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How to Spot a Market Top

  
Analysis, Education
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This is via an article in the Wall Street Journal title: How to Spot a Market Top

It begins generically enough with the sort of stuff you hear all the time:
  • A da Vinci sells for $450 million
  • one bitcoin is worth $7,700
  • 99-year-old Austria issues a 100-year bond at an interest rate of 2.1%
  • Clearly there is too much money in the world. That isn’t new, but how long can it last?
  • With central banks scaling back stimulus, investments that appear attractive when interest rates are near, or below, zero suddenly look silly.
Then, some, errr … wisdom:
  • The end may come soon, or the current investing nirvana could go on.
K, thanks.
But, then it gets better:…  walks through the risks and likely scenarios for markets in the coming months. It is ungated (I think), co check it out while we await Europe/UK action:

What is the probability of…

  
  Education
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  • A sideways market?
  • A trending market?
  • A trend continuing;
  • A trend reversal?
  • Getting stopped out of a trade?
  • Winning a trade?
  • Breaking even?
  • Losing a trade?

All questions that need to be answered if you are to have confidence in your trading system.  For it is confidence that allows you to profit from the markets.

Ridiculous notion?  Perhaps.  But true nonetheless. 

You see, despite our civilized veneer, we are still animals that react to fear, the most powerful of emotions.  And it is fear that supercedes our thoughts when we trade.

To circumvent fear, you should develop trading plans, trade according to plan, and analyze your trades in a trading journal.  As do this, you will build a database that will create statistical patterns of your trades.  This can be studied and help you to predict the outcome of future trades. (more…)

24 Mistakes done by 90% of Traders

  
  Education
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  • EGO (thinking you are a walking think tank, not accepting and learning from you mistakes, etc.)MISTAKE-UPDATE
  • Lack of passion and entering into stock trading with unrealistic expectations about the learning time and performance, without realizing that it often takes 4-5 years to learn how it works and that even +50% annual performance in the long run is very good
  • Poor self-esteem/self-knowledge
  • Lack of focus
  • Not working hard enough and treating your stock trading as a hobby instead of a small business
  • Lack of knowledge and experience
  • Trying to imitate others instead of developing your unique stock trading philosophy that suits best to your personality
  • Listening to others instead of doing your own research
  • Lack of recordkeeping
  • Overanalyzing and overcomplicating things (Zen-like simplicity is the key)
  • Lack of flexibility to adapt to the always/quick-changing stock market
  • Lack of patience to learn stock trading properly, wait to enter into the positions and let the winners run (inpatience results in overtrading, which in turn results in high transaction costs)
  • Lack of stock trading plan that defines your goals, entry/exit points, etc.
  • Lack of risk management rules on stop losses, position sizing, leverage, diversification, etc.
  • Lack of discipline to stick to your stock trading plan and risk management rules
  • Getting emotional (fear, greed, hope, revenge, regret, bragging, getting overconfident after big wins, sheep-like crowd-following behavior, etc.) (more…)

Legacy of Benjamin Graham- Video

  
Analysis, Education, Video
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  1 Comments

Last week I stumbled across this excellent video about Graham which includes old clips from his investment classes as well as some of his former students (including Warren Buffett, Rob Brandes and Irving Kahn) giving interviews about the effect the legendary investor had on them:

Bill Gross' Advice To Traders As Stocks Crash- Stay out of the bathroom

  
Analysis, Education
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In a time when the S&P fluctuates with unprecedented velocity and investors need HFT-like reflexes to catch any momentum move, this may be the most practical advice to traders we have heard today.

In an email to Bloomberg, the former (and currently in contention for the title with Jeff Gundlach) bond king Bill Gross says to “stay out of the bathroom” as stock markets enter bear territory.

For those who ate Chipotle.coli for lunch, our condolences.

“Markets are recognizing the limited tools they now have to prop up assets AND real economies,” Gross, who manages the $1.3 billion Janus Global Unconstrained Bond Fund, said in an e-mail.
Stocks fell around the world today, with U.S. equities trading at the lowest levels since August as oil plunged below $30 a barrel. Treasuries gained as U.S. economic data did little to ease concerns that global growth is slowing.


 
“Wealth effect constructed with paper – sometimes corrugated/strong, sometimes toilet/flimsy,” Gross said in a Tweet on Friday from the Janus Capital Group Inc. account. “Stay out of the bathroom.”
Gross warned in December that markets were headed for a fall and urged urged investors to de-risk their portfolios or “look around like Wile E. Coyote wondering how far is down,” a reference to the cartoon character whose schemes to catch the bird Road Runner always backfire, often with a plunge over a cliff.
In his e-mail, Gross said that zero-percent interest rates and quantitative easing created leverage that fueled a wealth effect and propped up markets in a way that now seems unsustainable.

His conclusion: “The wealth effect is created by leverage based on QE’s and 0% rates.”

In other words, it was all an illusion.

The High Priests of Finance

  
  Education
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Finance even has its own high priests in the form of the analysts and fund managers who promise their clients heavenly rewards if only they listen to their advice. They preach regular sermons in the form of brokers’ notes and quarterly reports, and they house themselves in vast cathedral-like buildings that dominate the skyline. Each day also has its canonical hours as traders pray for profitable opportunities at the European, American and Asian market openings. Finance has its annual calendar, too, marked with festivals known as results seasons in which the lucky participants receive their temporal (rather than spiritual) dividends.

And like any self-respecting religion, finance has its doctrinal schisms as well. Active fund managers are a bit like the medieval Catholic church, offering eternal salvation to those willing to pay the appropriate sum, which are known in modern parlance as performance fees rather than indulgences. The active-investment sect has its elaborate rituals and language, with a liturgy (“information ratios” and “alpha generation”) as baffling to the layman as the Latin mass was to the medieval peasant. Clients are supposed to listen to their presentations in a reverential hush, trusting that all the mumbo-jumbo will deliver superior results. The passive fund managers, or index-trackers, are akin to early Lutherans. Investors have no need for priestly intermediaries between them and the market, say the index-trackers. All they require is the full text of those companies that are included in the benchmark. (more…)

Successful Traders are Having 3 Things

  
  Education
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1)  Resilience – Successful traders take risk.  Successful traders are sometimes wrong.  Successful traders take hits.  Successful traders learn from the hits, get up, and move on.  They are resilient.  They succeed, as Churchill observes, by moving from failure to failure with enthusiasm.
2)  Selectivity – Successful traders have clear criteria for what makes good trade ideas.  They also have separate criteria for what turns good ideas into good trades.  They don’t watch everything, and they certainly don’t trade everything.  They wait for good ideas to become good trades.
3)  Calling – Successful traders have an uncanny sense that this is what they’re meant to be doing.  It’s not a job, and it’s not a career for them.  It’s a calling.  That’s the only thing that can keep people searching and re-searching, banging away for good ideas and good trades.  And it’s the only thing that enables them to gain the immersive pattern recognition experience that separates them from average traders.
To be sure, there are other success ingredients, from discipline to creativity.  What I see among the traders listed above, as well as those I work with, is an unusual combination of these three factors.  It’s a pleasure and a true education to study successful people.  There is much more to success than avoiding failure.

40 Great Quotes of Ed Seykota (Must Read )

  
  Education
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Ed Seykota, first featured in the book  Market Wizards has one of the best records of all time for any trader. Ed Seykota’s returns on capital compares to those achieved by Warren Buffett, George Soros or William J. O’Neil. He is among the trading gods with no doubt. What does he find important in trading success? Mr. Seykota has a keen focus on trader psychology above all other trading dynamics. Seykota’s website Trading Tribe spends more time advising it’s readers on proper trading  psychology than anything else. Most traders are not concerned with their own psychology and instead focus on entries and exits, with trading systems and making money, not their mind and emotions. This is generally their undoing. The longer you trade and the bigger your account grows the more I see the crucial importance of mindset in the trader’s success or failure. When a losing streak sets in the trader finds out what his underlying issues are and how he handles losing is the key to his long term success. The traders ego management determines his success as much as his trading system and risk management. An an ego can cause you to let losers run and bet far too much on any one trade. An unchecked ego can destroy your account. The market is a terrible place to learn about internal issues by losing money. Here are some quotes that changed how I thought about trading early on and have kept me on the right path to consistent profits. (more…)

3 Mistakes -Traders are Doing (101% It's All Mindset )

  
  Education
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If you agree with me that not a lot changes in the markets you won’t mind that I site an old study and will see the benefit of this little reminder of mine.

In 1974 Blair Stewart completes a study of 8,922 brokerage customer accounts.

The following mistakes are found:

1) Speculators showed a clear tendency to cut profits short, while letting their losses run.

2) Speculators were more likely to be long than short, even though prices generally declined during the 9 years of the study.

3) Longs bought on weakness, and shorts sold on strength, indicating they were price-level rather than price-movement traders.

If you are currently struggling in your trading you might like to consider these three well repeated mistakes and develop a plan that you can follow so as not to fall foul of them.

Hope & Fear

  
  Education
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In trading most new traders allow hope and fear to dictate their trading. They have a losing trade and instead of selling it and getting out they instead hope it will come back to even allowing the loss to grow. Another error  for new traders is that when they have a winning trade they fear that the profit will disappear so they sell for a small gain and miss the big trend in their favor. When hope and fear controls the trader they end up with big losses and small gains. A formula for ruin.
Instead the rich trader is fearful of losses getting bigger so they sell quickly when losing, risking a maximum of 1% of their capital on any one trade. Rich traders are able to think clearly and trade rationally knowing exactly what they are risking, when their stop is hit, they get out. This enables them to keep all their losses small.
When a trade is immediately a winner for a rich trader they hope it will run 100 points in their favor. Rich traders enable this to be possible with a trailing stop, they do not get out of a winning trade until a key price reversal has happened that tells them that the trend is actually reversing.
Rich traders are fearful of losses growing bigger and hope that their winners will continue on a monster trend. This mindset allows  them to be on the right side of trends and avoid any huge losses. This is why the best traders in the world are trend followers and win consistently. Do you want to join their club? Then do not let fear and hope dictate your trading decisions use them correctly.

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