraser and the late Sir Hugh Fraser, and a stepdaughter of the late 2005 Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter.[14]
[edit] Early life (more…)

keep it simple -Don't miss to read…

keepitsimple
If you have been reading this blog for a while you know that ANIRUDH SETHI REPORT promotes simplicity.  Am I alone in thinking this way?  I do not believe so!  I would hazard to guess that most all, if not all, professional traders believe that successful trading boils down to having and following a very simple set of rules. 
Here is a very short list of comments from very reliable sources—successful professional traders.
John F. Carter:  “It is important to remember that there is no need to spend wasted years looking for complicated setups or the next Holy Grail.  There are very simple setups out there to use.  Some of the best traders I know have been trading the same setup, on the same time frame, on the same market for 20 years.  They don’t care about anything else, and they don’t want to learn about anything else.  This works for them, and they are the masters of this setup.  They have nothing else coming in to interfere with their focus” (p. 31, Mastering the Trade: Proven Techniques for Profiting from Intraday and Swing Trading Setups).
Clifford Bennett:  “While there have been some spectacular front-cover traders, the ones who amass fortunes year after year tend to stay in the background. At the very least, they display a simple and down-to-earth approach to markets if they are ever interviewed” (p. 117, Warrior Trading: Inside the Mind of an Elite Currency Trader). (more…)

5 Rogue Traders -They had Broke Banks

So, who are the rogue traders that have experienced all of this? Here’s a small sample (the ones we know of!). They are not in chronological order but in order of how much money they actually lost their banks (from the lowest to the highest):

1. John Rusnak

Rogue Trader: John Rusnak

The guy that brought down the Allfirst Bank and incurred losses of $69.2 million.

He was sentenced to 7.5 years in prison on January 17th 2003 for hiding the losses that he incurred as a currency trader. He hid the losses for a year. He is now under confinement at his home (since January 2009, meaning that he served almost six years for his rogue trading).

He was ordered to pay back $1, 000 per month after his release from prison and despite the fact that he remains in debt to the full sum of $691.2 million he will probably never be able to pay it back. How did it all happen?

  • Allfirst Bank wished to make its forex operations go from just hedging to bringing in a yield of profits and thus increase the total profits of the bank.
  • John Rusnak was hired to do this.
  • Rusnak was bullish on the Yen. He believed that the Yen would not fall any more after the bursting of the Japanese bubble. He believed that the Yen would rise against the Dollar.
  • He neglected to hedge his forward contracts believing that the Yen could not fail to rise.
  • With the onset of the Asian crisis, the Yen fell.
  • He thus entered false options into the systems to make it seem as if the positions were hedged. He also asked for more money from high brokerage accounts in order to try to win back the money that he had already lost.
  • The management granted this to him and he invested even more money.
  • Rusnak made a personal gain of $550, 000 in bonuses plus his salary.
  • The losses only came to light when the bank asked for capital to be released and they realized that Rusnak had been working in the red all the time.
  • Rusnak was fired from his position and along with him he brought down 6 senior executives for failing to detect the scam.

One thing is for sure: Rusnak has kept his nose clean since getting out of prison and has managed to fall into relative anonymity. Nobody knows what he’s doing today for work. (more…)

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