Archives of “discipline” tag

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There's nothing you can do

  
  Education
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You might be at a stage of feeling very frustrated with yourself.

I know what this feels like – you begin to marvel at your own lack of discipline and ability to do what you know. It’s like “Arrgh! Why can’t I just WAIT for the damn setup?! Why am I such a screw up at this?!”

Speaking from experience, it’s frustrating because you just want to get on. You have plans and goals and now you see that your own idiocy is preventing you from making any progress towards them. All I can say is that there’s nothing you can do about this period except keep going and wait for it to pass… It’s deeply ingrained. You have to trade through it; six months, a year, two years… Grit your teeth and plow on.

In a way, you have to relax into your own ability to seemingly pick every wrong move in the market. Just accept it. Providing you are not losing big money, you CAN relax into it. The good news is you are in fact building up a tolerance to taking losses during this period – you ARE actually developing a skill. It’s called “risk tolerance.”

If you’re still in that “God dammit!” phase then do this: just keep losing and losing, but begin to try to take the losses without any emotional reaction what so ever and move immediately to the next trade.

Once you can do this, you then move on to learning to let go of your need to have success NOW. This combines with learning to do nothing in the market – learning to wait. Why not wait, you’re gonna lose anyway right? So you might as well wait…

Now you’re building up patience. This is a foundation that leads to a little magic further down the track, when you get to the point where you see that you could take any system and trade it properly to discover its true potential. All those millions of methods you tried for 3 days and abandoned in disgust now sit there like a pile of spare parts in the bike shed. You become interested in them again – there could actually be a few decent ideas amongst that lot.

So learn to lose.
Then learn to wait to lose.

You will be building risk tollerance and patience. There are more steps after that, but there is no way to skip this process, it has to be gone through by all.

Trading commandments

  
  Education
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ten_commandments1.) Respect the price action but never defer to it.

Our eyes are valuable tools when trading, but if we deferred to the flickering ticks, stocks would be “better” up and “worse” down. That’s backward logic.

2.) Discipline trumps conviction.

No matter how strongly you feel on a given position, you must defer to the principles of discipline when trading. Always try to define your risk and never believe you’re smarter than the market.

3.) Opportunities are made up easier than losses.

It’s not necessary to play every day; it’s only necessary to have a high winning percentage on the trades you choose to make. Sometimes the ability not to trade is as important as trading ability.

4.) Emotion is the enemy when trading.

Emotional decisions have a way of coming back to haunt you. If you’re personally attached to a position, your decision-making process will be flawed. Take a deep breath before risking your hard-earned coin. See related link.

5.) Zig when others zag.

Sell hope, buy despair and take the other side of emotional disconnects. If you can’t find the sheep in the herd, chances are you’re it. (more…)

The way to learn

  
  Education
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Learning to trade is not very different from learning any other discipline. It takes a lot of efforts and finding the right teachers. At some level of experience, the best teacher for you will be you, but before such level is reached having someone to show you the direction of least resistance is priceless.

For example, in his early years, one of the most notorious composers ever –  Mozart, imitated and mimicked the work of others. From their lessons, later in his life, he gradually builds his own unique style. This is a common path to success in music. Common path to success in trading.

In music first you learn the notes. Then you try to replay other guys’ compositions until one day you start to compose in your own unique style. In trading, first you learn the basics of supply and demand, some common market anomalies and basic market psychology. Then you read about other, already successful, people’s methods and try to mimic them until one day you become experienced enough to create your own style of trading that satisfy you financial and personal goals best. These are three different levels of expertese in each field and they should be mastered in the mentioned sequence.

Trade with Discipline

  
  Education
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1. never EVER add to a losing position. EVER! If it’s not working, why add good money to bad? At this point, you are in damage control mode. It’s another thing if you are trying to pyramid into a position. For example: You go into a trade with 1/3 size, add another 1/3 and add the final 1/3 in an attempt to build a full position in a stock you feel strongly about. I do not mind that. But adding money to a full position which is not working is a BIG NO in my book! You never want any ONE trade to ruin your entire week or month folks. DISCIPLINE!

2. NEVER ever compromise your stop loss. I know a nice ran away bull market makes everyone think that’s okay to remove the stop loss or lower the stop loss to much lower levels because eventually the stock will bottom and rebound. BE EXTREMELY CAREFUL guys! This is absolutely NOT what we are trying to do as traders. This is basically turning your trades into investments just because you cannot handle the pain of a small loss. It is much easier to dig yourself back form a 2-3% loss than a 10-15% loss. Hindsight is always 20-20 and most of you will say “gosh, i shoulda stuck to the original stop”. Trust me, life will be much less stressful taking occasional small stop losses along the way then being stuck in “hold and hope” mode.

Discipline-Risk Management-Passion

  
  Education
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DISCIPLINE: The trader must have the ability to control themselves and follow a plan. Discipline is a required skill in trading without it there is no edge, you are either a gambler or simply trading off fear and greed. You will not be successful, instead you will be gamed by those in control of their emotions.
RISK MANAGEMENT: Risk management must be a top skill for a trader to even survive in the markets. You must structure your risk per trade to be no more than risking 1% or 2% of your trading capital. You have to be able to survive 10 losses in a row. These strings of losses come around more often than a new trader would suspect. If you lose just 5% of your trading capital in each of ten trades you will be down almost 50% and need a 100% return just to get back to even. At this point you are ruined.
PASSION: A trader must love to trade, without a passion for the markets and trading the new trader will not survive the learning process because anyone with common sense would believe that it was not worth the struggle. Passion will be needed to bring a trader through the learning curve and later the losing streak.

Trading Truths

  
  Education
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    1. It’s all about risk management … never risk what you can’t comfortably lose.
    2. Never fall in love with a stock.
    3. To be succesfull in trading; study, understand and practice. The rest is easier.
    4. Always start by assuming your analysis is WRONG and that people much smarter and with more recent information are already positioned opposite you.
    5. Never take on a position larger than your comfort zone. (Don’t overtrade)
    6. Patience. never chase a stock.
    7. Before entering the trade very think carefully what will make you wrong, write it down clearly and put it infront of you where you trade, and when your wrong get out happy you’ve followed your trading discipline.
    8. Buy strength, sell weakness. Most traders are essentially counter-trend; most traders lose.
    9. No one ever went broke taking a profit!
    10. Once you find a good one, hang on unless of course they do you wrong.
    11. Never add to a losing position! (Unless scaling in was part of the plan).
    12. Whenever you think you’ve found the key to the lock, they’ll change the lock.
    13. Do not overtrade.
    14. Trade price not perception.
    15. Know the difference between stocks that you want to stay married to and those that are just a fling.
    16. The only sure way to make a small fortune is to start with a large one.

      17. and to paraphrase Will Rogers: Buy only stocks that will go up. Don’t buy the ones that don’t go up. “THIS is GAMBLING.”

    17. Cut your losses quickly and you may have a chance.
    18. An indicator works until it doesn’t.
    19. “MR. MARKET” IS ACTUALLY “MRS. MARKET” ONLY WOMEN CAN THINK, AND ACT THE WAY THE MARKET DOES. THAT IS WHY -ON AVERAGE -WOMEN ARE BETTER TRADERS THAN MEN, THEY UNDERSTAND WHAT THEY DEALING WITH! (more…)

    Intuition Discipline Confidence Risk

      
      Education
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    “Intuition although seemingly spontaneous, apparently emotional, stems from a form of “information” that has become built-in from past experience. Discipline means choosing what to do unencumbered by the fear of making a mistake. Confidence means trusting our intuition that what we “see” is what we “know.” There’s no escaping to the external, to the objective, and no standing on the shaky ground of emotions. So the question becomes, How do we create within ourselves the heroic condition of confidence wherein risk is not danger but life?

    7 Things You Must Do to Win at Trading.

      
      Education
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    1. Managing the risk of ruin.
    Do not risk so much on any one trade that 10 losing trades in a row will destroy your account. risking 1% to 2% of your trading capital per trade  is a great baseline for eliminating the risk of ruin.
    2. Only trade with a positive risk/reward ratio.
    Only take trades where your possible reward is at least two or three times the amount of capital you are risking in the trade.
    3. Always trade in the direction of the prevailing trend.
    Always trade in the direction of the flow of capital for your specific time frame. Shorting rockets and catching falling knives is not profitable in the long run.
    4. Trade a robust system.
    Back test and study your trading method, system, or style to ensure it is a winning system historically. The key is that it had bigger winners than losers over the long run in the past.
    5. You must have the discipline to take your entries and exits as they are triggered.
    You must take your entries when they trigger, your losses when they are hit, and your profits when a run is over to be a successful trader.
    6. You must persevere through losing periods.
    All successful traders were able to overcome their losing periods to come back and make the big money. If you quit you will not be around for the opportunity to win big.
    7. If you want to be a winning trader you must follow your trading plan not your fear and greed.
    Emotions will undo a trader more than anything else. Trading too big is due to greed, missing a winning trade due to no entry is a sign of fear, traders must trade the math and probabilities not their own opinions or emotions.

    Greed & Fear

      
      Education
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    Emotions, emotions and emotions, trading will always full of them, movement of the market based on them. Our rush to buy or sell sometimes overflow our plans. The common  traders question was “Why did I do this or do that?”

    What is driving us to get into the market when we are not prepared and exit on completely different prices, which completely disagree with our plans? Two major factors, Greed and Fear.

    Greed come when market goes as we expected then we want more! We believe it will continue for very long time. We forgot that everything changes. For successful trading you need a good strategy and discipline to execute that strategy. No matter how good it is, trading is completely useless without proper execution of the strategy.

    We Fear when we afraid to miss the profitable move or to loose the money. And until fear and greed will dominate us, our results will be very unstable. And worse if our money management is not the strongest point, this is the weakest point for emotional traders, will soon will be out of money, before we even had a chance to establish ourself as a trader.

    Art of Trading-10 Rules

      
      Education
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    1. Always wait for the setup: No Setup-No Trade.
    2. THE BEST trades work almost right away.
    3. Never take a big loss. If it doesn’t ‘feel’ right. Remove it!
    4. Always perfect your craft and sharpen your skills(good traders are constantly learning)
    5. Be patient with winning trades: Impatient with trades that fight back.
    6. DISCIPLINE is the key to winning at everything!
    7. Never get emotionally attached to trades, trading, losses or profits.
    8. Always trade with the size that makes you unemotional(emotional trading is the quickest way out of this game).
    9. Keeps things simple and do not over-think or over-complicate your trading. LESS IS ALWAYS MORE.
    10. Stay humble at all times.

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