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Enjoy ( Must Read )

Paul Singer

From Forbes:

Coming off a huge debt deal with Argentina, hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer’s advise is to be wary of expert advice. “The important turning points in markets are never identified with precision in advance by ‘experts’ and policymakers. This lack of foresight is not surprising, because markets and the course of the economy are not model-able scientific phenomena but rather are examples of mass human behavior, which are never predictable with anything like precision,” says Singer. “But what is surprising is that even the most sophisticated investors, traders and commentators continue to rely on predictions issued by those who have no record of success at such forecasts.”

Nice.

25 Shocking Facts About The Water Resources ,Read Point Number 11 & Think About it

water-asr

War, famine, mass extinctions and devastating plagues – all of these are coming unless some kind of miraculous solution is found to the world’s rapidly growing water crisis.  By the year 2030, the global demand for water will exceed the global supply of water by an astounding 40 percent according to one very disturbing U.S. government report.  As you read this article, lakes, rivers, streams and aquifers are steadily drying up all over the planet.  The lack of global water could potentially be enough to bring about a worldwide economic collapse all by itself if nothing is done because no society can function without water.  Just try to live a single day without using any water some time.  You will quickly realize how difficult it is.  Fresh water is the single most important natural resource on the planet, and we are very rapidly running out of it.  The following are 25 shocking facts about the Earth’s dwindling water resources that everyone should know…

#1 Right now, 1.6 billion people live in areas of the world that are facing “absolute water scarcity“.

#2 Global water use has quadrupled over the past 100 years and continues to rise rapidly.

#3 One recent study found that a third of all global corn crops are facing “water stress“.

#4 A child dies from a water-related disease every 15 seconds.

#5 By 2025, two-thirds of the population of Earth will “be living under water stressed conditions“.

#6 Due to a lack of water, Chinese food imports now require more land than the entire state of California. (more…)

My take on how to read financial news headlines

Headline: Stocks Rose/Fell Today by 1% Because of _______
How to read it: Millions of shares traded hands today because investors all have different goals, strategies, risk profiles, holding periods and ideas.

Headline: [Popular economist/fund manager] Expects Market Volatility to Pick Up Later This Year
How to read it: Saying you expect volatility to pick up at some point in the future is like saying you expect it to rain at some point in the future. And volatility works both ways — to the upside and the downside — so really this is just a way of saying the markets will fluctuate, which of course they will.

Headline: George Soros Gained/Lost $1 Billion
How to read it: Soros has around $25 billion so what he does with his money shouldn’t concern most investors.

Headline: Markets Got Slaughtered Today: A Sign of Worse Things to Come?
How to read it: No one ever really knows why stocks rise or fall on a single day. The market is up just over 50% of all trading days and down just under 50% of all trading days so you can never put too much stock in any one day.

Headline: Investors Are Dealing With More Uncertainty
How to read it: The future is always uncertain. The past just feels more certain because now we know what really happened.

Headline: Are Market Overbought Here? 
How to read it: Ask us again in a few months.

Headline: [Democrats/Republicans/current or past president] Caused X% of Economic or Stock Market Growth
How to read it: Presidents or political parties don’t personally control economies or stock markets made up of millions of participants and trillions of dollars all wrapped up within a complex adaptive system. These things don’t come with levers that you can pull to make them rise or fall.

Headline: The Stock Market Enters a Painful Correction
How to read it: Retirement savers rejoice as stocks fall on the week. Those with decades to save & invest should hope it continues.

Headline: _____ Could Cause Gold Could Rise to $1500/oz.
How to read it: Total guess. No one has a clue.

Headline: Is This the Stock-Picker’s Market We’ve Been Waiting For?
How to read it: It’s both always and never a stock-picker’s markets because it all depends on the quality of the stock-picker, not the market.

Headline: Goldman Sachs Expects Stocks to Rally For the Next 3 Months
How to read it: Big financial firms have so many strategists that there will surely be a research piece put out in the coming days that totally contradicts whatever they just predicted.

Headline: When Will the Fed Raise Rates?
How to read it: Has Fed policy really ever helped you make better investment decisions? Even if you knew exactly what they were going to do in the future you still have no idea how other investors will react. 

Headline: Investors Panic as Stocks Enter a Bear Market
How to read it: Don’t panic — expected returns and dividend yields go up during bear markets. This is a good thing for long-term investors.

Headline: A Perfect Storm Caused Markets to Fall
How to read it: Stuff happens in the markets and we like to attach important-sounding narratives to everything. 100-year storms now seem to come around once a month or so. (more…)

Probability and reward-to Risk Assessment -Traders Must Read

  • Never open a position without knowing the initial risk.
  • Define your profits and losses as a multiple of your initial risk (R-multiples).
  • Limit your losses to 1R or less.
  • Make sure your profits on the average are bigger than 1R.
  • Never take a trade unless the reward-to-risk ratio of that trade is at least 2:1 and perhaps even 3:1.
  • Your trading system is a distribution of R-multiples.
  • When you understand #6, you should be able to hear/see a description of a system and know the kind of R-multiple distribution it would generate.
  • The mean of that distribution is the expectancy, and it tells you what you’ll make on the average trade. It should be a positive number.
  • The mean, standard deviation, and number of trades determine the SQN score for your system.
  • Your SQN score tells you how easy it will be to meet your objectives using position sizing strategies. Other than that, your system has nothing to do with meeting your objectives.
  • Systems are usually named after their setups, which are usually based on some attempt to predict future prices. Prediction has nothing to do with trading well.
  • System performance has to do with controlling risk and managing the position through your exits.

Predictions vs. Expectations

There are two VERY DIFFERENT terms to consider when it comes to trading: 1) Prediction and 2) expectation (or confidence) surrounding the prediction. 

Placing a trade involves making a prediction. It is not possible to place a trade without making a prediction, and that is true even for trades that might or might not execute, such as those placed using a stop order or limit order, for example.

Every trader who places a trade does so because the trader believes there is some chance, greater than 0%, that the trade will be beneficial, perhaps based on historical probability (back testing) perhaps based on intuition (years of trading experience) perhaps based on hopes and prayers or possibly based on nothing more than a need to gamble. Whatever the basis, there must be SOME chance to benefit or else the trader would not entertain it. The trader predicts he or she will benefit, or else the trader does not enter a trade order.

No matter what the prediction may be, so long as the EXPECTATIONS for the prediction are based in reality, there is nothing inherently wrong with making a prediction. As long as a trader accepts a 30% win rate, for example, and makes allowances accordingly, there is nothing wrong with taking such a trade. The same is true for trades with 50/50 odds, as long as the trader properly predicts, expects, and is prepared for 50% failures; which is why it is possible to flip a coin and still be successful. 

Many successful traders may say they never predict, when what they may really mean is that they never EXPECT their prediction to come true. Thus they may say things like “I only react” when more accurately they are reacting… to a failed prediction. For, it is virtually impossible to trade without predicting. So, I say to all you new traders out there “Don’t be afraid to predict. Just know how likely it is that you’ll be wrong, and know what to do when your prediction fails!”

These 7 Things -Traders Must Avoid

  • Trading with no stop losses. You can’t control how big your profits are, the market will trend as far as it does. However, you can control and limit the size of your losses with a stop loss and a carefully managed positions size. Not having an exit plan if you are wrong can be very expensive when a trend takes off against your position and you start hoping instead of just cutting your losses and moving on.
  • Your opinion can cost you money. Trading your opinion against all other market participants can be very expensive. The market goes where it wants and when you disagree with where it is going it will cost you. Going with the flow in your time frame is the best way to make money. Fighting the flow of the market can be expensive.
  • Egos are expensive things. Inflated egos cause a trader’s #1 priority to be proving they are right and refusing to admit when they are wrong. It is very expensive for ego gratification to be higher on a trader’s list than making money.
  • Trading off predictions can cost a lot of money when they are wrong. There is more to be made by reacting to what the market is doing instead of predicting what you think it will do later. The future does not exist and it is expensive to pretend like it does.
  • Stubbornness causes small losses to become big losses. It causes a trader to make the same mistake over and over because they do not assimilate feedback. Instead they keep doing the same thing over and over and expect different results but keep getting the same results. Stubbornness is expensive.
  • Not having an exit strategy for a winning trade can be very expensive. It is possible to ride a big winning trade back to even. If there is no plan to lock in profits while they are there a winning trade can even turn into a big loser. Trailing stops and targets can put the profits in the bank.
  • Trading too big of position sizes for your account can be very costly because no manner how good your winning trades are you are set up to give back the profits with a few big losing trades in a row,