Archives of “market trends” tag

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John Murphy’s Ten Laws of Technical Trading

  
  Education
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1. Map the Trends

Study long-term charts. Begin a chart analysis with monthly and weekly charts spanning several years. A larger scale map of the market provides more visibility and a better long-term perspective on a market. Once the long-term has been established, then consult daily and intra-day charts. A short-term market view alone can often be deceptive. Even if you only trade the very short term, you will do better if you’re trading in the same direction as the intermediate and longer term trends.

2. Spot the Trend and Go With It

Determine the trend and follow it. Market trends come in many sizes – long-term, intermediate-term and short-term. First, determine which one you’re going to trade and use the appropriate chart. Make sure you trade in the direction of that trend. Buy dips if the trend is up. Sell rallies if the trend is down. If you’re trading the intermediate trend, use daily and weekly charts. If you’re day trading, use daily and intra-day charts. But in each case, let the longer range chart determine the trend, and then use the shorter term chart for timing.

3. Find the Low and High of It

Find support and resistance levels. The best place to buy a market is near support levels. That support is usually a previous reaction low. The best place to sell a market is near resistance levels. Resistance is usually a previous peak. After a resistance peak has been broken, it will usually provide support on subsequent pullbacks. In other words, the old “high” becomes the new low. In the same way, when a support level has been broken, it will usually produce selling on subsequent rallies – the old “low” can become the new “high.”

4. Know How Far to Backtrack (more…)

7 Ways to Become an Unsuccessful Trader

  
  Education
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If you’d prefer to become an unsuccessful trader, you can start by making the following common trading mistakes.

-The first big mistake is the flawed logic of extrapolation. Many traders and investors assume that a trend will remain in force until an “event” comes along to change it. But market trends are not like billiard balls on a pool table. This false assumption will put you on the wrong side of the market more times than not, especially at major turning points.

-The second big mistake is to suppose that news events drive market trends. In fact, the opposite is true: economic, political and social events lag market trends.

-One common mistake is to buy puts or calls that are way “out of the money,” with no other transactions to compliment them. Unless your timing is absolutely perfect — and who has perfect timing? — your chance of success is low. It’s like buying a lottery ticket.

-Another common mistake is to buy options with too little time left to expiration. With less than one month to expiration, the time decay begins to accelerate and the chances of success diminish.

-In the middle of a corrective pattern, it’s common to run out of patience while waiting for confirmation of a trend change. You have to give corrective patterns time to unfold before you jump in. This requires discipline, and a solid understanding of the many ways corrective patterns can unfold.

-Too many traders think Elliott wave is a trading system that tells you exactly where to enter and exit a particular market. That’s the biggest misconception. The reality is that it’s an analytical and forecasting tool, which helps you develop and use your own trading system, based on your own personal risk tolerance.

-Traders tend to over-rely on momentum indicators such as RSI, Stochastics and MACD to precisely spot turning points. But to paraphrase Mark Twain, markets can stay overbought or oversold a lot longer than either you or I can remain solvent.

Take the knocks

  
  Education
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I’ve identified recently that one of the most important internal abilities a trader needs is a seemingly endless supply of resilience to take daily knocks in the market and get back up. For me this shows up as a “not happening day”…

Some days its happening, but some days its not. As soon as I realize I’m in a not happening day the most important thing to do is quit right now and start again tomorrow completely fresh. Just forget it, start over tomorrow.

Each day in the market has no connection for the trader to the one before, its a clean slate. You need to just bounce back like a ball, fresh as a daisy. The sins of yesterday are completely forgiven, but you will be judged on how you act today.

Strangely I notice that these days also often line up to some degree with market behavior. My not happening days can sometimes be accompanied by a daily print that whipsawed in an ugly confused fashion.

This is not always the case, sometimes the market trends cleanly but I just didn’t get what was going on, I was in the wrong state to be doing this. Other days my head is clear but the market is a nervous wreck.

It is a strength though to be able to realize quickly that today its just not happening for what ever reason and to leave it for another day. If I’m in a position and i feel like this, I’ll just cut it, start flat tommorow. Usually these are positions that are going nowhere or else going bad anyway.

MRI’s of Succesful Traders

  
  Education
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I’ve seen this study making the rounds on several websites now as a type of neuroeconomic confirmation of Buffetological principles…

Perhaps procedure might be slightly useful as a means of seeing physical brain improvement by training– such as that found through meditative practices.

“Traders who buy more aggressively based on NAcc signals earn less. High-earning traders have early warning signals in the anterior insular cortex before prices reach a peak, and sell coincidently with that signal, precipitating the crash. These experiments could help understand other cases in which human groups badly miscompute the value of actions or events.”

“Neuroeconomists Confirm Warren Buffet’s Wisdom”:

“Seeing what’s going on in people’s brains when they are trading suggests that Buffett was right on target,” says Colin Camerer, the Robert Kirby Professor of Behavioral Economics at Caltech.

That is because in their experimental markets, Camerer and his colleagues found two distinct types of activity in the brains of participants—one that made a small fraction of participants nervous and prompted them to sell their experimental shares even as prices were on the rise, and another that was much more common and made traders behave in a greedy way, buying aggressively during the bubble and even after the peak. The lucky few who received the early warning signal got out of the market early, ultimately causing the bubble to burst, and earned the most money. The others displayed what former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan called “irrational exuberance” and lost their proverbial shirts.

Must See -What goes up, comes down considerably faster.Global Stocks -Lost $ 15 Trillion in 7 Months

  
Analysis, Education, Global Indices
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30-15

For global stocks, the way down ($15 trillion lost in 7 months) has been much easier than the climb up ($30 trillion added in 4 years).

With markets from Asia to Europe entering bear markets this month, stocks worldwide have lost more than $14 trillion, or 20 percent, in value from a record last June amid worries over global growth and deepening oil declines. The pace of the drop has been so fast that it has already unraveled about half of the rally since a low in 2011.

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