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Trading Nuggets

  
  Education
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Price — The Truth, The Light, The Way

  • Work to understand price
  • Price does not move in a straight line
  • Big moves take time
  • Volatility is your friend and helps to compress time
  • Although volatility is your pal, it can cut both ways
  • If a stock moves 30% a day, then you can’t trade with a 5% stop
  • Don’t expect a volatile stock to stop behaving as it has been and only move in your favor just because you’re now in it. Unless you’re Bill Clinton, what is, IS.

Random Thoughts:

  • Observe but be slow to shift gears — we are trend followers, not predictors
  • It’s the market’s “job” to shake you out
    • The market will do what it has to do to create the most pain (for the most people)
    • The market will often do the obvious in the most un-obvious manner
  • Err on the side of the longer-term trend
    • DO wait for entries
    • DO use protective stops
    • DO trail and scale as offered

10 Trading Principles of George Soros

  
  Education
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“I’m only rich because I know when I’m wrong…I basically have survived by recognizing my mistakes.”

Understanding that he was not always right enabled him to cut losses short and position size right.

“My approach works not by making valid predictions but by allowing me to correct false ones.”

Soros’ is flexible in his trades, he changes his mind and reverses positions when needed. He does not marry his trades.

“It’s not whether you’re right or wrong that’s important, but how much money you make when you’re right and how much you lose when you’re wrong.”

George Soros knows that the key to profitability for him is more about big wins and small losses than his winning percentage. 

“The markets are always on the side of exuberance or fear. It’s fear and greed. Right now greed has the better of it, which is rather nice (for investors) as long as it doesn’t get out of hand,”

Market trends are caused more by the extremes of  investors emotions than fundamental reasons.

“Once we realize that imperfect understanding is the human condition there is no shame in being wrong, only in failing to correct our mistakes.”

The problem is not in a losing trade but in failing to cut the loss or add to a losing position.

“The worse a situation becomes, the less it takes to turn it around, and the bigger the upside.”

The more extended a trend gets from its average the greater the odds of a snap back and reversion to that mean.

“If investing is entertaining, if you’re having fun, you’re probably not making any money. Good investing is boring.” (more…)

The World’s Worst Teacher

  
  Education
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The market often rewards bad behavior. You exit a stock because your stop is hit. You are okay with this because you followed your plan. The market then immediately reverses. You begin to think, “If only I stayed with the position.” The next time the market goes against you, you decide you are not going to get tricked again. This time though, the market does not reverse and what started out as a small manageable loss is now huge.

The market will give you loss after loss forcing you to abandon a methodology right before it takes off without you. On the flip side, the market will lull you into a false sense of confidence. You trade larger and larger, taking on excessive risk. You print money until your risks become so excessive that one or two bad trades wipe you out.

Learn from the market, but realize that sometimes it can be a lousy instructor.

A Venerable Technique

  
Analysis, Education
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JL-One of intelligent honest things that Livermore did was to get out of one market by selling a related market, inducing the other traders to think that there was weakness in one market which would carry over to the related market. The art of indirection and letting people use their own intelligence and inferences to come to their own conclusion. for example if he wanted to get out of cotton, he’d sell some coffee. If he wanted to get out of a common, he’s sell the preferred or a related company that owned a big chunk of it, like sell Christiana which owned general motors et al. This technique one wonders how often is it used today. When it happens, is it artful indirection or chance? How to quantify and what predictions to be made? Would the robots be smart enough to do this?

These 7 Things -Traders Must Avoid

  
  Education
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  • Trading with no stop losses. You can’t control how big your profits are, the market will trend as far as it does. However, you can control and limit the size of your losses with a stop loss and a carefully managed positions size. Not having an exit plan if you are wrong can be very expensive when a trend takes off against your position and you start hoping instead of just cutting your losses and moving on.
  • Your opinion can cost you money. Trading your opinion against all other market participants can be very expensive. The market goes where it wants and when you disagree with where it is going it will cost you. Going with the flow in your time frame is the best way to make money. Fighting the flow of the market can be expensive.
  • Egos are expensive things. Inflated egos cause a trader’s #1 priority to be proving they are right and refusing to admit when they are wrong. It is very expensive for ego gratification to be higher on a trader’s list than making money.
  • Trading off predictions can cost a lot of money when they are wrong. There is more to be made by reacting to what the market is doing instead of predicting what you think it will do later. The future does not exist and it is expensive to pretend like it does.
  • Stubbornness causes small losses to become big losses. It causes a trader to make the same mistake over and over because they do not assimilate feedback. Instead they keep doing the same thing over and over and expect different results but keep getting the same results. Stubbornness is expensive.
  • Not having an exit strategy for a winning trade can be very expensive. It is possible to ride a big winning trade back to even. If there is no plan to lock in profits while they are there a winning trade can even turn into a big loser. Trailing stops and targets can put the profits in the bank.
  • Trading too big of position sizes for your account can be very costly because no manner how good your winning trades are you are set up to give back the profits with a few big losing trades in a row,

Don’t focus on making money; focus on protecting what you have

  
  Education
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  • You need to determine where you will get out before you get in. You need to specify your exit point when you get in. When you set an exit point, you need to know how much money you are willing to lose on this idea and also at what exit point you think you are wrong in your assessment. You should not place a stop too close, because that is likely to lead to multiple losses.
  • Some times, options can provide the same protection as stops.
  • At the portfolio level, it may also be prudent to specify a maximum loss from the starting stake for each year.
  • Be willing to get out quickly when you are wrong.
  • If you are not sure whether you are wrong or right and you have made a loss, partially liquidate 50%. If you continue to be wrong, liquidate 50% more. Then what is left is not a big deal.
  • When your losses are small, you will bet again. When your losses are big, you are afraid to bet and you lose great opportunities.
  • Never risk more than 1% of total equity on any trade is probably a effective money management tool for many.

6 Lessons from Paul Tudor Jones

  
  Education
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  1. I approach every stock with the understanding that my knowledge is imperfect, that I could be wrong and I give myself permission to make mistakes.
  2. If something falls more than 10% versus the market, I force myself to re-evaluate my thesis and think about how I could be wrong – what is the price action trying to tell me.
  3. I ask myself if I didn’t own the stock here, would I buy it today. If the answer is no, I sell immediately.
  4. If something falls below its 200-day moving average I sell 50% of the position right away, and again re-evaluate my thesis.
  5. If a position is causing me a lot of stress or is consuming an undue amount of time on a weekly basis, I cut 50% – the position is obviously too big.
  6. If I wake up worried about a position repeatedly, I cut it 50% immediately.
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