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Ed Seykota’s Magic Trading System

  
  Education
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1: Do not stress about whipsaws – one good trend pays for them all.

A whipsaw is when you enter a stock, but get stopped out quickly.  In a period of whipsaws, this may happen many times.  This can be frustrating to a trader or investor, and it may cause them to change their system.  But the fact is that one good trend will pay for all of these whipsaws, and if you change your system you lose the benefit of that!

2: When you Catch a Trend, ride it to the end.

Your system must be able to jump on a trending stock (for instance, up if you are going long), but then also be able to ride that trend to the end.  Many novice traders will jump out of stocks before they are finished trending because they are scared the market has gone too far.  Let your system tell you when the trend is ending, and only exit once it does.

3: When you show a loss, give the loss a toss.

Every single successful money manager ever interviewed has said something along the lines of: “Cut your losses short”.  Get rid of your losses.  Keep your winners.  And once you have your system don’t second guess it!  Being stopped out is part of the process.

4: We know if our risk is right when we make a lot of money, but can still sleep at night.

Risk is the amount of risk per trade (the price between your entry and your stop loss), and how much your total risk is (regarding how many positions you have open at one time). (more…)

Great -Mark Douglas Trading Quotes

  
  Education
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In trading your mind may be the ultimate technical indicator that determines whether you persevere and win in the markets or get broken in half by fear, greed, ego, stress, and uncertainty. No matter whether you are a an investor, retail trader, prop trader, or professional money manger your success will still be determined on the management of your mind. Never underestimate the importance of keeping a cool head in rough times.

Here are ten of the best quotes from Mark Douglas, an author who verbalizes the real nature of trading as well as I have ever seen it captured. If you can absorb these teachings it will help you get through that rough period when you have 10 losing trades in a row or experience a 10% draw down in your trading capital. If you are not matching risk correctly you may have to come back from a complete wipe out of your account like many other have had to do. But do not give up, you can do this if you really want to.

“I know it may sound strange to many readers, but there is an inverse relationship between analysis and trading results. More analysis or being able to make distinctions in the market’s behavior will not produce better trading results. There are many traders who find themselves caught in this exasperating loop, thinking that more or better analysis is going to give them the confidence they need to do what needs to be done to achieve success. It’s what I call a trading paradox that most traders find difficult, if not impossible to reconcile, until they realize you can’t use analysis to overcome fear of being wrong or losing money. It just doesn’t work!”
-Mark Douglas

“There is a random distribution between wins and losses for any given set of variables that defines an edge. In other words, based on the past performance of your edge, you may know that out of the next 20 trades, 12 will be winners and 8 will be losers. What you don’t know is the sequence of wins and losses or how much money the market is going to make available on the winning trades. This truth makes trading a probability or numbers game. When you really believe that trading is simply a probability game, concepts like “right” and “wrong” or “win” and “lose” no longer have the same significance. As a result, your expectations will be in harmony with the possibilities.”
-Mark Douglas (more…)

The Inanity Of Asking Questions On Blue Channels

  
Analysis, Education
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Last week I was watching a investor query an analyst on a television show , the analyst in his most humble opinion on a particular stock said “Fundamentally it is good , technically it is not looking so good ” . What should I do asked the investor ? , the analyst replied ” I think you should hold on ” . the investor prompted “can I buy more , should I sell some ” . up came the analyst in his humble opinion ” buy on a fall , and sell on a rise ” and in wisdom he added “it is a volatile stock anything can happen “.. I failed to understand what the investor achieved of this conversation . the conversation had incorporated everything viz. . buy ,sell , hold and the standard disclaimer , “anything can happen ” . Investors are bombarded with packets of irreconcilable data which cause their little hard drives to collapse under pressure and confusion . Partly to blame for this are investors themselves , who ,in the quest for more information buy themselves a box of contradictions . !
What an investor needs is a modicum of authenticated information and to be phlegmatic .. however most investors these days are contrarian’s and hence , they follow up with every pink paper , and investment magazine , add to it the daily dose of ‘analysis’ on television … Those Score’s of analyst reciting their pedantic verses and the numerous phone calls by altruists souls that ring in to tell you ‘what’s hot on the street’ .! What do we have at the end of all this ? Ans.: An agglomeration of profligate et irreconcilable information and a confused individual — who can barely find his way in the heap of ‘ information ‘.
Serpents In the financial Eden :
All the information an investor has access to is at most sciolism , what lies beneath is above the reach of the common man on dalal street .Distortion and dilution are the two most plaintive facets of information today . Mostly intentional , distortion and dilution is carried out by interested quarters and the fodder is fed to the people , the public domain as we are all aware has the ability to Xerox information at the speed of light , and before you know it a distorted Piece of information has taken the shape of a ‘hot news’ on the street. (more…)

George Soros loads up on gold

  
Analysis, Education, Gold / Silver
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soros-gold

So why is Soros buying gold?  Though he believes gold is the ultimate bubble, he had said before that he likes to ride bubbles.  But unlike most investors, Soros usually knows when to get out.

From the WSJ:

LONDON—Investor George Soros doubled his bet on gold at the end of 2009 amid rising prices, a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission showed.

The filing, made late Tuesday for the financial period ended Dec. 31, comes after Mr. Soros made comments during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in late January calling gold an asset bubble. He told media at the time that the low-interest-rate environment creates a condition for bubbles to develop and that gold is the ultimate bubble…..

The First Requirement for Success

  
  Education
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“Sun Tzu said if you sit by the river long enough, you’ll see the bodies of your enemies float by. The key is “long enough.” If you live long enough, you have to be the survivor. When I was a kid, we didn’t have the video games you have today, so we used to listen to comedy records. One of the greatest ones was Mel Brooks doing the 2000 year old man. Carl Reiner says to him, “how did you get to be the world’s oldest man?” And he says, “Simple. Don’t die.” How do you get to be the world’s oldest investor? The answer is don’t crap out.

“So if you look at distressed debt where we started in 1988, I could tell you who our number one competitor was in every year through 1995 and not one is a main competitor today. And it’s not because of what we did; all we did is perform consistently. They crapped out. It sounds simplistic to say, but the first requirement for success is survival…”

– Howard Marks

What steps do you take to ensure survival as a trader? (more…)

The Wisdom of Burton Pugh

  
  Education
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It was true when he wrote it in 1948, and it’s still true today:

“To the professional short-turn trader who can spend all his time at the exchange, it
is, of course, permissible and expected that he will try to secure frequent fragmentary profits in an effort to compound them into larger funds, but this is not investment. Few are the ones who can afford to become ‘professionals’ and, in the final wind-up of a financial campaign, the outright investor following [a] plan will far exceed the results achieved by the less patient in-and-out trader.”

12 Insightful Thoughts from “The Most Important Thing” by Howard Marks

  
Education, Life
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1. People usually expect the future to be like the past and underestimate the potential for change.

2. When everyone believes something is risky, their unwillingness to buy usually reduces its price to the point where it’s not risky at all. Broadly negative opinion can make it the least risky thing, since all optimism has been driven out of its price.

3. In investing, as in life, there are very few sure things. Values can evaporate, estimates can be wrong, circumstances can change and “sure things” can fail. However, there are two concepts we can hold to with confidence: • Rule number one: most things will prove to be cyclical. • Rule number two: some of the greatest opportunities for gain and loss come when other people forget rule number one.

4. Very early in my career, a veteran investor told me about the three stages of a bull market. Now I’ll share them with you. • The first, when a few forward-looking people begin to believe things will get better • The second, when most investors realize improvement is actually taking place • The third, when everyone concludes things will get better forever

5. Investors hold to their convictions as long as they can, but when the economic and psychological pressures become irresistible, they surrender and jump on the bandwagon.

6. Even when an excess does develop, it’s important to remember that “overpriced” is incredibly different from “going down tomorrow.” • Markets can be over- or underpriced and stay that way—or become more so—for years.

7. If everyone likes it, it’s probably because it has been doing well. Most people seem to think outstanding performance to date presages outstanding future performance. Actually, it’s more likely that outstanding performance to date has borrowed from the future and thus presages subpar performance from here on out. (more…)

Fear in the Markets

  
  Education
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I think there is something to be said for the idea fear-based arguments standing out in people’s minds. Highly charged, emotionally relevant information is certainly processed differently from normal information, which is why advertisers will show very happy people drinking Coke, or people having car wrecks relying on their insurers. The correlations of investor margin debt and price movements of the markets might be one way to quantify how fear impacts speculative behavior …

That having been said, I do notice a kind of cultishness to the permabears… it is an ingrained belief that organizes their thinking about markets, the future, etc. The motivation, I suspect, is a desire to belong to a special group that will be spared the oncoming calamity.

Worth Reading..

  
  Education
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“The mathematical expectation of the speculator is zero.” -Louis Bachelier was a French mathematician who was, well after the fact, credited with founding the Efficient Market Thesis. In 1900 Bachelier published his Ph.D thesis titled “The Theory of Speculation.” In his paper, Bachelier discussed the use of Brownian motion to evaluate stock prices. Unfortunately, his thesis was “not appropriately received”, which resulted in academic black-balling and the concept being buried for more than sixty years.

Almost sixty-five years later Professor Eugene Fama from the University of Chicago was officially credited with developing the Efficient Market Thesis after publishing his Ph.D thesis. His paper was titled “The Behavior of Stock Market Prices.” The core tenet of his paper and the Efficient Market Thesis is that an investor “cannot consistently achieve returns in excess of average of market returns on a risk-adjusted basis, given the information that is publicly available at the time the investment is made.”

Is it not somewhat ironic that the determination of who founded the Efficient Market Thesis was not efficient?”

Trading Experiences

  
  Education
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A major key to success as a Trader and Investor lies in your mind.  Actually, it lies in your ability to use your mind optimally and creatively.

Please remember – there is NOTHING WRONG WITH YOU.  You don’t need to change YOU.  What you most likely need to change is the “software” that you are running in your mind.  When we are born we do not get a user’s manual on how best to use our mental abilities.  So we learn by soaking up what we see and hear around us as we grow up.  And often times what we learn is not conducive to being a successful trader and investor.

One of the key mental approaches is to “Welcome Every Experience.”  Welcome every experience that comes to you.  It may be an expectation, or it may be a surprise.  It may be ‘good’, or it may be ‘bad’ based on your first assessment of it.  It may involve someone getting hurt, someone getting promoted, a tragedy, a triumph, a windfall, a bankruptcy, an ‘aha’ moment….anything.  The most useful way to approach experiences we receive (which are mostly experiences we can’t control as they are outside of us) is to welcome them and learn from them.  Realize that they are exactly what we need in that moment, at that point in our lives.  And since we don’t have a time machine, once something has happened, there’s no changing it. (more…)

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