- I have always been a discretionary trader with my analysis based on fundamentals…. Whatever kind of a trader you are, you have to be aware of perceptions in the market place, that can influence the participants’ behavior. If a lot of people are charting and they think that a certain level is a key level for whatever reason – lunar, astrological, who the hell knows – then you have to be aware of it. Because it is going to cause a certain number of market participants to react and you have to be aware of it. You have to understand how that is going to affect your position.
- You have to be aware of all these technical techniques, such as momentum, because a lot of market participants use them and so they can affect the market.
Archives of “finance” tag
rss‘The Psychology of Trading-Book Review
Author Brett Steenbarger has done a great job with this book. He covers what I personally believe is the most important element in trading: psychology.
New traders will probably not last through their first year in the markets without blowing up their accounts by taking losses too personally. Many times draw downs cause traders to start gambling when they become desperate to recover their losses. Many times increasing position size when they should be decreasing it is an ego-driven desperation to get back their losses. Other similar bad mental behaviors creep into our trading careers as dysfunctions in our personal lives cloud our minds from being able to make the right decisions in following our systems and established trading principles.
What this book shows is how to take the proper perspective and observe our greed and fear, enabling us to see them for what they are instead of getting caught up in these powerful emotions that lead to terrible consequences in our accounts and lives.
This book is a very good book on both psychology and trading. It is packed with lessons from the authors patients and his own experiences. What the book shows is that we are the most important element in our trading. We must have the right mind set in trading, and while developing as a trader we need to keep a log of the emotions we feel on our losses and wins to better understand ourselves and why we make emotional charged decisions that we shouldn’t while trading. (more…)
7 Things Traders Must Manage -To get Success in Trading
1. Traders must be great risk managers.
“At the end of the day, the most important thing is how good are you at risk control.” -Paul Tudor Jones
2. Traders must manage their own stress.
Trade position sizes that keep your stress level manageable, if you can’t talk calmly to someone while trading you are trading too big.
3. Traders have to be able to manger their emotions, we have to trade our plan not our greed or fear
“There is nothing more important than your emotional balance.” – Jesse Livermore
4. Traders must manage their ego and need to be right.
“As a trader, you have to decide what is more important—being right or making money—because the two are not always compatible or consistent with one another.” -Mark Douglas
5. Traders must manage entries. When the time is right take the entry. Don’t wait until it is too late and chase, and don’t get in prematurely before the actual signal, also don’t get carried away and be to aggressive trade the right size.
6. Traders must manage the exit. Whatever our exit strategy is we have to take it. Sell at your target, exit into an exhaustion gap, or take the trailing stop, whatever the plan is follow it.
7. We have to manage our thoughts. We have to focus on what is happening right now. Mentally time traveling back into the past and reliving our losses has no value, we have to learn from our lessons and move forward. Mentally time traveling into the future and believing that big profits await if we take a huge position size and go for it, may be the most dangerous mind set of all. We must manage our mind and focus it on following a tested trading plan.
24 Reasons 95 Percent Traders Don’t Make Money
- Lack of homework on what works.
- Allowing big losses in your trading account,
- Quitting when they learn trading isn’t easy money.
- Inability to trade volatile markets.
- Inability to emotionally manage equity curves.
- Trading without a positive expectancy model.
- Never committing to one trading strategy.
- Changing trading systems.
- Trading based on opinions.
- Not managing the risk of ruin.
- Over thinking their trades.
- Reactive trading decisions based on internalizing emotions.
- Trading with leverage without understanding the risks.
- Trading on margin without understanding it.
- Over trading.
- Trading without a plan.
- Not understanding what it takes mentally to be a trader.
- Setting stops in obvious places.
- Selling short what looks expensive.
- A lack of discipline.
- Watching Blue Channels (Whole Day )
- Reading PINK PAPERS
- Watching Fundamentals ,Results of Companies (All Manipulative )
- Looking and Listening GROWTH ,INFLATION ,IIP ,RBI (All Manipulative in India )
Conviction, Anxiety and Belief
In 1952 Harry Markowitz effectively founded modern finance with his seminal paper “Portfolio Selection“. The famous (or infamous) CAPM and Efficient Markets Hypothesis, for all practical purposes, evolved from the Nobel winning ideas in this paper. (Note to self: resist urge to make Nobel joke). Ironically however virtually no one knows that Markowitz himself said his paper began with step 2! Step one was deciding what you believe.
We hear a lot from the well known trading coaches about conviction and it strikes me as funny because conventional risk wisdom says “don’t get married to an idea”, “let the market tell you”, “take what the market gives” and other such axioms all based on the idea of maintaining objectivity and essentially not becoming full of conviction.
Well which is it?
I mean we also hear “believe in yourself” but where do these advisories leave you when a trading idea is going wrong? How do you handle the teeter totter that holds belief and conviction on one side and price and risk management on the other? What fulcrum can you depend on?
We of course have our answer…but before we talk any more about it, we would REALLY like hear yours!
Market-Neutral Trading-Thomas Carr (Book Review )
Thomas Carr is the CEO of an advisory and trader training service, designer of a MetaStock add-on toolkit, and partner in an investment firm. Known online as Dr. Stoxx, he is the author of Trend Trading for a Living and Micro-Trend Trading for Daily Income. His latest work is Market-Neutral Trading: Combining Technical and Fundamental Analysis into 7 Long-Short Trading Systems (McGraw-Hill, 2014).
Carr is an excellent marketer which, as might be expected, is the downside of this book. Without the tools that he sells, the reader cannot implement all of the book’s strategies. He may not even gain the confidence to trade any of them since Carr admits that “blindly following a set of systems” doesn’t work. When real money was on the line, he traded “in a very detached, mechanical fashion” and lost a lot of money—both in his own account and in a small fund for clients. By contrast, he made a lot of virtual money for the subscribers of his newsletters. The difference (aside from the obvious real vs. paper money distinction) was that he added discretion when making calls for his newsletters. He applied “God-given skills of discretionary analysis, skills that [had] been honed by years of apprenticeship under some of the great masters of the game, in addition to a long slog of real-time, real-money trading experience.” (p. 131) How does a trader learn the discretion that is necessary to make trading systems profitable? “You need to find a mentor who already has it and sit by their side for a while.” (p. 134) Yes, Carr is also a mentor.
Now that you know that, without a further outlay of funds to Carr, you won’t be able to trade all of the systems described in this book and that, even if you can trade them all, you will still lose money if you don’t overlay them with a large dose of discretion (gained only by spending still more money), what does this book have to offer? (more…)
4 Types of Problems For Traders
1) Problems of training and experience – Many traders put their money at risk well before they have developed their own trading styles based on the identification of an objective edge in the marketplace. They are not emotionally prepared to handle risk and reward, and they are not sufficiently steeped in markets to separate randomness from meaningful market patterns. They are like beginning golfers who decide to enter a competitive tournament. Their frustrations are the result of lack of preparation and experience. The answer to these problems is to develop a training program that helps you develop confidence and competence in identifying meaningful market patterns and acting upon those. Online trading rooms, where you can observe experienced traders apply their skills, are helpful for this purpose.
2) Problems of changing markets – When traders have had consistent success, but suddenly lose money with consistency, a reasonable hypothesis is that markets have changed and what once was an edge no longer is profitable. This happened to many momentum traders after the late 1990s bull market, and it also has been the case for many scalpers after volatility came out of the stock indices. Here the challenge is to remake one’s trading, either by retaining the core strategy and seeking other markets with opportunity or by finding new strategies for one’s market. The answer to these problems is to reduce your trading size and re-enter a learning curve to become acquainted with new markets and methods. Figuring out how you learned the markets initially will help you identify steps you need to take to relearn new patterns.
3) Situational emotional problems – These are emotional stresses that are recent in origin and that interfere with decision making and performance. Some of these stresses might pertain to trading, such as frustration after a slump or loss. Some might stem from one’s personal life, as in a relationship breakup or increased financial pressures due to a new home or child. Very often these problems create performance anxieties by putting the making of money ahead of the placing of good trades. The answer to these problems is to seek out short-term counseling to help you gain perspective on the problems and cope with them effectively.
Berkshire Hathaway’s Willingness to Kill
I’m poring over the just-release 2014 annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders today and, as usual, I’m finding nuggets of wisdom on every single page.
One really interesting bit I wanted to pass on concerns a crucial benefit that their conglomerate structure offers. In countering the idea that Berkshire should break itself up or spin off some businesses to “unlock shareholder value”, Warren Buffett explains a key advantage that his collection of companies offers – beyond the obvious ability to self-fund.
He reminds his shareholders that being able to channel capital across opportunities and be willing to walk away from a dying industry is critical to the corporation’s longevity. He laments the twenty years between 1965 and 1985 that he allowed the legacy New England textile assets to decay before finally pulling the plug. He talks about the conflicts that a more singularly-focused corporation might have when its central line of business goes into secular decline.
One of the heralded virtues of capitalism is that it efficiently allocates funds. The argument is that markets will direct investment to promising businesses and deny it to those destined to wither. That is true: With all its excesses, market-driven allocation of capital is usually far superior to any alternative. Nevertheless, there are often obstacles to the rational movement of capital. As those 1954 Berkshire minutes made clear, capital withdrawals within the textile industry that should have been obvious were delayed for decades because of the vain hopes and self-interest of managements. Indeed, I myself delayed abandoning our obsolete textile mills for far too long. A CEO with capital employed in a declining operation seldom elects to massively redeploy that capital into unrelated activities. A move of that kind would usually require that long-time associates be fired and mistakes be admitted. Moreover, it’s unlikely that CEO would be the manager you would wish to handle the redeployment job even if he or she was inclined to undertake it…
…At Berkshire, we can – without incurring taxes or much in the way of other costs – move huge sums from businesses that have limited opportunities for incremental investment to other sectors with greater promise. Moreover, we are free of historical biases created by lifelong association with a given industry and are not subject to pressures from colleagues having a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. That’s important: If horses had controlled investment decisions, there would have been no auto industry.
10 Characteristics of Successful Traders
1) The amount of time spent on their trading outside of trading hours (preparation, reading, etc.);
2) Dedicated periods to reviewing trading performance and making adjustments to shifting market conditions;
3) The ability to stop trading when not trading well to institute reviews and when conviction is lacking;
4) The ability to become more aggressive and risk taking when trading well and with conviction;
5) A keen awareness of risk management in the sizing of positions and in daily, weekly, and monthly loss limits, as well as loss limits per position;
6) Ongoing ability to learn new skills, markets, and strategies; (more…)
The two best predictors of long-term trading success are
1) Originality – Traders who develop their own, unique approach to markets are more likely to succeed that traders that employ generic methods. My common impression when I meet a promising trader is, “Wow…why didn’t I think of that?” I quickly recognize that the trader has achieved an insight that others have not. That original thinking is more likely to generate distinctive results than run-of-the-mill thinking you could hear from any of a dozen market participants.
2) Flexibility – The worst traders I know are perma-bulls or perma-bears. They fit markets to their own thinking, rather than adapt to changing markets. The best traders work with a kind of anti-confirmation bias: they actively scan for information that does not fit with their views. That enables them to be flexible and adapt quickly to new market conditions.
If I were to place these two predictors of success under one umbrella, it would be “real-time creativity.” The successful trader sees and approaches markets in fresh ways–and continually refreshes those perceptions and methods.