Momentum : If you understand this you will understand trends and mean reversion. You will understand why and how momentum works in the market. Most indicators are momentum based. Trend following and buying strength also works, so does mean reversion. They are all part of the momentum phenomenon. - Market Breadth: Stock markets are composite markets. The overall move in market is an aggregate of moves of several hundred or several thousand stocks. So the level of participation in a move is important.
- Equity Selection: Because the overall market is a composite of many individual moves, it becomes critical to select right kind of stocks from the universe of stocks. Hence equity selection is extremely critical. You should know various ways in which one can select equities.
- Market Anomalies: Market anomalies are the distortions in the market. If you base your trading on a proven and statistically significant anomaly, you will be profitable. Absent that no amount of indicators will help you. A through understanding of anomalies will give you an edge.
- Market Microstructure: Market Microstructure is a branch of finance concerned with the details of how exchange occurs in markets. Understanding this will tell you how the market operates. The concept of market microstructre is very critical if you are trading very small time frames or are a day trader. Because to be successful on those time frame you need to find exploitable anomalies in market microstructure. You need to understand role played by market makers, automated programs, arbitragers, large fund buyers and so on. Their tactics and behaviour creates certain patterns
- Growth investing : Growth investors buy stocks of companies growing faster than the average company in the market.
- Value investing : Value investors buy stocks of companies which are cheap or out of favor.
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Momentum : If you understand this you will understand trends and mean reversion. You will understand why and how momentum works in the market. Most indicators are momentum based. Trend following and buying strength also works, so does mean reversion. They are all part of the momentum phenomenon. Perseverance is one of the Best Traits to Have When Trend Following
It is never easy…and those that promise you that are not telling you the truth.
Perseverance is one of the Best Traits to Have When Trend Following!
Trend following is a marathon. There will always be those that say it is over!
It takes losses in the stock market to make future great traders and learning from mistakes is one of the best teachers.
Have a trading plan….and more importantly…Make sure you follow your own rules!
Scott Nations, The Complete Book of Option Spreads and Combinations-Book Review
If you trade options, you’d do well to have Scott Nations’ Complete Book of Option Spreads and Combinations (Wiley, 2014) in your reference library. It’s an intermediate-level book that explains the structure of more spreads than most people will ever trade but that they should understand nonetheless. A case in point: a conversion or a reversal, a combination that is rarely executed as a package but that “a smart retail trader might end up having on.” (p. 209) It’s better to know in advance what this position is and how to deal with it.
There’s an abundance of information available online about option spreads and combinations, and Nations of necessity covers much of the same territory. But he proceeds more analytically, and he deals with issues that most online descriptions ignore, such as ways to mitigate wide bid/ask spreads. Take, for instance, the long call condor. Nations looks at an AAPL call condor that, using midpoint pricing, costs 18.87 and that, buying on the ask and selling on the bid would cost 0.63 more. What if we were to replace the in-the-money call spread “with something that’s out-of-the-money and has bid/ask spreads similar to the bid/ask spreads of these other out-of-the-money options?” That is, what if we sold a put spread with the same strikes instead of buying that call spread—and again sold at the bid and bought at the ask? Instead of paying a 0.63 penalty, we now pay only 0.27. This “new, magical structure” is an iron condor. (pp. 201-202)
In eleven chapters this book deals with vertical spreads, covered calls, covered puts, calendar spreads, straddles, strangles, collars, risk reversal, butterflies, condors and iron condors, and conversion/ reversal. Every strategy is encapsulated in cheat sheets and, more importantly, is illustrated with examples, complete with tables and figures. Here, for instance, is the graph of a vertical spread he analyzes, which includes the probability of profitability—something he explains how to calculate on the previous page.
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Ray Dalio’s Long-Term Debt Cycle Charts
The following speech was delivered by Ray Dalio of Bridgewater at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s 40th Annual Central Banking Seminar on Wednesday, October 5, 2016.
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It is both an honor and a very special opportunity for me to be able to address such a large and esteemed group of central bankers at such an interesting time for central bankers. I especially want to thank President Dudley and Vice President Schetzel for inviting me to forthrightly share my perspective as an investor and my unconventional template that I believe sheds some light on the very unconventional circumstances that we face.
It is no longer controversial to say that:
• …this isn’t a normal business cycle and we are likely in an environment of abnormally slow growth
• …the current tools of monetary policy will be a lot less effective going forward
• …the risks are asymmetric to the downside
• …investment returns will be very low going forward, and (more…)
The Mind of a Trend Following Winner
All types of traders have different emotional responses to winning trades as well as losing trades. The mindset of a winning trend follower is much different than most. There is no excitement on a winning trade nor emotional distress on a losing trade. The reason there is no excitement on a winning trade is due to the humbleness of the winning trend follower. He or she did nothing different. They were consistent in their plan and the market moved. The reason is very simple why these small group of winning trend followers succeed. The winning trend follower has an exact plan and knows that he is playing the odds. He or she keeps their losses small…or try to do so…however there will always be gaps or limit moves against them. There is only 4 possibilities when we trade:
big losses
big wins
small losses
small wins… (more…)
15 Ways to Manage Trader Stress
Only risk 1% of total trading capital per trade with stop losses and proper position sizing. Proper positions sizing makes the emotional impact of any one trade only one of the next one hundred a totally different mental perspective than an all in/have to be right Hail Mary trade.
- Only trade a position size you are comfortable with.
- Trade a method or system you believe in based on back testing of a positive expectancy.
- Know where you will get out of a trade before you get in.
- Only trade with a detailed trading plan.
- Believe in your ability to follow your trading plan. YOu must have faith in yourself to lower your stress levels.
- Know yourself as a trader and only take your kind of trades. Take trades that will leave no regrets because they were good trades regardless of out comes. (more…)
Emotional Resilience & Creativity -Qualities of Successful Traders
Emotional Resilience – The very successful traders have a great attitude about losing. They know it’s going to happen. They don’t take it personally. If anything, they try to find learning experiences from losses. Elsewhere I have written about how good traders view a losing trade as “paying for information”. A trade with an edge that doesn’t go their way either tells them something important about the market, or it tells them something about their execution. Either way, it’s a potential learning experience. Resilience means that the excellent traders trade well out of a hole. They can be down money for day, week, or quarter and continue to make the same good trades they would normally make.
Creativity – We normally think of creativity as a trait that belongs to artists, but it also is quite noticeable among traders who have been successful over many years. They find edges in the most unlikely places. They look at interesting relationships within the market they’re trading, and they find unique relationships from one market to another. One trader very recently told me of a strategy that exploited the way one market was priced related to a similar market at certain time periods. I would have never thought of that idea in a million years. He was making consistent money from the concept.
Paul Tudor Jones Trend Following Wisdom
Paul Tudor Jones was featured in Market Wizards and is one of the successful trend followers. In the Market Wizards book there are some interesting quotes & trading tips that are important for all stock traders & trend followers.
Quoting Paul Tudor Jones
“I become quicker and more defensive. I am always thinking about losing money as opposed to making money.”
“Risk control is the most important thing in trading.”
“Don’t be a hero”.
“Don’t have an ego.”
“Always question yourself and your ability”.
“I am more scared now that I was at any point since I began trading, because I recognize how ephemeral success can be in this business. I know that to be successful, I have to be frightened. My biggest hits have always come after I have had a great period and I started to think that I knew something.”
“One of my strengths is that I view anything that has happened up to the present point in time as history. I really don’t care about the mistake I made three seconds ago in the market. What I care about is what I am going to do from the next moment on. I try to avoid any emotional attachment to a market.”
“I never apologize to anybody, because I don’t get paid unless I win.”
“When you get a range expansion, the market is sending you a very loud, clear signal that the market is getting ready to move in the direction of that expansion.”
“Advice: don’t focus on making money; focus on protecting what you have.”
“Trading gives you an incredibly intense feeling of what life is all about.”
Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future performance. The risk of loss in trading futures contracts, commodity options or forex can be substantial, and therefore investors should understand the risks involved in taking leveraged positions and must assume responsibility for the risks associated with such investments and for their results. You should carefully consider whether such trading is suitable for you in light of your circumstances and financial resources.
20 Principles That Make Market Wizards Successful
- They have the resilience to come back from early losses and account blow ups.
- They focus on what really matters in trading success.
- They have developed a trading method that fits their own personality.
- They trade with an edge.
- The harder they work at trading the luckier they get.
- They do the homework to develop a methodology through researching ideas.
- The principles they use in their trading models are simple.
- They have mental and emotional control is key while winning or losing.
- They manage the risk to avoid failure and pain.
- They have the discipline to follow their trading plan.
- Market wizards have confidence and independence in themselves as traders
- They are patient with winning trades and impatient with losing trades.
- Emotions are dangerous masters to the trader; they know how to manage their own emotions.
- Market wizards evolve as a trader to avoid eventually failing in a method that has lost its edge over time.
- It is not the news but how the market reacts to that news is what they watch for.
- The fully understand the right way to position size for their goals of returns and drawdowns based on their risk/reward and winning percentage.
- Market wizards understand comfortable trades are usually losing trades while the more uncomfortable trades are usually the winners.
- They are good losers. Cutting losses when proven wrong and even reversing the direction of their trades when the price action dictates it.
- The best traders are always learning through their own mistakes.
- Passion for trading was the fuel for their eventual success.
The Way of The Turtle -17 Quotes
I like to collect quotes from books I read, and here you have some good quotes from the book:
- …we were taught how to think in terms of the long run whan trading and we were given a system with an edge. (page 34)
- The Turtle Way views losses in the same manner: they are the cost of doing business rather than an indication of a trading error or a bad decision. ……In fact, we were taught that periods of losses usually precede periods of good trading (page 37)
- The secret of trading and of the Turtles’ success is that you can trade successfully by using ideas and concepts that are well known and have been around for years. But you have to follow those rules consistently (page 39)
- Over the years I kept finding evidence that emotional and psychological strength are the most important ingredients in successful trading. This was my first exposure to that idea and the first time I had seen it in action (page 44).
- Good trading is not about being right, it’s about trading right. If you want to be successful, you need to think of the long run and ignore the outcomes of individual trades (page 44).
- ….It takes a lot of time and study before one realizes just how simple trading is, but it takes many years of failure before most traders come to grips with how hard it can be to keep things simple and not lose sight of the basics (page 115).
- Keep it simple. Simple time tested methods that are well executed will beat fancy complicated methods every time (page 131).
- In a similar manner, simple rules make systems more robust because those rules work in a greater variety of circumstances (page 212).
- People have a tendency to believe that complicated ideas are better than simple ones….Some of us thought that trading successfully couldn’t possibly be that simple; that there must be something else to it (page 224).
- The primary goal of trading should be to stay in the game (page 116).
- Luck or random effects play a large role in the performance of actual traders and actual funds even though the best traders do not like to admit that to their investors (page 159).
- They often do not realize how markets go through phases and change over time, often returning to conditions that previously existed….In trading as in life, the young often fail to see the value in studying the history that occurred before they existed (page 193).
- The reality is that you don’t know and can’t predict how a system will perform. The best you can do is use tools that provide a sense of the range of potential values and the factors that affect those values (page 196).
- There are many successful discretionary traders, but there are far more unsuccessful ones. The biggest reason for this is that the ego is not your friend as a trader. The ego wants to be right, it wants to predict, and it wants to know secrets. The ego makes it much more difficult to trade well by avoiding the cognitive biases that hinder profits (page 224).
- One of the ways in which good traders differ from those who are less successful is that they are not afraid to be different (page 235).
- Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Risk is your friend (page 236).
- Most successful traders use a mechanical trading system…..It makes it easier for a trader to trade consistently because there is a set of rules that specifically define exactly what should be done (page 245).