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9 Rules by Nassim Taleb’s Risk Management

Rule No. 1- Do not venture in markets and products you do not understand. You will be a sitting duck.

Rule No. 2- The large hit you will take next will not resemble the one you took last. Do not listen to the consensus as to where the risks are (that is, risks shown by VAR). What will hurt you is what you expect the least.

Rule No. 3- Believe half of what you read, none of what you hear. Never study a theory before doing your own observation and thinking. Read every piece of theoretical research you can-but stay a trader. An unguarded study of lower quantitative methods will rob you of your insight.

Rule No. 4- Beware of the nonmarket-making traders who make a steady income-they tend to blow up. Traders with frequent losses might hurt you, but they are not likely to blow you up. Long volatility traders lose money most days of the week.

Rule No. 5- The markets will follow the path to hurt the highest number of hedgers. The best hedges are those you alone put on. (more…)

Key of Success is Timing in Trading- Anirudh Sethi

Image result for timingThe significance of market timing can’t be depicted by just a single thing. There are a few reasons why anybody intrigued by trading rates and products, Forex, ETF’s and stocks would need to sharpen their market timing aptitudes. The greatest single imperative reason that rings a bell is that of limiting your hazard presentation. At the point when there is a considerable measure of cash at hazard, it is anything but difficult to begin questioning your unique explanations behind putting on the trade when the market begins moving against your position. On the off chance that you have been trading for any time span, undoubtedly you have encountered the feelings I portray. Initially, maybe you do a little pattern estimating utilizing some Gann or Fibonacci strategy, or your most loved marker. You feel entirely sure about the choice to go long the market at a specific cost and along these lines, you enter correctly as arranged. Market timing is the system of settling on the purchase or offer choices of monetary resources (frequently stocks) by endeavoring to foresee future market value developments. The expectation might be founded on a viewpoint of a market or monetary conditions coming about because of the specialized or principal investigator. This is a venture methodology in light of the standpoint for a total market, as opposed to for a specific monetary resource.

Timing is Built upon Financial Strategies

Regardless of whether the market timing is ever a practical speculation methodology is disputable. Some may consider showcase timing to be a type of betting in view of immaculate shot since they don’t put stock in underestimated or exaggerated markets. The effective market speculation guarantees that money related costs dependably show irregular walk conduct and hence can’t be anticipated with consistency. The market clock looks to offer at the ‘top’ and purchase at the ‘base’. In this way, if financing costs increment, the market clock may offer a few or the greater part of his stocks and buy more securities to exploit what might be a ‘crested’ market for stocks and the start of a blast for securities. Market clocks trust here and now value developments are critical and frequently unsurprising; this is the reason they regularly allude to factual inconsistencies, repeating designs, and other information that backings a connection between’s sure data and stock costs. A market clock’s speculation skyline can be months, days, or even hours or minutes. Latent financial specialists, then again, assess a speculation’s long haul potential and depend more on the key investigation of the organization behind the security, for example, the organization’s long haul procedure, the nature of its items, or the organization’s associations with the administration when choosing whether to purchase or offer. (more…)

Three Best Practices For Traders

*  Keeping risk-taking down until you see markets clearly– Losing small and gaining big is what makes for excellent risk-adjusted returns.  Accepting that you’re not seeing things well is half the battle.  By continuing to actively engage markets in small size, you give yourself an opportunity to regain perspective.  Trading larger or more often out of the frustration of losing is a recipe for disaster.
*  Focusing on yourself – Very often, losses occur because market patterns have changed.  Slumps occur because your mindset has changed.  By working on yourself before you go hard at markets, you place yourself in an optimal mindset to press your advantage when things line up.  Stepping back from trading, renewing your energy, getting back to core strengths–all can help create the mindset to see markets freshly.
*  Searching and re-searching – Stepping back from trading doesn’t mean you step back from markets.  When times are tough, great traders double down on research and idea generation.  It’s that pipeline of ideas that will produce the next winning trades.  Research and development is what ultimately keeps your trading business alive; turning the search for trades into trading re-search turns a losing period into an opportunity for advancement.
Drawdowns are inevitable.  Slumps are not.  Your job in coaching yourself is to learn from the drawdowns and use them as opportunities to make yourself better.  A drawdown only becomes a slump when it gets inside our heads and takes us away from our core strengths.  Drawdowns become business opportunities when they focus us on those strengths and prod us to expand them.

3 Trading Mistakes

mistake-1) Trading Without Context – Many traders will enter positions with little more than a chart-based “setup” or a hunch that the market is heading lower. They don’t locate where the market is trading with respect to its daily range and often can’t identify where the relevant ranges are located. Is the most recent market move gaining or losing volume/participation? Are most sectors participating in the move? Without context, traders trade reflexively, not proactively.
2) Trading Without Targets – Focused on entries, traders often don’t explicitly identify where they would harvest profits. They hold trades too long, exiting in a panic after reversals, or they take profits quickly, missing opportunity. They don’t factor current volatility into estimates of how far the market could move on their time frame, and they often don’t explicitly look for targets based upon prior moves and ranges.
3) Trading Without Reflecting – The slow times of day are excellent opportunities to review trading for the day, reformulate market views, correct mistakes, and set goals going forward. Many traders, however, never stop looking for the next trade, lured by the siren’s promise of breakout. Without the benefit of reflection, they compound errors, turning mistakes into blowups and blowups into slumps.

The Disciplined Trader: Developing Winning Attitudes by Mark Douglas

Intro

  • Reaching the level of success they desire as traders will require them to make at least some, if not many, changes in the way they perceive market action.
  • The markets have absolutely no power or control over you, no expectation of your behavior, and no regard for your welfare.
  • There are only a few traders who have come to the realization that they alone are completely responsible for the outcome of their actions.  Even fewer are those who have accept the psychological implications of that realization and know what to do about it.
  • The nature of the markets made it easy no to have to confront anything that otherwise might be perceived as a problem because the next trade always had the possibility of making everything else in one’s life seem irrelevant.
  • I CREATED MY LOSSES INSTEAD OF AVOIDING THEM SIMPLY BECAUSE I WAS TRYING TO AVOID THEM.
  • Unsuccessful Trading Behaviors
    1. Refusing to define a loss.
    2. Not liquidating a losing trade, even after you have acknowledged the trade’s potential is greatly diminished.
    3. Getting locked into a specific opinion or belief about market direction.  I.E. “I’m right, the market is wrong.”
    4. Focusing on price and the money
    5. Revenge-trading to get back at the market from what it took from you.
    6. Not reversing your position even when you clearly sense a change in market direction
    7. Not following the rules of the trading system.
    8. Planning for a move or feeling one building, then not trading it.
    9. Not acting on your instincts or intuition
    10. Establishing a consistent patter of trading success over a period of time, and then giving your winning back to the market in one or two trades.

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Benefits of Mindfulness in Trading

Mindfulness in trading can be of significant benefit to traders.  Mindful trading will positively impact traders and their trading in a number of ways:

  • Reduce loss aversion
  • Mitigate the disposition effect (i.e., cutting winning trades short and letting losing trades run)
  • Help traders get into “the zone”
  • Reduce the negative effects of cognitive biases and heuristics on trading decisions
  • Directly reduce stress
  • Help traders see the market more clearly
  • Increase awareness of the trader’s internal state and how it impacts their trading
  • Increased ability to maintain focus on the market and the trading task at hand while trading, even when emotions are running hot
  • Increase internal emotional regulation
  • Other positive effects on trading and trading behavior

Your Trading Method-10 Points

 1.“Trade What’s Happening…Not What You Think Is Gonna Happen.” – Doug Gregory
2.    Go long strength; sell weakness short in your time frame.
3.    Find your edge over other traders.
4.    Your trading system must be built on quantifiable facts not opinions.
5.    Trade the chart not the news.
6.    A robust trading system must either be designed to have a large winning percentage of trades or big wins and small losses.
7.    Only take trades that have a skewed risk reward in your favor.
8.    The answer to the question, “What’s the trend?” is the question, “What’s your timeframe?” – Richard Weissman. Trade primarily in the direction that a market is trending in on your time frame until the end when it bends.
9.    Only take real entries that have an edge, avoid being caught up in the meaningless noise.
10.    Place your stop losses outside the range of noise so you are only stopped out when you are likely wrong.

Trend Following Goes for the Middle Meat

Consider an illustration that can make you rich:
trend following chart

Trend following does not pick bottoms or tops. You always get into a trend late, and get out late. You cannot predict a trend. That chart might not seem like a great strategy at first glance, but it is the foundation of one of the most profitable insights in the history of market speculation: capture the middle meat and you can make a fortune.

Extract From R.W. Schabacker's -Stock Market Profits :Written 82 Years Back

It is very interesting to note that the forefathers of technical analysis, unlike many snake oil salesmen of today, while espousing the benefits of technical analysis, went to great lengths to warn future chartists of the many dangers inherent in charting, such as the desire to be right.  Schabacker, in his classic Stock Market Profits, published nearly 80 years ago, writes in an eloquent prose few today can match

No trader can ever expect to be correct in every one of his market transactions.  No individual, however well he may be grounded, no matter how much experience he has had in practical market operation, can expect to be infallible.
There will always be mistakes, some unwise judgments, some erroneous moves, some losses. The extent to which such losses materialize, to which they are allowed to become serious, will almost invariably determine whether the individual is to be successful in his long range investing activities or whether such accumulated losses are finally to wreck him on the shoals of mental despair and financial tragedy.
 
 

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The Secret to Trading Success

Secret-ASRThe most important thing you must learn in every market cycle  is where the money is flowing. It is flowing into the companies where the earnings are growing. As long as mutual funds have capital in flows instead of net out flows then they must put new money to work investing in stocks. If you want to make your job as a trader much easier then find where the flow is going. Mutual fund managers can not go to an all cash position they can only move money around. A bear market sinks most stocks because managers have to sell everything to raise money to redeem shares. In an uptrend they have to buy stocks with the incoming money flows. Where does this money go? It goes into the sectors and stocks that are in favor due to increased earnings in a sector and individual stocks that are dominating their sector and changing the world in the process. You want the leaders not the has been. You want the best the market has to offer. Where are consumers dollars flowing into? That is where the money is going. What companies have the best growth prospects? The stock can only grow in price if the underlying company does. Mutual fund managers are the biggest customers in the market when they start buying a stock that increases huge demand and price support.

Your job is to follow the big money, shorting in bear markets, going long in bull markets. Following the trend of what is in favor. Do not fight the action, flow with it.

Quit having opinions and start being a detective looking for the smart money, the fast money, the big money and where it is going now.

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