DISCIPLINE: The trader must have the ability to control themselves and follow a plan. Discipline is a required skill in trading without it there is no edge, you are either a gambler or simply trading off fear and greed. You will not be successful, instead you will be gamed by those in control of their emotions.
RISK MANAGEMENT: Risk management must be a top skill for a trader to even survive in the markets. You must structure your risk per trade to be no more than risking 1% or 2% of your trading capital. You have to be able to survive 10 losses in a row. These strings of losses come around more often than a new trader would suspect. If you lose just 5% of your trading capital in each of ten trades you will be down almost 50% and need a 100% return just to get back to even. At this point you are ruined.
PASSION: A trader must love to trade, without a passion for the markets and trading the new trader will not survive the learning process because anyone with common sense would believe that it was not worth the struggle. Passion will be needed to bring a trader through the learning curve and later the losing streak.
Archives of “losing streak” tag
rssTrading wisdom and strategies
Trading System – According to Howard Abell: The trading system gives the trader the ability to control his or her emotional states rather than allowing them to control him. A system is a disciplined method for organizing dynamic, ever-changing market phenomena.
Risk Control – According to Paul Tudor Jones: If I have positions going against me, I get right out; if they are going for me, I keep them… Risk control is the most important thing in trading. If you have a losing position that is making you uncomfortable, the solution is very simple: Get out, because you can always get back in.
Psychological Makeup – According to Leo Melamed: You learn to distinguish the good traders from the bad, the successful techniques from the unsuccessful, and the good habits from the faulty. You also learn to distinguish the lover from the fighter, the winners from the losers, the serious from the frivolous, the cerebral from the superficial, and the friend from the foe. But above all, you learn that the psychological makeup of the trader is the single most critical element of success.
The Easy Middle – According to Randy McKay: The beginning of a price move is usually hard to trade because you are not sure whether you are right about the direction of the trend. The end is hard because people start taking profits and the market gets very choppy. The middle of the move is what I call the easy part.
Cut Back Trading Size When Losing – According to Bill Lipschutz: When you are in a losing streak, your ability to properly assimilate and analyze information starts to become distorted because of the impairment of the confidence factor, which is a by-product of a losing streak. You have to work very hard to restore that confidence, and cutting back trading helps achieve that goal.
Have A Predetermined Stop – According to Bruce Kovner: Whenever I enter a position, I have a predetermined stop. That is the only way I can sleep. I know where I am getting out before I get in. The position size on a trade is determined by the stop, and the stop is determined on a technical basis.
Accept the Risk – According to Mark Douglas: To whatever degree you haven’t accepted the risk, is the same degree to which you will avoid the risk. Trying to avoid something that is unavoidable will have disastrous effects on your ability to trade successfully.
Making Mistakes Is Part of Business – According to Bruce Kovner: Michael Marcus [another top trader] taught me one other thing that is absolutely critical: You have to be willing to make mistakes regularly; there is nothing wrong with it. Michael taught me about making your best judgement, being wrong, making your next best judgement, being wrong, making your third best judgement, and then doubling your money.
Top 26 Quotes From Ed Seykota On Trend Following, Trading And Life
Quote 1:
“Win or lose, everybody gets what they want out of the market. Some people seem to like to lose, so they win by losing money.”
Quote 2:
“Fundamentals that you read about are typically useless as the market has already discounted the price, and I call them “funny-mentals”. However, if you catch on early, before others believe, you might have valuable “surprise-a-mentals”.”
Quote 3:
“If you can’t measure it, you probably can’t manage it… Things you measure tend to improve.”
Quote 4:
“The key to long-term survival and prosperity has a lot to do with the money management techniques incorporated into the technical system.”
Quote 5:
“There are old traders and there are bold traders, but there are very few old, bold traders.”
Quote 6:
“”I would add that I consider myself and how I do things as a kind of system which, by definition, I always follow.”
Quote 7:
“Systems trading is ultimately discretionary. The manager still has to decide how much risk to accept, which markets to play, and how aggressively to increase and decrease the trading base as a function of equity change.”
Quote 8:
“Trying to trade during a losing streak is emotionally devastating. Trying to play “catch up” is lethal.”
Quote 9:
“The elements of good trading are: 1, cutting losses. 2, cutting losses. And 3, cutting losses. If you can follow these three rules, you may have a chance.” (more…)
10 Powerful Psychological Traits of the Rich Trader
Ten Powerful Psychological Traits of the Rich Trader
- They have the ability to admit they were wrong and get out of a trade. They know the place where price proves them wrong.
- They have the ability to not only close a losing trade but reverse and go in the other direction when it is called for.
- The rich trader is not trying to prove anything about themselves they are focused on making money.
- They do not fall in love with an idea, currency, commodity, or stock they will make trades based on price action.
- Rich traders know that the market action is their ultimate boss regardless of their opinions.
- No matter how sure they are about a trade they still ALWAYS manage the risk.
- Rich traders get more aggressive when winning and trade smaller or take a break during a losing streak.
- A great trader is one that can admit to anyone that they were wrong.
- Rich traders do not believe their own hype, they know they can not really predict the future they can only react to current reality and the probabilities.
- Rich traders love what they do, win or lose.
When you are trading like that, it is hard to be beaten. Time is your friend.
20 Lessons From Stock Market Wizards
Most of you have probably heard of this book and some may have read it. For the benefit of those who have not read it or heard of it, Stock Market Wizards is basically a book that consists of interviews with 15 top stock traders in America. These top traders come from a myriad of backgrounds and have varied interests- from mathematician, historian, scientist, to those with an interest in photography and even farming. But they have quite a few things in common when it comes to trading:
DISCIPLINE
LOSS CONTROL
HARD WORK
Most of the traders interviewed were quite forthcoming, but a few were reluctant to talk about their strategies (even past strategies that worked but is now no longer used) for fear that disclosure would render its effectiveness. Of the 15 traders, only Mark Cook and John Bender are options trader. By the way, Mark Cook’s story is one of my favourite and he is also the guy that likes to farm.
I am interested to read about these traders, not simply because they are top traders, but also because many of them encountered major failures and lost tons of money before they become successful in trading. The path to success is never easy and this book really keeps me inspired. I think in future if I meet with setbacks in my trading journey, This is 4th time ,I had completed reading this book.
Here’s my 20 lessons from Stock Market Wizards (more…)
Ed Seykota-Quotes
(So you didn’t have a clear exit point) In other words, the only way you could stop trading was by losing.
If you can’t take a small loss, sooner or later you will take the mother of all losses.
There are old traders and there are bold traders, but there are very few old, bold traders.
Dramatic and emotional trading experiences tend to be negative. Pride is a great banana peel, as are hope, fear, and greed. My biggest slip-ups occurred shortly after I got emotionally involved with positions.
I prefer not to dwell on past situations. I tend to cut bad trades as soon as possible, forget them, and then move on to new opportunities.
The elements of good trading are: 1. Cutting losses, 2. Cutting losses, and 3. Cutting losses. If you can follow these three rules, you may have a chance.
Trying to trade during a losing streak is emotionally devastating. Trying to play “catch up” is lethal. (more…)
19 Quotes from the Book “Hedge Fund Market Wizards”
1. As long as no one cares about it, there is no trend. Would you be short Nasdaq in 1999? You can’t be short just because you think fundamentally something is overpriced.
2. All markets look liquid during the bubble (massive uptrend), but it’s the liquidity after the bubble ends that matters.
3. Markets tend to overdiscount the uncertainty related to identified risks. Conversely, markets tend to underdiscount risks that have not yet been expressly identified. Whenever the market is pointing at something and saying this is a risk to be concerned about, in my experience, most of the time, the risk ends up being not as bad as the market anticipated.
4. The low-quality names tend to outperform early in the cycle, and the high-quality names tend to outperform toward the end of the cycle.
5. Traders focus almost entirely on where to enter a trade. In reality, the entry size is often more important than the entry price because if the size is too large, a trader will be more likely to exit a good trade on a meaningless adverse price move. The larger the position, the greater the danger that trading decisions will be driven by fear rather than by judgment and experience.
6. Virtually all traders experience periods when they are out of sync with the markets. When you are in a losing streak, you can’t turn the situation around by trying harder. When trading is going badly, Clark’s advice is to get out of everything and take a holiday. Liquidating positions will allow you to regain objectivity.
7. Staring at the screen all day is counterproductive. He believes that watching every tick will lead to both selling good positions prematurely and overtrading. He advises traders to find something else (preferably productive) to occupy part of their time to avoid the pitfalls of watching the market too closely.
8. When markets are trending up strongly, and there is bad news, the bad news counts for nothing. But if there is a break that reminds people what it is like to lose money in equities, then suddenly the buying is not mindless anymore. People start looking at the fundamentals, and in this case I knew the fundamentals were very ugly indeed.
9. Buying low-beta stocks is a common mistake investors make. Why would you ever want to own boring stocks? If the market goes down 40 percent for macro reasons, they’ll go down 20 percent. Wouldn’t you just rather own cash? And if the market goes up 50 percent, the boring stocks will go up only 10 percent. You have negatively asymmetric returns.
10. If a stock is extremely oversold—say, the RSI is at a three-year low—it will get me to take a closer look at it.8 Normally, if a stock is that brutalized, it means that whatever is killing it is probably already in the price. RSI doesn’t work as an overbought indicator because stocks can remain overbought for a very long time. But a stock being extremely oversold is usually an acute phenomenon that lasts for only a few weeks. (more…)
Lessons from the Wizards
One of the first books I read in this business oh-so many years ago was Stock Market Wizards. It had a profound impact on my thinking about trading, psychology, risk, capital preservation, etc.
- All successful traders use methods that suit their personality; You are neither Waren Buffett nor George Soros nor Jesse Livermore; Don’t assume you can trade like them.
- What the market does is beyond your control; Your reaction to the market, however, is not beyond your control. Indeed, its the ONLY thing you can control.
To be a winner, you have to be willing to take a loss
HOPE is not a word in the winning Trader’s vocabulary;
When you are on a losing streak — and you will eventually find yourself on one — reduce your position size;
Don’t underestimate the time it takes to succeed as a trader — it takes 10 years to become very good at anything;
Trading is a vocation — not a hobby (more…)
Trading Thoughts
The speculator’s chief enemies are always boring from within. It is inseparable from human nature to hope and to fear. In speculation when the market goes against you, you hope that every day will be the last day — and you lose more than you should had you not listened to hope — to the same ally that is so potent a success-bringer to empire builders and pioneers, big and little. And when the market goes your way you become fearful that the next day will take away your profit, and you get out — to soon. Fear keeps you from making as much money as you ought to. The successful trader has to fight these two deep-seated instincts. He has to reverse what you might call his natural impulses. Instead of hoping he must fear; instead of fearing he must hope. He must fear that his loss may develop into a much bigger loss, and hope that his profit may become a big profit.
When you’re in a losing streak, your ability to properly assimilate and analyze information starts to become distorted because of the impairment of the confidence factor, which is a by-product of a losing streak. You have to work very hard to restore that confidence, and cutting back trading size helps achieve that goal.
When I get hurt in the market, I get the hell out. It doesn’t matter at all where the market is trading. I just get out, because I believe that once you’re hurt in the market, your decisions are going to be far less objective than they are when you’re doing well. If you stick around when the market is severely against you, sooner or later they are going to carry you out.
The key to trading success is emotional discipline. If intelligence were the key, there would be a lot more people making money trading… I know this will sound like a cliche, but the single most important reason that people lose money in the financial markets is that they don’t cut their losses short.”
Discipline-Risk Managment-Passion for Traders
- DISCIPLINE: The trader must have the ability to control themselves and follow a plan. Discipline is a required skill in trading without it there is no edge, you are either a gambler or simply trading off fear and greed. You will not be successful, instead you will be gamed by those in control of their emotions.
- RISK MANAGEMENT: Risk management must be a top skill for a trader to even survive in the markets. You must structure your risk per trade to be no more than risking 1% or 2% of your trading capital. You have to be able to survive 10 losses in a row. These strings of losses come around more often than a new trader would suspect. If you lose just 5% of your trading capital in each of ten trades you will be down almost 50% and need a 100% return just to get back to even. At this point you are ruined.
- PASSION: A trader must love to trade, without a passion for the markets and trading the new trader will not survive the learning process because anyone with common sense would believe that it was not worth the struggle. Passion will be needed to bring a trader through the learning curve and later the losing streak.