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. (more…)
Archives of “futures contract” tag
rss16 +1 Differences Between Good Trades & Bad Trades
Good Trades are made by managing the mind, ego, and emotions.
1. A good trade is taken with complete confidence and follows your trading method; a bad trade is taken on an opinion.
2. A good trade is taken with a disciplined entry and position size; a bad trade is taken to win back losses the market owes you.
3. A good trade is taken when your entry parameters line up; a bad trade is taken out of fear of missing a move.
4. A good trade is taken to be profitable in the context of your trading plan; a bad trade is taken out of greed to make a lot of money quickly.
5. A good trade is taken according to your trading plan; a bad trade is taken to inflate the ego.
6. A good trade is taken without regret or internal conflict; a bad trade is taken when a trader is double-minded.
Good trades are just one trade inside a robust methodology that gives the traders an advantage int eh long term.
7. A good trade is based on your trading plan; a bad trade is based on emotions and beliefs.
8. A good trade is based on your own personal edge; a bad trade is based on your opinion.
9. A good trade is made using your own timeframe; a bad trade changes timeframe due to a loss.
10. A good trade is made in reaction to current price reality; a bad trade is made based on personal judgment.
11. A good trade is made after identifying and trading with the trend; a bad trade fights the trend.
12. A good trade is made using the trading vehicles you are an expert in; a bad trade is when you trade unfamiliar markets. (more…)
Bitter Truth :Why Traders Lose Money in Market
- Traders miss a trade setup, then take it late in the move. Chasing a trade is rarely a good decision. Buy right or sit tight.
- Traders buy a dip before it really reaches a good risk/reward setup.
- Traders buy a dip before there is any sign of a reversal.
- Traders wait for the perfect moment and end up with no setups.
- Traders hold onto opinions after price action has proven them wrong.
- Traders are stopped out of ordinary price action because their stop losses are too close, and their trades aren’t given enough room to breathe.
- Traders perpetually short uptrends and buy downtrends, missing the easy money and creating losses.
- Those that spend more time trading than studying will have their money taken by traders devoted to learning.
- Caring more about personal opinions than price action is the best way to donate money to the market.
- Holding onto a losing trade because you don’t want to take the initial loss, is a great way to turn a small loss into a big one.
10 Bad Habits of Trader
- They trade too much. The edge that small traders have over institutions, is that they can pick trades carefully and only trade the best trends and entries. The less they trade, the more money they make, because being picky gives traders an edge.
- Unprofitable traders tend to be trend fighters, always wanting to try to call tops and bottoms. They eventually will be right, but their account will likely be too small by then to really profit from the reversal. Money is made by going with the flow of the river, not paddling upstream against it.
- Taking small profits quickly and letting losing trades run in the hopes of a bounce back, is a sure path to failure. Profitable traders understand their risk/reward ratio; big wins and small losses. Being quick to take profits while allowing losses to grow, is a sure way to blow up your trading account.
- Wanting to be right more than wanting to make money will be a very expensive lesson. A trader who doesn’t want to take losses will most certainly balk at reversing his position because it signifies personal failure. A profitable trader is not afraid to get on the right side of the market to start making money.
- Unprofitable traders trade too big, and risk too much to make too little. The biggest key to profitability is to avoid big losses. Your wins can be as big as you like, but the losses must be limited.
- Unprofitable traders watch BLUE CHANNELS for trading ideas.
- Unprofitable traders want stock picks, while profitable traders want to develop trading plans and systems.
- Unprofitable traders think trading is about being right. Profitable traders know that profitability is about admitting you are wrong quickly, and being right as long as possible.
- Unprofitable traders don’t do their homework because they think there is a quick and easy route to trading success.
- Unprofitable traders #1 question is how much they can make if they are right, while the profitable traders #1 concern is how much they can lose if wrong.
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.
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.
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…)
Universal Lessons
What follows are some of the most well-known investment disciplines along with a lesson or two from each that every investor should be able to use in their own strategy.
Focused Value Investing: Buying stocks that are underpriced in relation to their intrinsic value.
Lesson(s): It’s important to invest from the perspective that stocks represent an ownership interest in a business. You get your share of corporate profits from the stocks you own and over the long-term the value of the business should be reflected in the stock price.
Quantitative Investing: Using a systematic, mathematical approach to make buy and sell decisions within a portfolio.
Lesson(s): A rules-based, objective approach to investing is a great way to take out the emotions which can trip up so many investors and introduce biases into the investment process. Automating good decisions can reduce costly mistakes.
Technical Analysis: Studying charts, past prices and volume for security and market analysis by using patterns.
Lesson(s): An understanding of the history of the financial markets is extremely important to be able to define your tolerance for risk and gain the correct perspective on what couldhappen in terms of gains and losses. And at the end of the day markets rise and fall because of supply and demand.
Index Investing: Owning the entire market/index at a low cost.
Lesson(s): Beating the market is hard. Keeping your expenses, activity and turnover to a minimum is a prudent way to earn your fair share of the market’s return over time. (more…)
10 Options Trading Pitfalls To Avoid
- The first question to ask in any option trade is how much of my capital could I lose in the worst case scenario not how much can I make. You can lose a high percentage of the capital you have in an option trade so keep it small in comparison to your total account size. I suggest never risking more than 1% of your trading capital on any one option trade.
- Long options are tools that can be used to create asymmetric trades with a built in downside and unlimited upside. The leverage is already there, if you position size correctly based on the normal amount of shares you trade you will stay out of a lot of trouble with losing a lot of money.
- Options should only be sold short when the probabilities are deeply in your favor that they will expire worthless, also a small hedge can pay for itself in the long run creating a credit spread instead of a naked option with unlimited risk exposure.
- Understand that in long options you have to overcome the time priced into the premium to be profitable even if you are right on the direction of the move.
- Long weekly deep-in-the-money options can be used like stock with much less out lay of capital to capture intrinsic appreciation in the underlying stock.
- The reason that deeper in the money options have so little time and volatility priced in is because you are insuring someone’s profits in that stock. That is where the risk is: the loss of intrinsic value, and that risk is on the buyer of the option contract.
- When you buy out-of-the-money options understand that you must be right about direction, time period of move, and amount of move to make money. Also understand this is already priced in.
- When trading a high volatility event that potential price move will be priced into the option, after the event the option price will remove that volatility value and the option value will collapse. You can only make money through those events with options if the increase in intrinsic value increases enough to replace the Vega value that comes out. This is why it is so hard to make money when holding options through earnings, the move is already priced in and that extra value is gone the next morning the options open for trading.
- Only trade in options with high volume so you do not lose a large amount percentage of money on the bid/ask spread when entering and exiting trades. You have to find those few option chains that have the liquidity to trade with spreads measured in cents not dollars. A $1 price difference in the bid/ask spread will cost your $100 to get in and out of a trade on top of commissions. Also be aware that the best liquidity is in the front month at-the-money options and option chains get more illiquid as they go deeper in-the-money or out-of-the-money this has to be considered in a winning trade because you might have to roll the option to a more liquid contract. Most options chains can’t be traded due to the fact that they are just not liquid enough.
- When used correctly options can be tools for managing risk by limiting capital at risk exposure and capturing huge trends, used incorrectly they can blow up your account.
10 Trading Mistakes
- Are you trading without a plan? Trading without a plan makes you emotional and a gambler.
- Do you ever trade too big for your trading account size? Big trades are bad trades for the emotional engagement and risk of ruin that they entail over the long term.
- Do you risk losing more if you are wrong than you will make if you are right? The biggest driver of profitability in your trading will be big wins and small losses. Big losses and small wins is a sure path to losing your trading capital.
- Have you traded without studying charts to see what has happened historically with similiar price patterns? If you do your homework you can make money understanding possibilities and probabilities from past patterns. Trading your own opinions will usually put you on the wrong side of the market.
- Did you trade a system before you back-tested it?Or are you just trading blindly?
- Have you ever exited a trade due to fear instead of due to hitting your stop loss or trailing stop? The right exit is what determines your profitability and whether your win is a big one or your loss is a big one.
- Have you ever entered a trade becasue of greed without an entry signal? Chasing a trade after the trend is over is a great way to lose money consistently and quickly.
- Have you ever copied someone else’s trade not knowing their time frame or position size? Ultimately you have to trade your own system and your own method that matches your own personality and risk tolerance. Only you can make yourself profitable with faith in yourself and your method.
- Are you that person that loves to short during market up trends and miss a whole up move?The easy money is on the side of the trend in your time frame going against the trend is a great way to lose money.
- Are you that knife catcher that keeps going long at the worn time in a down trend? When everyone is exiting a market that is the worst time to be getting long as wave after wave of holders are leaving.