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ECB Purchases Of Sovereign Bonds Surge Tenfold Compared To Prior Week, Hit €1.4 Billion

After dropping to a modest €134 million last week, ECB purchases of sovereign debt exploded tenfold in the last ended week to €1.384 billion, confirming that the ECB continues to bid up all Portuguese and Irish bonds available for sale, so the market does not crash. As Reuters notes, this is the highest weekly amount purchase since early July. Once again it is up to the European Fed-equivalent to be the buyer of only resort. And Europe’s continued central bank facilitated life support comes on the heels of the latest joke in recession timing: per Dow Jones, the Center for Economic Policy Research Monday said its Euro Area Business Cycle Dating Committee had determined that the currency area’s recession began in January 2008 and ended in April 2009, lasting a total of 15 months and reducing gross domestic product by 5.5%. Some recovery there, when half the PIIGS have no access to capital markets, have their Prime Ministers mocked during conference calls, and are fighting with an exchange rate last seen long before Greece, Portugal, Spain and Ireland had to be rescued. We wonder what the CEPR’s timing on the end of the European depression will end up being?

Conviction, Anxiety and Belief

In 1952 Harry Markowitz effectively founded modern finance with his seminal paper “Portfolio Selection“. The famous (or infamous) CAPM and Efficient Markets Hypothesis, for all practical purposes, evolved from the Nobel winning ideas in this paper. (Note to self: resist urge to make Nobel joke). Ironically however virtually no one knows that Markowitz himself said his paper began with step 2! Step one was deciding what you believe.

We hear a lot from the well known trading coaches about conviction and it strikes me as funny because conventional risk wisdom says “don’t get married to an idea”, “let the market tell you”, “take what the market gives” and other such axioms all based on the idea of maintaining objectivity and essentially not becoming full of conviction.

Well which is it?

I mean we also hear “believe in yourself” but where do these advisories leave you when a trading idea is going wrong? How do you handle the teeter totter that holds belief and conviction on one side and price and risk management on the other? What fulcrum can you depend on?

We of course have our answer…but before we talk any more about it, we would REALLY like hear yours!

14 things financial journalists won't tell you.

IF YOU’RE READING the business section, you need to read between the lines. Here are 14 things financial journalists won’t tell you:

  1. That unbelievably telling anecdote at the top of my article? I scoured the country for three weeks to find that schmuck.
  2. The Dow industrials fell 263 points today. Why? By the time deadline arrives, I’ll have cooked up a reason.
  3. What qualifications do I possess? An ability to dial a telephone.
  4. Actually, I always wanted to be a sports reporter.
  5. Today, I had to bang out a long feature story on the mortgage market. My editor is looking to buy a new house.
  6. What qualifications do my sources possess? A willingness to pick up the receiver.
  7. If you saw my portfolio, you’d never ask me for financial advice.
  8. In the story, the company’s PR guy is quoted as saying, “no comment.” But on background, the senior counsel sung like a bird.
  9. The more the market falls, the giddier the newsroom gets.
  10. I don’t understand collateralized mortgage obligations, but I just wrote 1,000 words about them.
  11. My sources aren’t nearly as articulate as I make them sound.
  12. That joking, throwaway comment that the CFO made as we hung up? It’ll be in the second paragraph.
  13. We’ll get the online version up now, and figure out the real story for the print edition.
  14. I want my editors and sources to think I’m smart. What about readers? Yeah, I guess they’re also important.

Confidence

When you feel confident, presuming you do sometimes feel confident, where do you feel it? Can you feel it in your brain or is it in your thorax (i.e. middle part of your body)? Better yet, why do I ask?

Well if you think about it, part of our mission here at Trader Psyches is to teach traders of all stripes how to use the message in Gladwell’s blink to assist in the d/m (that is decision making) process. The zillion copies it has sold prove the interest in it but the practical parts about what I read – sort of the “just do it” related to using your instantaneous impressions seem frankly impossible.

And I honestly still feel that most traders are for good reason, stuck in their heads. So, I ask this simple question – when you feel confident where does it hurt?

Qualities of Successful Traders

Emotional stability. You don’t have to be nuts to trade, but it helps!  That is a joke, of course. Emotional stability is grace under pressure. A successful trader must be able to remain calm in difficult situations. Traders that rank very high on the emotional stability scale have very low anxiety levels, remain calm, relaxed, and have a low suspicion level. They tend to be trusting individuals and are not paranoid. You won’t hear them blame the market makers for forcing the stock to hit their stop and they take responsibility for their actions. Successful traders tend to be well
grounded.
 

Discipline. Successful traders are ones that can follow the rules. They are the guys that drive the speed limit. They tend to be perfectionist and take pride in their work. They like to take a project from start to finish and get joy from completing it successfully. Pilots, trained to follow checklists, tend to make good traders. An impulse oriented individual will have difficulty achieving the discipline to become a successful trader.
 

Intelligence. Bill says that successful traders tend to be intelligent. They need not have the IQ of Einstein but they are above average in intelligence. They tend to be good problem solvers and good with numbers, such as statistics. They understand that trading is based on probability, that not every trade will work as planned.