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Learn To Love Uncertainty

It is often said that markets hate uncertainty and it is true. We do live and trade in uncertain times. But, as traders and investors, we must all learn to love and appreciate uncertainty. With uncertainty, also brings opportunity. Understanding this concept is so very important and learning how to profit from uncertainty consistently is going to make a critical difference between your success and failure.

Traders learn through experience the importance of examining and evaluating the markets through placing percentages on various future market scenarios. For example, at the hedge fund I worked at last week, every morning traders assemble for a 30 minute premarket meeting where everyone at the firm works closely together to outline the various potential scenarios for the market that day and then place specific odds on what they think is most likely to occur and why. One trader every day is in charge of diagramming out the different market scenarios on a whiteboard which resembles a flow chart so that the firm has a structured and easy to follow game plan. That game plan is also copied and stored so that the firm can later review it to learn and prepare in future days. In fact, at the end of every trading day they have another meeting to review the game plan and what went right and wrong and why.

By having the plan in place with various market scenarios outlined and positions to profit from those scenarios, uncertainty is no longer a factor. In fact, traders learn to love uncertainty because uncertain market conditions tend to favor those who are the most prepared to handle anything and everything Mr. Market could throw their way.

When the market does something outside of that original plan (it doesn’t happen as often as you might think), there is always a Plan B, Plan C, and so on with a number of preconfigured trading ideas to profit if the market moved in a specific manner different than the most likely scenario. By having this planned structure in place, everyone can then focus on price action and trading setups as they occur instead of flying by the seat of their pants or, even worse, finding themselves held hostage or paralyzed by the ticker.

I had the distinct privilege of looking through the archive of firm’s game plans for the past year and was amazed by how well the firm positioned itself according to the plan AND more importantly how it handled itself when the market did something unusual. In fact, just reviewing past game plans would be incredibly useful as a teaching mechanism for new traders who have little understanding of how the pros plan their work and work their plan. If you’re like me, you’ll begin to respect the other side of the trade much more than you probably do already.

As you might imagine, the process of formulating a game plan based on setting percentage odds for various scenarios was very interesting and useful for me to watch and participate in. It also stressed how important it is to have a plan, but at the same time be flexible enough to adjust as market conditions change. I usually spend at least an hour of prep time before every trading day, but after last week’s experience I will be doing more prep than before. That’s how important I think this kind of exercise can be!

So, the question becomes, are you adequately prepared every trading day? In working with many traders over the years, most are not as prepared as I saw with my very own eyes last week. In fact, given the firm’s results compared with other traders I know, I have good reason to think that kind of high-level preparation frequently can separate the winners from the losers.

Yes, it is true that we call can get lucky (every trade in theory has a 50% chance of working out, correct?), but over time the market will remove that luck factor and your success will be determined primarily on consistency and how you plan and deal with uncertainty in the markets. If you spend time every morning engaged in developing your own plan, I think you’re bound to see steady and significant improvement. As Sun Tzu once said, “every battle is won before it is ever fought” and that’s true for those who engage in doing battle with the market in such uncertain times.

Swope and Howell, Trading by Numbers

The title of this book by Rick Swope and W. Shawn Howell is somewhat misleading. It’s not intuitively obvious, or at least it wasn’t to me, that Trading by Numbers: Scoring Strategies for Every Market (Wiley, 2012) is primarily about options.

But let’s start, as the authors do, with their trend and volatility scoring methods. The trend score has four components: market sentiment (the relationship between a long-term moving average and a short-term moving average and the position of price in relation to each moving average), stock sentiment (the same parameters as market sentiment), single candle structure (body length relative to closing price), and volume (OBV trend). The range is -10 to +10. Volatility scoring has three legs: historical market volatility, historical stock volatility, and expected market volatility. The range is 0 to +10.

Before moving on to the standard option strategies, the authors address risk management, which they wisely describe as nonnegotiable. Risk management again has three legs: risk/reward, concentration check, and position sizing. 

And, with chapter five (of sixteen), we’ve reached covered calls. The reader who has no experience with options will be lost. Even though the authors push all the right buttons (ITM, ATM, OTM strategies; the Greeks; position adjustments), they push the buttons almost as if they were playing a video game. Very fast.

Assuming that the reader is not new to the option market, what can he/she learn from this book? Let’s look very briefly at three strategies and see how they reflect three different market or individual stock conditions: a long call, a straddle/strangle, and an iron condor. Traditionally described, in the simplest of terms, the first is looking for a significant bullish directional move, the second anticipates a surge in volatility, and the third expects a rangebound market. (more…)

15 Fundamentals To Win Stock Market Battle

Gerald Loeb was a founding partner of E.F. Hutton, a renowned and successful Wall Street trader, and the author of the books The Battle For Investment Survival and The Battle For Stock Market Profits.

Mr. Loeb promoted a contrarian view of the market as too risky to hold stocks for the long term in direct contrast to many of his generation. At the time, many considered Loeb’s comments heresy to the buy and hold doctrine so common among many in the industry. While Loeb never had the opportunity to trade in an environment now ruled by quants, algorithmic trading and massive government intervention, his wisdom and insight is still applicable in today’s environment. After all, the more things change, the more they always stay the same!

Based on his two books, here are 15 fundamentals Loeb argues that you need to understand to win the battle not only against yourself, but also against the market:

  1. What everyone else knows is not worth knowing.
  2. Stocks are always way overvalued in a bull market and way undervalued in a bear market.
  3. The best stocks will always seem overpriced to the majority of investors.
  4. Expectation, not the news itself, is what moves the market.
  5. Three basis elements should be considered when evaluating a stock – 1) quality (fundamentals, liquidity, management), 2) price, and 3) trend (the most important).
  6. Stocks act like human beings and go through the same stages and phases as people do, including infancy, growth, maturity, and decline. The key in trading is to be able to recognize which stage the stock is in and to take advantage of that opportunity.
  7. Pyramid your buys – start with an initial position and then add to it only if the trade moves in your favor.
  8. The more experienced and successful you become, the less you should diversify.
  9. Traders must always resist the urge and temptation to change their strategies for each and every different market cycle.
  10. To succeed in trading you must 1) aim high, 2) control the risks, 3) be unafraid to keep uninvested reserves and 4) be patient.
  11. Successful traders are intelligent, they understand human psychology, they practice pure objectivity, and they have natural quickness.
  12. You must always trade with the actions of the market and not simply by how you might think the market should trade.
  13. Knowledge through experience is one trait that separates successful stock market speculators from everyone else.
  14. The stock market is more an art than a science and far more complex than most people understand.
  15. Always sell when you start patting yourself on the back for being smarter than the market. (more…)

Ten Times When A Trader Should do Nothing

Ten Times When A Trader Should do Nothing

  1. When you are confused and don’t know what to do, do nothing.
  2. There are no set ups on your watch list, then don’t trade.
  3. You are a trend trader and there is no trend to trade.
  4. The market is extremely volatile due to headline risk.
  5. You want to make an option trade but the options are illiquid with a huge bid ask spread.
  6. If you are trying to trade supply and demand but the government keeps interfering with your market, pick a different market.
  7. Your stock reports earnings the next day and you expect a powerful move but it could easily go either way, wait until after earnings to trade.
  8. You are a momentum trader but their is not momentum, then wait.
  9. You play the long side only and the market is in a correction or a bear market, wait for a new trend to the upside.
  10. If you are not at your best mentally and emotionally then don’t trade until you are.

The Four Elements Of Successful Trading. Do You have all Four?

The Knowledge

If we don’t do the homework to know what we need to know we will fail due to ignorance. Understanding historical price action, reading books by and about the best traders, seminars, mentor-ships, and  systems testing is all part of the homework we must do to get the needed knowledge.

The Resources

While trading with a small account is a good place to start it is not a good place to stay. Traders must be adequately capitalized for meaningful trading. We must have an affordable broker that does not charge bloated commissions and gives great execution on orders. A trader must have a platform and charting service that is adequate for his trading style. Trading a small account with an expensive broker with poor execution is a path to eventual failure. (more…)

Top Ten Things Traders Must Change to Survive

  1. When the market goes from bull to bear, or from an uptrend to a down trend you must change from going long to going to cash or selling short.
  2. When a market recovers from a bear market to an uptrend over taking the 200 day moving average you must go from bearish or neutral to long.
  3. New bull markets most of the time have new leaders you can’t just play the same ones from the last up trend.
  4. When you make a trade and it goes against you, then you were wrong. When your stop is hit you must change your position and get out.
  5. When you have a strong opinion about a trade but it goes the opposite of what you believe day after day you must change your mind, you were wrong.
  6. When a trade does not go the way you expected in the time frame you had planned you have to take a time stop and change to something that is moving.
  7. Each day you must change and grow as a trader and improve on your skills through continuous learning.
  8. While the market will change the principles of winning through risk management, correct trader psychology, and playing the probabilities will stay the same.
  9. The market rotates and different market capitalizations come into favor and out of favor, follow the money.
  10. Different sectors rotate in and out of favor based on the cash flow of earnings, follow the capital.

Top Ten Reasons Not to Trade– and Why You Should Do It Anyway

#1 Trading creates no greater good
– like when you buy grain futures, the price skyrockets, and you make a killing! A poor farmer plants more seeds as a consequence, third world children get affordable bread, hmm, did I say you make a living?

#2 Trading makes you selfish
– and that’s why filthy rich old speculators turn to philanthropy.

#3 Staring at screens all day is not healthy
– which is true, and why slow lunch hours are perfect for physical exercise.

#4 Staring at screens all day is not good for your social skills
– which is why traders are out having fun when the market is closed. (Don’t “normal” people spend evenings in front of the TV?)

#5 The market is a casino
– where scrupulous gamblers make it easier (and more important) for sane traders to make a living. (more…)

4 Points to be Successful Traders

1) Diversify: If you have a pattern you  trade successfully, you don’t have to grow your size. Instead, look to diversify  to a different pattern (different market, different time frame) not correlated  with the first. You’ll smooth out your returns, as one pattern makes money while  the other experiences drawdown. You’ll also achieve the portfolio manager’s goal  of superior return for less risk exposure.
2) Review Entries: Review your trades for the week and see how much heat  you took on your winners. This will give you an idea of how good your entries are.
3) Review Exits: Review your trades for the week and see if the market  went in your favor or against you after you exited. This will give you an idea  of how good your exits are.
4) Work Orders: Get into the habit of working orders to buy at bid, sell  at offer or to place orders between the bid and offer to avoid paying a price  that is out of line with “fair value”. For the frequent trader, the single tick saved by good execution adds up over time.
The successful traders I’ve worked with never stop working on themselves. This is equally true of successful athletes, musicians, and chess champions. Small, steady improvements can create massively greater performance over time.

Desire -Skill

The Desire
If you are trading just for the money you will quit before you are successful, Why? Anyone without a love for the game will quit during the long difficult learning process. After hundreds of hours of work and years of trading with nothing but a loss to show for all the effort anyone with common sense will think it is too hard and just quit. Those with a love and passion for trading will eventually succeed and usually make six figures or become a millionaire for their efforts. Those that do a cost benefit analysis in the first few years will generally quit due to the math.
The Skill
A trader must have the skill to trade in three dimensions. The management of the mind,  the method, and money management are all crucial for success. Traders must have the discipline and perseverance to trade robust systems through different market environments without giving up. They must have the ability to accept and deal with their thoughts and emotions as they arise during both winning and losing streaks. Risk must be managed on every single trade without the ego causing bets so big that they put your future trading at risk. The trader must also have the skill to not let fear take away the traders ability to pull the trigger on a good entry.

Ten Times When A Trader Should do Nothing

  1. When you are confused and don’t know what to do, do nothing.
  2. There are no set ups on your watch list, then don’t trade.
  3. You are a trend trader and there is no trend to trade.
  4. The market is extremely volatile due to headline risk.
  5. You want to make an option trade but the options are illiquid with a huge bid ask spread.
  6. If you are trying to trade supply and demand but the government keeps interfering with your market, pick a different market.
  7. Your stock reports earnings the next day and you expect a powerful move but it could easily go either way, wait until after earnings to trade.
  8. You are a momentum trader but their is not momentum, then wait.
  9. You play the long side only and the market is in a correction or a bear market, wait for a new trend to the upside.
  10. If you are not at your best mentally and emotionally then don’t trade until you are.