rss

Honesty & Experience in Trading

Honesty:

Trading introduces you to yourself and you can’t ignore it. The mentor was just being honest.  He saw the guys impatience.  The more emotionally the guy got about the reality of the situation the more angry the guy got.  Trading is difficult because money is an imperfect feedback mechanism.  The habits you create early on you may continue to pay for throughout your career even it if paid you in the beginning. The good habits you create may not pay you for awhile or you may not be able to see them paying off.  It take a strong person to keep going without rewards.

Experience:

If I have learned one thing it is never to discount others experience. If someone has something to say I am smart enough to learn something from it.  That does not mean that all experience are created equally efficiently.  But completely discounting it is dangerous.  About everything I have ever done I started off thinking I was smarter than everyone else.  It started with my parents and continued to football and trading.  Each step I got better.  However it is important to take the information and make it work for you.

A 6 Step Process for Traders


Control is the ultimate goal. Getting control is, in my eyes, a 6 step process:
 1. Honesty of yourself leads to the desire to learn.
 2. The desire to learn leads to knowledge.
 3. Knowledge leads to understanding.
 4. Understanding leads to confidence.
 5. Confidence leads to conviction.
 6. Conviction leads to control.
It takes time, and not simply created overnight. That’s the reality. So relax, you have
plenty more years ahead. Go at your own pace, get the knowledge you need and
focus on doing it right. You will be saving yourself from a lot of pain and anguish in
the future.
Shift your concentration. Get away form the charts and start filling in your knowledge
gaps.

Trouble in paradise

“We need the financial industry to be honest with us,” she told a conference in Berlin. “If we don’t get honesty, then we might not do the right thing technically but we will do the right thing politically.”

Wolfgang Schäuble, her finance minister, defended Germany’s sudden move. “If you want to drain a swamp, you don’t ask the frogs for an objective assessment of the situation,” he told reporters. ft

The Krauts really shouldn’t talk to the French like that

Fast Easy Money

You know, it never stop puzzling me, why people think the stock market is a place for fast easy money.
J-LIf you had read Livermore, the guy’s puzzled too.
Let me quote an excerpt from Richard Smitten’s How to Trade Like Jesse Livermore
Livermore believed that the game of speculation is the most uniformly fascinating
game in the world. But it is not a game for the stupid, the mentally lazy, or the person of inferior emotional balance, or for the get-rich-quick adventurer. They will die poor.
dinner-party-

Over a long period of years, he rarely attended a dinner party including strangers when someone did not sit down beside him and inquire after the usual pleasantries:
“How can I make some money in the market?”
In his younger days, he went to considerable pains to explain all the difficulties faced by the trader who simply wishes to take quick and easy money out of the market; or through courteous evasiveness, he would work his way out of the snare.
In later years, his answer became a blunt “I don’t know.” (more…)

Weekend -Trading Quotes

Trading Journal

Show me a trader with good records, and I’ll show you a good trader.”

– Dr. Alexander Elder


“The fruits of your trading or investment success will be in direct ratio to the honesty and sincerity of your own effort in keeping your own records, doing your own thinking, and reaching your own conclusions. You cannot wisely read a book on ‘ how to keep fit’ and leave the physical exercise to another. “

– Jesse Livermore


Risk Management

“Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing.”

– Warren Buffet

 

Money Management

“It’s not whether you’re right or wrong that’s important, but how much money you make when you’re right and how much you lose when you’re wrong.”

– George Soros


“If you have an approach that makes money, then money management can make the difference between success and failure… … I try to be conservative in my risk management. I want to make sure I’ll be around to play tomorrow. Risk control is essential. “

– Monroe Trout


“Every winner needs to master three essential components of trading; a sound individual psychology, a logical trading system and good money management. These essentials are like three legs of a stool – remove one and the stool will fall, together with the person who sits on it. Losers try to build a stool with only one leg, or two at the most. They usually focus exclusively on trading systems. Your trades must be based on clearly defined rules. You have to analyze your feelings as you trade, to make sure that your decisions are intellectually sound. You have to structure your money management so that no string of losses can kick you out of the game.”

– Dr. Alexander Elder


“The most important advice is to never let a loser get out of hand. You want to be sure that you can be wrong twenty or thirty times in a row and still have money in your account. When I trade, I’ll risk perhaps 5 to 10 percent of the money in my account. If I lose on that trade, no matter how strongly I feel, on my next trade I’ll risk no more than about 4 percent of my account. If I lose again, I’ll drop the trading size down to about 2 percent. I’ll keep on reducing my trading size as long as I’m losing. I’ve gone from trading as many as three thousand contracts per trade to as few as ten. “

– Randy McKay


“All traders make mistakes, great traders, however, limit the damage.”

– Unknown


“My trading style blends both the risk-oriented and conservative personality of my personality. I take the risk-oriented part of my personality and put it where it belongs to : trading. And, I take the conservative part of my personality and put it where it belongs to money management. My money management techniques are extremely conservative. I never risk anything approaching the total amount of money in my account, let alone my total funds. “

– Randy McKay


“I’m more concerned about controlling the downside. Learn to take the losses. The most important thing about making money is not to let your losses get out of hand. “

– Marty Schwartz


“I’m always thinking about losing money as opposed to making money. Don’t focus on making money, focus on protecting what you have.”

– Paul Tudor Jones (more…)

Essentials of a Winning Psychology

winningFour fears that block a winning psychology:

  1. Fear of Loss
  2. Fear of being wrong
  3. Fear of missing out
  4. Fear of leaving money on the table.

Realize that trading is based on probabilities, as such, every trade is unique. In other words, the past does not equal the future.

Probability thinking manifest other states and beliefs:
  • Because we know that we will succeed in the long run and because we know we will protect ourselves no matter what the market does, we acquire the state of “self trust” and the state of being “carefree”.

In turn these states allow us to remain…. (more…)

Go to top