1. Make Rational, Not Emotional, Decisions — Do you have a plan to enter and exit your trades? Or do you just wing it? If you have a plan, write down your rules, and make sure that you trade your plan. If you don’t, or can’t, follow your rules, hire someone who can.
2. Respect Risk — Stock Market is not going anywhere. If you risk too much, your emotions will take over, and you will likely go broke. Always know where you are going to exit before you enter and how much you are going to risk if wrong.,
3. Don’t Judge Your Success One Trade at a Time — Losing money is part of trading. It happens to everyone. Once you learn to expect that will happen, you can plan for it and get past normal pitfalls, such as giving up on your system after a few losing trades.
4. Think like a winner — Remember that winning starts within. How you think is everything.,
5. Ask For Help — Making money on Wall Street is simple, but it is definitely not easy. Don’t let your ego get in your way of making money. Most people have a hard time asking for help. That’s just one reason why most people lose money on Stock Market . You don’t have to go it alone. Find someone you trust and are comfortable with, and don’t be afraid to ask for help.
Archives of “Financial economics” tag
rss3 Elements of Trading Success
What all winning traders must have, regardless of timeframe and system are as follows:
Trading System
- They trade a robust system or method that wins more money over time than it loses.
- Their system gives them a reward to risk ratio that is in their favor.
- Their system or method is proven to work with a live trading record over many markets, trades, or has historical back testing.
Trading with Managed Risk
- They manage the risk of ruin to avoid blowing up their account.
- They risk no more than 1%-2% of total account equity on any one trade.
- They manage risk through proper position size so they do not risk their account and their ability to trade in the future.
- They do not risk more than 6%-12% of their capital at one time, across multiple trades.
Must Read Quotes For Traders
“Good investing is a peculiar balance between the conviction to follow your ideas and the flexibility to recognize when you have made a mistake.“-Michael Steinhardt
Do not stay bullish or bearish. Go with the current flow of the market. Be on the team that is making the money.
“There is only one side of the market and it is not the bull side or the bear side, but the right side.” -Jesse Livermore
When putting it all together, it is more than just numbers. Successful traders trade in three dimensions.
“Successful trading depends on the 3M`s – Mind, Method and Money. Beginners focus on analysis, but professionals operate in a three dimensional space. They are aware of trading psychology their own feelings and the mass psychology of the markets. Each trader needs to have a method for choosing specific stocks, options or futures as well as firm rules for pulling the trigger – deciding when to buy and sell. Money refers to how you manage your trading capital.” – Alexander Elder
The money is in the primary market trend, not jumping in and out.
“I think it was a long step forward in my trading education when I realized at last that when old Mr. Partridge kept on telling other customers, “Well, you know this is a bull market!” he really meant to tell them that the big money was not in the individual fluctuations but in the main movements-that is, not in reading the tape but in sizing up the entire market and its trend.” – Jesse Livermore (more…)
Avoid the pitfalls of ‘over trading’ and ‘under trading.’
* There are basically two types of over trading. Trading too often and trading too many shares/contracts.
* Remember that there really is no good reason to trade constantly, since extreme over-trading creates stress, produces high commissions and can often lead to more losses.
* Market forces do not last forever and time has shown various examples of the law of gravity in the trading market- that whatever comes up must go down. – and vice versa.
* Instead of grabbing every opportunity that comes along (or thinking that it is an opportunity) make sure each trade setup meets the criteria of your trading plan, don’t be over confident or scared of making trades.
* Utilizing a risk calculator to determine the appropriate position size before you enter a trade can help you determine how many shares/contracts you initially buy. You can start off with a small position and add as the trade continues in your favor. It relieves stress to know that the amount at risk for each position you hold is well proportioned to the size of your entire account and this is great asset management.
* Whenever you feel that you did not stick to your trading plan and made a mistake, quickly learn from that and let it go.
12 Things Traders Should Not Do at all
- A big ego that wants to prove they are right by stubbornly staying with a position that is wrong becasue they want to be right eventually so bad.
- A trader that want to prove he is a hot shot by trading big position sizes especially in options or futures.
- Not wanting to take a stop loss and instead just hope the trade comes back.
- Trading with emotions instead of a trading plan can get very expensive very fast.
- Being a bear in a bull market.
- Being a bull in a bear market.
- Being overly eager to start trading with real money before fully testing out a trading system.
- Trading without doing adequate homework on how to win.
- Dollar cost averaging down in a trade is many time expensive to fight that trend.
- Ignoring the charts and just trading your opinion.
- Ignoring the probability of the risk of ruin based on your current position sizing.
- Not really understanding the true danger of ‘Black Swan’ and ‘Fat Tail’ events.
5 Wisdom Thoughts For Traders
- Learn to think in probabilities. In some types of analysis, it’s easy to forget that any conclusion is only valid within the range of statistical probability. For instance, if we do valuation work, we might think that is the value, and just wait for price to converge. Technical tools make us face the reality in the market, and that is that markets are not very predictable, and are only predictable within a range of probabilities.
- Learn to cut your losses. It’s impossible to say what is the “most important” thing in trading or investing, but this certainly is a candidate. Many methodologies do not have any way of telling you when you’re wrong. For instance, if price is under your valuation and it goes down, the logical course of action is to buy more. At some point, declining prices carry a message, and technical tools can force us to respect that message.
- Understand how a market has been trending. This can be as easy as squinting at a price chart and see if it “goes up, down, or is pretty flat”. You don’t need moving averages or indicators to do this–simple visual inspection is enough. However (and this is a huge “however”), do not assume that a market that has been trending in the past will continue to trend in the future. That requires a few more steps.
- Understand when the rubber band might be stretched a bit too far. Markets tend to move in waves: directional movements will alternate with pullbacks or flat periods. Sometimes, a market goes a bit too far, too fast and can be set to snap back. Buying a market (or shorting) when it is overextended is chasing, and can open the trader up to some stunning losses. There are simple technical tools that will highlight when markets are perhaps a bit overextended, and can tell us to wait for more favorable conditions.
- Enforce discipline. Markets are random, but you cannot be random. The only way to get consistent results out of difficult and competitive markets is to always act with consistency and discipline. Technical methodologies encourage us to face market conditions and to immediately evaluate the results of our actions. There is no better way to drive toward consistent behavior.
10 -Trend Following Commandments
1. You shall back test and develop quantify robust trend trading systems that are profitable over the long term.
2. You shall identify and follow the long term trend in the markets you trade, and have no guru that you bow down to.
3. You shall not try to predict the future, that is a fool’s game, but follow the current price trend.
4. You shall remember the stop loss to keep your capital safe from destruction; you shall know your exit level before your entry is taken.
5. Follow your trend following system all the days that you are trading, so that through discipline you will be profitable.
6. You shall not give up on your trading system because of a draw down.
7. You shall not change a winning system because it has had a few losing trades.
8. You shall trade with the principles that have proven to work for successful traders. Manage risk, go with the trend, and diversify so your days in the market will be long.
9. You shall keep the faith in your trend following system even in range bound markets; a trend will begin anew eventually.
10. You shall not covet fundamentalist’s valuations, Blue channels talking heads, newsletter predictions, Holy Grails, or the false claims of any of the black box systems.
10+10+10 Trading Rules
1. Be flexible and go with the flow of the markets price action, stubbornness, egos, and emotions are the worst indicators for entries and exits.
2. Understand that the trader only chooses their entries, exits, position size, and risk and the market chooses whether they are profitable or not.
3. You must have a trading plan before you start to trade, that has to be your anchor in decision making.
4. You have to let go of wanting to always be right about your trade and exchange it for wanting to make money. The first step of making money is to cut a loser short the moment it is confirmed that you are wrong.
5. Never trade position sizes so big that your emotions take over from your trading plan.
6. “If it feels good, don’t do it.” – Richard Weissman
7. Trade your biggest position sizes during winning streaks and your smallest position sizes during losing streaks. Not too big and trade your smallest when in a losing streak.
8. Do not worry about losing money that can be made back worry about losing your trading discipline.
9. A losing trade costs you money but letting a big losing trade get too far out of hand can cause you to lose your nerve. Cut losses for the sake o your nerves as much as for the sake of capital preservation.
10. A trader can only go on to success after they have faith in themselves as a trader, their trading system as a winner, and know that they will stay disciplined in their trading journey.
Bring your risk of ruin down to almost zero. (more…)
Getting Started in Chart Patterns -Thomas Bulkowski (Book Review )
Thomas Bulkowski is probably the best known chart pattern researcher. Among his credits are theEncyclopedia of Chart Patterns and the three-volumeEvolution of a Trader. In this second edition ofGetting Started in Chart Patterns (Wiley, 2014), a book originally published in 2006 and newly revised and expanded with updated statistics, he introduces more than forty chart formations. Better yet, he explains how to trade using them.
Although the title indicates that the book is for novices, it is equally valuable—perhaps even more valuable—for more experienced pattern traders. Without continually reviewing, testing, and revising pattern trading strategies, it’s all too easy to trade yesterday’s market.
In two action-packed chapters Bulkowski explores trendlines and support and resistance. He considers support and resistance to be “the most important chart patterns” because “they show how much you are likely to make and how much you are likely to lose on each trade. That’s like playing poker and knowing the hands of your opponents. You won’t always win, but it helps.” (p. 35)
10+1 Rules If You USE Charts
Rule 1 – If you cannot see trends and patterns almost instantly when you look at a chart then they are not there. The longer you stare, the more your brain will try to apply order where there is none.
If you have to justify exceptions, stray data points and conflicting evidence then it is safe to say the market is not showing you what you think it is.
Rule 2 – If you cannot figure out if something is bullish or bearish after three indicators then move on. The more studies you apply to any chart the more likely one of them will say “something.” That something is probably not correct.
When I look at a chart and cannot form an opinion after applying three or four different types of indicators – volume, momentum, trend, even Fibonacci – I must conclude that the market has not decided what it wants to do at that time. Who am I to tell it what it thinks?
Rule 3 – You can torture a chart to say anything you want. Don’t do it.
This is very similar to Rule 2 but it there is an important point to drive home. You can cherry pick indicators to justify whatever biases you bring to the table and that attempts to impose your will on the market. You cannot tell the market what to do – ever. (more…)