“When a market is going straight up, the natural inclination of many traders is to try calling a top. Active market players have strong desire to be the market-timing genius that nails the precise moment that a trend has come to an end. The attempt is understandable — but is it smart? In theory, you should be able to make a ton of money if you can do this with some precision, but the reality is that this is usually more of an exercise in ego than
anything else — and it doesn’t tend to produce a big profit, either. What happens when people engage in this game is that they rack up a series of losses as their trades are stopped out and they try again. The tendency is to justify the behavior by saying, “I was just a little early, but this time I’m going to nail it.” If you try long enough, you will eventually be right, but what we never hear about is how much money has been lost in the process. Would you have better off simply staying with the trend and only selling once you saw some weakness? In addition to the cost of losses on premature short positions, there is another hefty price: the profit you have lost by failing to stick with the trends. It is hard enough to keep pace with the market trend when you are long. It is just plain impossible when you are obsessed with trying to call a market turn. The combination of being on the wrong side of the
market, along with the opportunity cost of premature shorts, should give pause to anyone who is trying to time market turns.” –
Archives of “finance” tag
rssBull Market Aphorisms
- Buy in May and Stay Leveraged Long
- Buy the Rumor, Buy the News
- Buy the Dip, Buy the Rip
- Be Greedy When Others Are Greedy
- Bulls Make Money, Bullish Pigs Make More Money
- Rule No. 1: Never Go Short. Rule No. 2: Never Forget Rule No. 1
- Buy Low, Buy High
- The Uptrend is Your BFF
- Always Go Long a Dull Market
- There’s Always a Bull Market Everywhere
- 3 Steps and Soar
- Always Catch a Falling Knife
- Stairs Up, Elevator Up
- Stocks Climb a Wall of Serenity
- Buy When There’s Anything on the Street
- Always Reach for Yield
- Buy Rosh Hashanah, Buy Yom Kippur
- Anyone Who Went Broke Took Profits
- This Will End Well
- Everyone Has a Plan Until They Get Rich in Bitcoin
- The Easy Money Has Yet to Be Made
- The Calm Before the Melt-Up
Who Really Beats the Market?
Survivorship bias, or survival bias, is the logical error of concentrating on the people or things that “survived” some process and inadvertently overlooking those that did not because of their lack of visibility. This can lead to false conclusions in several different ways. – Wikipedia
There is survivor bias in looking at trading and investing performance and then there are the traders and investors that have an edge. People with an edge end up with the losses of those that rely on luck for profits.
This article is from an edited transcript of a talk given at Columbia University in 1984 by Warren Buffett.
Investors who seem to beat the market year after year are just lucky. “If prices fully reflect available information, this sort of investment adeptness is ruled out,” writes one of today’s textbook authors.
Well, maybe. But I want to present to you a group of investors who have, year in and year out, beaten the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index. The hypothesis that they do this by pure chance is at least worth examining.
I would like you to imagine a national coin-flipping contest. Let’s assume we get 225 million Americans up tomorrow morning and we ask them all to wager a dollar. They go out in the morning at sunrise, and they all call the flip of a coin. If they call correctly, they win a dollar from those who called wrong. Each day the losers drop out, and on the subsequent day the stakes build as all previous winnings are put on the line. After ten flips on ten mornings, there will be approximately 220,000 people in the United States who have correctly called ten flips in a row. They each will have won a little over $1,000.
Now this group will probably start getting a little puffed up about this, human nature being what it is. They may try to be modest, but at cocktail parties they will occasionally admit to attractive members of the opposite sex what their technique is, and what marvelous insights they bring to the field of flipping. (more…)
Warren Buffett – The World's Greatest Money Maker-Video
If you invest in the stock market you’re almost 100% certain to have heard of Warren Buffett. Indeed, you’ve probably read books about him, or you might have read his annual shareholder letter, or even been to the spectacle that is the Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholders meeting.
Now’s your chance to watch an interesting documentary that offers an intimate look at the life of Warren Buffett. The documentary offers an eye opening view of how he runs the company (complete with a tour of his office), the annual shareholders meeting of Berkshire Hathaway, and a peak at his many eccentricities.
Of course the film also reviews how he made his money, how he operates, how he came to operate in the way he does, and how he thinks about his wealth which is in the tens of billions of dollars.
HOW TO LOSE MONEY IN THE STOCK MARKET
There are so many ways to lose money in the stock market but whether it is from blindly trusting what turns out to be a Bernie Madoff ponzi scheme to refusing to take a loss on a “sure thing”, the root cause of losses is our inability to objectively perceive market action without the many and varied biases associated with “money on the line”.
According to Mark Douglas…
In any particular trade you never really know how far prices will travel from any given point. If you never really know where the market may stop, it is very easy to believe there are no limits to how much you can make on any given trade. From a psychological perspective this characteristic will allow you to indulge yourself in the illusion that each trade has the potential of fulfilling your wildest dream of financial independence. Based on the consistency of market participants and their potential to act as a force great enough to move prices in your direction, the possibility of having your dreams fulfilled may not even remotely exist. However, if you believe it does, then you will have the tendency to gather only the kind of market information that will confirm and reinforce your belief, all the while denying vital information that may be telling you the best opportunity may be in the opposite direction.
There are several psychological factors that go into being able to assess accurately the market’s potential for movement in any given direction. One of them is releasing yourself from the notion that each trade has the potential to fulfill all your dreams. At the very least this illusion will be a major obstacle keeping you from learning how to perceive market action from an objective perspective. Otherwise, if you continually filter market information in such a way as to confirm this belief, learning to be objective won’t be a concern because you probably won’t have any money left to trade with (italics mine).
From Chapter Four of THE DISCIPLINED TRADER
Trend following..
The objective of the trend follower is to employ discipline to offset biases in order to extract signals from prices to the exclusion of other information. In fact, this has greater similarity to a statistical or engineering problem than to a finance problem. Because prices are surrounded by or filled with noise, trend following is a form of price smoothing. You eliminate the noise to obtain a clearer signal. It also can be thought of as a filtering problem. You throw out the excess information that may be associated with trades that are not driving the trend signal.
10 points -Risk Managment
1. Never enter a trade before you know where you will exit if proven wrong.
2. First find the right stop loss level that will show you that you’re wrong about a trade then set your positions size based on that price level.
3. Focus like a laser on how much capital can be lost on any trade first before you enter not on how much profit you could make.
4. Structure your trades through position sizing and stop losses so you never lose more than 1% of your trading capital on one losing trade.
5. Never expose your trading account to more than 5% total risk at any one time.
6. Understand the nature of volatility and adjust your position size for the increased risk with volatility spikes.
7. Never, ever, ever, add to a losing trade. Eventually that will destroy your trading account when you eventually fight the wrong trend.
8. All your trades should end in one of four ways: a small win, a big win, a small loss, or break even, but never a big loss. If you can get rid of big losses you have a great chance of eventually trading success.
9. Be incredibly stubborn in your risk management rules don’t give up an inch. Defense wins championships in sports and profits in trading.
10. Most of the time trailing stops are more profitable than profit targets. We need the big wins to pay for the losing trades. Trends tend to go farther than anyone anticipates.
Buffett on Stock Prices
Its early in this potential correction, but let me remind you of Buffett’s interesting (1997) comments:
“If you plan to eat hamburgers throughout your life and are not a cattle producer, should you wish for higher or lower prices for beef?
Likewise, if you are going to buy a car from time to time but are not an auto manufacturer, should you prefer higher or lower car prices?
These questions, of course, answer themselves. But now for the final exam: If you expect to be a net saver during the next five years, should you hope for a higher or lower stock market during that period?
Many investors get this one wrong. Even though they are going to be net buyers of stocks for many years to come, they are elated when stock prices rise and depressed when they fall. In effect, they rejoice because prices have risen for the “hamburgers” they will soon be buying. This reaction makes no sense. Only those who will be sellers of equities in the near future should be happy at seeing stocks rise. Prospective purchasers should much prefer sinking prices.”
–Warren Buffett, chairman’s letter, Berkshire Hathaway annual report, 1997
Its worth thinking about, regardless of whether the recent investor nervousness turns into something more significant . . .
The Bible of Technical Analysis Edwards & Magee- Some Things Never Change
“It has often been pointed out that any of several different plans of operation, if followed consistently over a number of years, would have produced consistently a net gain on market operations. The fact is, however, that many traders, having not set up a basic strategy and having no sound philosophy of what the market is doing and why, are at the mercy of every panic, boom, rumor, tip, in fact, of every wind that blows. And since the market, by its very nature, is a meeting place of conflicting and competing forces, they are constantly torn by worry, uncertainty, and doubt. As a result, they often drop their good holdings for a loss on a sudden dip or shakeout; they can be scared out of their short commitments by a wave of optimistic news; they spend their days picking up gossip, passing on rumors, trying to confirm their beliefs or alleviate their fears; and they spend their nights weighing and balancing, checking and questioning, in a welter of bright hopes and dark fears.
Furthermore, a trader of this type is in continual danger of getting caught in a situation that may be truly ruinous. Since he has no fixed guides or danger points to tell him when a commitment has gone bad and it is time to get out with a small loss, he is prone to let stocks run entirely past the red light, hoping that the adverse move will soon be over, and there will be a ‘chance to get out even,’ a chance that often never comes. And, even should stocks be moving in the right direction and showing him a profit, he is not in a much happier position, since he has no guide as to the point at which to take profits. The result is he is likely to get out too soon and lose most of his possible gain, or overstay the market and lose part of the expected profits. (more…)
Bruce Lee on Stock Trading
If Bruce Lee was a trader I believe this would be his advice:
If you let the market show you the way you will win.
Do not trade your opinions about what the market will do next, instead always ask the questions:
What is the chart saying? Where is support and resistance?
Is the market trending or range bound? At what price level will I know that it has changed?
Where is all the capital flowing? What keeps going up day after day?
If I enter a trade at what price level will I know I was wrong?
Can I quickly admit I am wrong about a trade and move on to the next one?
Water is so versatile it can be ice in the winter and steam in extreme heat. Traders do well to be a bull in a bull market and a bear in a bear market.
Water can wear through a rock if it is a strong river. You can win in the markets if you keep trading the right method over and over again.
Water takes the form of whatever you put water into. Traders should trade for the market conditions that they find themselves in.
Water can only be reduced to its core elements hydrogen and oxygen but it can not be truly destroyed. If you only risk 1% per trade your account can experience a draw down in capital but it to can not be destroyed.