We all know that sentiment is a critically important ingredient in the pricing of tradable assets. But it is extremely difficult to move from this general and somewhat amorphous principle to a trading/investing edge. Richard L. Peterson takes up this challenge inTrading on Sentiment: The Power of Minds Over Markets (Wiley, 2016).
Peterson is the CEO of MarketPsych, a firm that in 2011 joined forces with Thomson Reuters to produce the Thomson Reuters MarketPsych Indices (TRMI), sentiment data feed covering five asset classes and 7,500 individual companies that Thomson Reuters distributes to its clients. As the Thomson Reuters website explains, these indices use “real-time linguistic and psychological analysis of news and social media to quantify how the public regards various asset classes according to dozens of sentiments including optimism, fear, trust and uncertainty.”
Odds are that, unless you’re a bank or hedge fund employee, you won’t have access to TRMI. Peterson’s book is the next best thing, although you have to realize that if you want to incorporate sentiment (not some proxy for sentiment) into your trading decisions and can’t do big data analysis yourself, you’re working with one hand tied behind your back.
Trading on Sentiment is divided into five parts: foundations, short-term patterns, long-term patterns, complex patterns and unique assets, and managing the mind.
Archives of “Investment” tag
rssHedge Fund Market Wizards – Joe Vidich
A critical distinction of all great investing books is that every time you re-read them, you find insights that you somehow missed the previous times. Recently I had the opportunity to re-read some of the chapters in Hedge Fund Market Wizards. The section about equity traders is my favorite one, so I delved into it again. In this post, I am featuring some interesting observations from Jack Schwager’s conversation with Joe Vidich:
1. Position sizing is a great way to manage risk
The larger the position, the greater the danger that trading decisions will be driven by fear rather than by judgment and experience.
If you are diversified enough, then no single trade is particularly painful. The critical risk controls are being diversified and cutting your exposure when you don’t understand what the markets are doing and why you are wrong.
It is really important to manage your emotional attachment to losses and gains. You want to limit your size in any position so that fear does not become the prevailing instinct guiding your judgment. Everyone will have a different level. It also depends on what kind of stock it is. A 10 percent position might be perfectly okay for a large-cap stock, while a 3 percent position in a highflying mid-cap stock, which has frequent 30 percent swings, might be far too risky.
2. Charts are extremely important.
One of the best patterns is when a stock goes sideways for a long time in a narrow range and then has a sudden, sharp up move on large volume. That type of price action is a wake-up call that something is probably going on, and you need to look at it. Also, sometimes whatever is going on with that stock will also have implications for other stocks in the same sector. It can be an important clue. (more…)
A common trait you'll see among the world's best investors
In 1968, a self-described “gun-slinging nitwit,” fresh out of Harvard Business School, Grantham played the go-go market at its peak. By 1970, he had lost all of his money. “I like to say I got wiped out before anyone else knew the bear market started,” Grantham recalled years later.
Think about that. The man who today relentlessly warns of risk began his investing career by losing all of his money and then sitting through a 12-year bear market.
What lasting impact did this have on his outlook? How did this experience influence his opinion of markets today?
Likely, a lot.
People like to assume they can think objectively. But you and I are just a product of the experiences we’ve had in life. And most of those experiences were random and out of our control. Would Grantham hold his bearish stance if, by luck, he began his investing career at the start of a bull market? Or doubled his money his first year out of college, rather than losing it all?
There’s evidence to suggest the answer is “no.” (more…)
2009…Heads or Tails?
Adam Smith (1723 – 1790) in “The Money Game” wrote:
“Prices have no memory and yesterday has nothing to do with tomorrow. Every day starts out fifty-fifty!”
If the above statement is to be trusted, then you could just take the 50 – 50 odds, expand their daily time horizon to a yearly one, and decide whether or not to “stay in the stock market game” in 2009!
Decide on just a flip of a coin?
Given the past year’s negative returns, what does this “flip” imply for the investors’ chances this coming year?
Well, that is a matter of asking the question the right way!
If you assume that the years are flipping randomly, and that there is no bias for any year, then you could ask if it is fair enough to assume that flipping through a calendar is otherwise the same as just flipping a coin?
Let’s assume that you were just flipping a coin. Then, YES …
The odds of one flip would always be 50 – 50!
Indeed, you might be led to start questioning about how fair the coin actually would be! In this case, you really should look back and base your expectations on historical econometric analysis and try to establish how fair the coin would be!
But if you are guessing that some things do look like a flip of a coin, shouldn’t you also assume that just because we had a negative year, we’re now going to get a positive one?
Who knows … Investments based on that kind of speculation might actually end up yielding a positive result!
But the odds are still only 50 – 50!
On the other hand …
I do know that …
I will get a much better than 50 -50 chance!
Warren Buffett will earn your annual salary in the time it takes you to read this article
There’s no doubt that Warren Buffett is ridiculously rich but if you made a few pips on the USD/JPY dip today and you’re feeling flush, then take a quick look at this tool that shows how much of a drop in the bucket your salary is compared to the $13.5 billion Uncle Warren made last year.
And if you’re admiring Messi’s magnificence today note that it took Buffett less than two days to earn Messi’s $64m paycheck last year.
2 -Risk Quotes For Traders
You are the biggest risk. Yes, that’s right you. All of your talk of discipline, preparation, planning, all of the hours of screentime, all of the chats with trader friends–all of that isn’t worth much if you are don’t follow through and do the right thing. If you aren’t disciplined every moment of every trading day, you are not a disciplined trader. The market environment is harder than you can imagine, and it will challenge you to the very limits of human endurance. Spend a lot of time thinking about the most critical part of your trading system: you, yourself.
Plan for risks outside the market. Everyone, from the institutional scale to the individual trader, will have outside influences challenge their market activities. Institutionally, regulatory changes and developments in market structure can dramatically change the playing field. Your investors will make mistakes–becoming fearful and exuberant at exactly the wrong times. If you’re an individual investor, you will face outside financial stresses, personal issues, health issues, etc. All of these things will have an effect on your trading that is hard to capture in the numbers, but prudent planning will allow you to navigate these challenges.
Trading Plan :10 Points
The Trading Plan comes first and should account for the following parameters:
1. Entering a trade. Quantified approved entries.
2. Exiting a trade. Predetermined Exit point BEFORE you enter a trade.
3. Stop Placement. How will you know you were wrong about a trade? A stop loss, trailing stop, chart signal, volatility stop, time stop, or target price.
4. Money Management. How much capital will you risk on any one trade? This is the key to position sizing.
5. Position Sizing. How much capital will you put on any one trade? Do you have rules that tell you to trade bigger or smaller based on the odds?
6. What to Trade. What qualifies stocks to be on your watch list?
7. Trading Time Frames. Are you going to day trade or position trade and hold for a week or more? or will you be a short term or long term trend follower?
8. Back Testing. You need back testing either with a computer, by reviewing charts, or others research to show that your system is a winner.
9. Performance Review. You must keep a detailed log of your trades and watch your performance to understand the wins and losses and their causes.
10. Risk vs. Reward. Each trade must begin with the potential of winning more money than you are risking.
This is a very basic outline, I suggest expanding this to include 30 rules minimum; 10 each covering the areas of risk management, psychology, and method. If you can write this, believe it, and follow it, you will win in trading the only question that remains is when?
25 Trading Lessons From Jesse Livermore
1. Watch the market leaders, the stocks that have led the charge upward in a bull market. That is where the action is and where the money is to be made. As the leaders go, so goes the entire market.
If you cannot make money in the leaders, you are not going to make money in the stock market. Watching the leaders keeps your universe of stocks limited, focused, and more easily controlled.
2. There is nothing new on Wall Street or in stock speculation. What has happened in the past will happen again, and again, and again. This is because human nature does not change, and it is human emotion, solidly build into human nature, that always gets in the way of human intelligence. Of this I am sure.
All through time, people have basically acted the same way in the market as a result of greed, fear, ignorance, and hope. This is why the numerical formations and patterns recur on a constant basis.
I absolutely believe that price movement patterns are being repeated. They are recurring patterns that appear over and over, with slight variations. This is because markets are driven by humans — and human nature never changes.
3. The market will often go contrary to what speculators have predicted. At these times, successful speculators must abandon their predictions and follow the action of the market. Prudent speculators never argue with the tape. (more…)
6 Universal principles of successful traders
1). Preparation
Author Brent Penfold is in the minority believing risk management is the #1 priority in trading. Brent believes that once you get your trading system and position size in place you must use the amount you will risk on each trade to determine your risk of ruin. The book shows exactly how to figure this out using Excel. His point is that if your risk of ruin is not zero then you will eventually blow out your account. Risking 1% to 2% of your capital in any one trade usually gives you a zero percent risk of ruin but it also depends on your systems win/loss ratio. But the point is to test any system with 30 trades first then determine your risk of ruin.
2). Enlightenment
Your most important goal is to lower your risk ruin to zero. In trading, the trader with the best ability to cut losses short wins. Simple trading strategies work the best based on traditional support and resistance while trading with the trend on either retracements of break outs. The 10% of winners in the market win by treading where others fear, buying on break outs when they first occur and going short when a new low is made, or buying into the abyss when a security finds support or resistance and reverses at the end of a monster trend.
3). Developing a trading style (more…)
The Three pillars of trading
Money Management: You must make your trades as fixed as possible. Trade with the same risk, capital, units, percentage, and in the same type markets to manage risk most effectively.
Methodology: Choose a method that works for you and your personality. (Dow Theory, technical indicators, patterns, price and volume, etc) Once you have a methodology to your trading, test it in the real world, in real time, either with micro trades or paper trade. You need a sample size to judge its efficacy.
Trader Psychology: Manage your hope, greed, fear, and pain to stay in the game.