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.
Archives of “Investment” tag
rssMarket-Neutral Trading-Thomas Carr (Book Review )
Thomas Carr is the CEO of an advisory and trader training service, designer of a MetaStock add-on toolkit, and partner in an investment firm. Known online as Dr. Stoxx, he is the author of Trend Trading for a Living and Micro-Trend Trading for Daily Income. His latest work is Market-Neutral Trading: Combining Technical and Fundamental Analysis into 7 Long-Short Trading Systems (McGraw-Hill, 2014).
Carr is an excellent marketer which, as might be expected, is the downside of this book. Without the tools that he sells, the reader cannot implement all of the book’s strategies. He may not even gain the confidence to trade any of them since Carr admits that “blindly following a set of systems” doesn’t work. When real money was on the line, he traded “in a very detached, mechanical fashion” and lost a lot of money—both in his own account and in a small fund for clients. By contrast, he made a lot of virtual money for the subscribers of his newsletters. The difference (aside from the obvious real vs. paper money distinction) was that he added discretion when making calls for his newsletters. He applied “God-given skills of discretionary analysis, skills that [had] been honed by years of apprenticeship under some of the great masters of the game, in addition to a long slog of real-time, real-money trading experience.” (p. 131) How does a trader learn the discretion that is necessary to make trading systems profitable? “You need to find a mentor who already has it and sit by their side for a while.” (p. 134) Yes, Carr is also a mentor.
Now that you know that, without a further outlay of funds to Carr, you won’t be able to trade all of the systems described in this book and that, even if you can trade them all, you will still lose money if you don’t overlay them with a large dose of discretion (gained only by spending still more money), what does this book have to offer? (more…)
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…)
Jason Zweig’s Rules for Investing
1. Take the Global View: Use a spreadsheet to track your total net worth — not day-to-day price fluctuations.
2. Hope for the best, but expect the worst: Brace for disaster via diversification and learning market history. Expect good investments to do poorly from time to time. Don’t allow temporary under-performance or disaster to cause you to panic.
3. Investigate, then invest: Study companies’ financial statement, mutual funds’ prospectus, and advisors’ background. Do your homework!
4. Never say always: Never put more than 10% of your net worth into any one investment.
5. Know what you don’t know: Don’t believe you know everything. Look across different time periods; ask what might make an investment go down.
6. The past is not prologue: Investors buy low sell high! They don’t buy something merely because it is trending higher. (more…)
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.
Psychology & Risk Management For Traders
PSYCHOLOGY
- I keep Blue Channels turned off while trading.
- I do not care about others opinions I care only about price and chart action.
- I do not try to predict, instead I trade in accordance with the chart.
- I am not trying to prove I am right I am trying to make money.
- I am not trading for ego gratification I am trading for money.
- I am not trying to be the genius who calls a top I am the trend follower who follows a trend all the way up until it ends.
- I admit freely to my losing trades along with my winning trades.
- I do not get emotionally attached to each price movement through out the day.
- I have faith in my rules, methodology and system.
- I understand it that it is the market conditions and not me that creates profits.
RISK MANAGEMENT
- I never add to a losing positions.
- I carefully control position sizing to limit risk based on volatility.
- I attempt to never lose more than 1% of my capital on any one trade.
- I trade smaller when volatility is high.
- I sell positions with volatility stops when daily ranges double in the wrong direction.
- I have stale stops and sale positions that do not trend in four days after entry.
- I quickly sell losing trades when my stop is hit.
- I sell stocks when they close in the bottom of the days range.
- I never expose more than 6% of my capital to possible loss at any one time.
- Risk is priority #1, profits are #2.
Michael Lewis’ Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt -A Remarkable Read
Michael Lewis has a spellbinding talent for finding emotional dramas in complex, highly technical subjects. He did it for the role of left tackle in American football in The Blind Side (2006), and for the science of picking baseball players in Moneyball (2003). In Flash Boys, he turns his gaze on high-frequency computerised trading in US stock markets.
In terms of sheer storytelling technique, Flash Boys is remarkable. High-frequency trading, although often in the news when things go wrong, as in the 2010 “flash crash”, is hard for a specialist to understand, let alone the average reader. It is as if a violinist, bored with the repertoire, opted to play Paganini right-handed as a challenge.
Lewis reaches a stark conclusion: US stock markets are now rigged by traders who go to astonishing lengths to gain a millisecond edge over their rivals. As the innocent investor presses a button to buy shares, they leap invisibly into electronic markets to profit from the order and thousands of others, siphoning off billions of dollars a year.
The rise of high-frequency trading (HFT) was encouraged by a regulation passed in 2005, which aimed to open large exchanges such as the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq to stiffer competition. The idea was to make trading fairer; it instead unleashed, in Lewis’s view and that of other critics, a tidal wave of algorithmic front-running by traders whose superfast connections to stock exchanges allow them to react to buying and selling before others can. (more…)
Warren Buffett’s Biggest Losses
Unless you can watch your stock holding decline by 50% without becoming panic-stricken, you should not be in the stock market.” – Warren Buffett
A good starting point to gauge investment performance is to compare your results against a simple buy and hold portfolio.
While there are certainly ways to improve the performance of buy and hold, there are many more ways to make it much worse. You have to determine if the effort and actions you take with your portfolio strategy are worth it when compared to this simple (but not easy) alternative.
Investors generally fare much worse than buy and hold so this is an important decision for the average investor to consider.
When you hear about the average long-term gains of 9-10% in the stock market you must remember that those returns contain every single type of market environment. That means high valuations, low valuations, high interest rates, low interest rates, high inflation, low inflation, bubbles, recessions, booms, busts and everything in-between.
It’s an all-inclusive number that contains the good and the bad. (more…)