1. Divide your trading capital into ten equal risk segments
2. Use a two-step order process
3. Don’t overtrade
4. Never let a profit turn into a loss
5. Trade with the trend
6. If you don’t know what’s going on, don’t do anything
7. Tips don’t make you any money
8. Use the right order to get into the markets
9. Don’t be whimsical about closing out your trades
10. Withdraw a portion of your profits
11. Don’t buy a stock only to obtain a dividend
12. Don’t average your losses
13. Take big profits and small losses
14. Go for the long pull as an outside speculator
15. Sell shorts as often as you go long
16. Don’t buy something because it is low priced
17. Pyramid correctly, if at all
18. Decrease your trading after a series of successes
19. Don’t formulate new opinions during market hours
20. Don’t follow the crowd – they are usually wrong
21. Don’t watch or trade too many markets at once
22. Buy the rumor, sell the fact
23. Take windfall profits when you get them
24. Keep charts current
25. Preserve your capital
26. Nothing new ever occurs in the markets
27. Money cannot be made every day from the markets
28. Back your opinions with cash when they are confirmed by market action
29. Markets are never wrong, opinions often are
30. A good trade is profitable right from the start
31. As long as a market is acting right, don’t rush to take profits
32. Never permit speculative ventures to turn into investments
33. Don’t try to predetermine your profits
34. Never buy a stock because it has a big decline from its previous high, nor sell a stock because it is high priced
35. Become a buyer as soon as a stock makes new highs after a normal reaction
36. The human side of every person is the greatest enemy to successful trading
37. Ban wishful thinking in the markets
38. Big movements take time to develop
39. Don’t be too curious about the reasons behind the moves
40. Look for reasonable profits
41. If you can’t make money trading the leading issues, you aren’t going to make it trading the overall markets
42. Leaders of today may not be the leaders of tomorrow
43. Trade the active stocks and futures
44. Avoid discretionary accounts and partnership trading accounts
45. Bear markets have no supports and bull markets have no resistance
46. The smarter you are, the longer it takes
47. It is harder to get out of a trade than to get into one
48. Don’t talk about what you’re doing in the markets
49. When time is up, markets must reverse
50. Control what you can, manage what you cannot
Archives of “market” tag
rss10 Essential Trading Words
- Simplicity – have a simple, well defined way to generate trading ideas. Have a simple approach towards the market. You can’t take everything into account when you try to make an educated decision. Filter the noise and focus on several key market components. For me, they are relative strength and earnings’ growth.
- Common sense – create a trading system that is designed on the basis of proven trading anomaly. For example, trend following in different time frames. (more…)
The key to trading these markets, or ANY market, is to REMAIN PATIENT! Learn from the Patient Bear!
Hallmark of a Position Day Trader
Speculators, Skeptics & Suckers
- Speculators jump into stocks in the late stages of a Bear market and into the early stages of the Bull market; they are the gamblers; and they are willing to accept higher relative risk to capture the largest price movements that occur later, when the Skeptics and Suckers are buying in larger numbers.
- Skeptics wait for the Speculators to make the first move and to see real evidence of economic recovery before buying into a Bull market. Skeptics don’t jump in; they move in increments; and they usually miss the biggest price movements, both up and down. Put simply, Skeptics make their money when neither fear nor greed are at peak levels. There is also a sub-category of Skeptic, which are the Contrarians, who are skeptical to the degree that the most prudent position is the opposite of the herd.
- Suckers will buy or sell at any point during a market cycle but tend to buy more at higher price levels and sell more at lower price levels; therefore, as a whole, Suckers are the last to join a Bull market and the last to abandon it.
These are generalizations and most investors will exhibit characteristics of all three types at various points of a market cycle. For example, at the market cycle extremes–the highest and lowest points–many Speculators and Skeptics become Suckers. Also, there are hybrid forms (e.g. Speculative Suckers, Skeptical Speculators, Perma-Suckers, and so on).
Trade base on Facts, Not on Hope -Anirudh Sethi
Knowledge is the key to winning and gain in the Stock, Commodity and Futures, and Forex markets.
Trading on trust is a fools game.
Do not attempt to place a trade. If the market triggers the exit signal you had predefined, without emotion follow it immediately. Many traders enter the market with more ‘hope’ than understanding. You have to take complete charge of your trading. The best way to do this is to get knowledge and all of the information you can about the market you wish to trade and then form a plan.
You plan should include not only the entry parameters but also the exit parameters. The departure is the most important. Your trade should be protected. Failure to admit that you’re wrong when the trade is moving south is one of the reasons.
Learn to trade on knowledge. There isn’t any need for fear and hope that get in your way. When you’re able to trade on knowledge, you’ll have the ability to react to trading opportunities when it’s time to do 31 and to exit out.
Your best friend needs to be the Stop Loss order. (more…)
Emotional Discipline
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.”
Timing
Timing your entries and exits is crucial to your success as a trader. The charts and price action tell you when the time is right. You just need to pay attention and recognize what they are saying.When you can simplify your information sources down to only a few then your task will become easier. After all , how many indicators do you really need when the chart shows it is going up and the markets show they are going up? How much confirmation do you need? And confirmation of what? The future is unwritten. The more you wait, the farther way the prime entry/exit spot is moving away from you. The more risk you take on. More risk can play on your emotions. Indicators are always behind the times. I view them as pretty useless. The price on the chart and the candles are my REAL TIME indicators. Sounds simple and it is.So if you have simplified things in the manner I describe, the next item to truly believe in is probabilities. I (and everybody else) don’t know what is going to happen in the future. However, I know that profit taking will happen after long trends, pops, drops etc. Trading the probability of a reversal after a extended uptrend when the candles are getting shorter, volume is dropping off and the overall markets showing the same is only taking the view that gravity usually takes effect and that the stock will drop. This is timing the market. My mind is not encumbered by hopes, dream and predictions of what will happen. I think of only the probability. There is a huge difference between the two psychologically after you take some losers in a row. I don’t take the losers personally as a reflection of my poor judgment. I just think that it’s the law of probabilities playing themselves out and so I can go into my next trade opportunity unafraid and without hesitation.
Trading Mathematics and Trend Following
Some quick points, to be making money, Profit Factor must be greater than 1.
- Profit Factor (PF)
- = Gross Gains / Gross Losses
- = (Average win * number of wins) / (Average loss * number of losses)
- = R * w / (1-w)
- where R = Average win / Average loss
- w = win rate, i.e. % number of winners compared to total number of trades
Re-arranging, we have
- w = PF / (PF + R)
- R = PF * (1 – w) / w
Sample numbers showing the minimum R required to break-even (i.e. PF = 1, assuming no transaction costs) for varying win rates.
- w = 90% >> R = 0.11
- w = 80% >> R = 0.25
- w = 70% >> R = 0.43
- w = 60% >> R = 0.67
- w = 50% >> R = 1
- w = 40% >> R = 1.5
- w = 30% >> R = 2.33
- w = 20% >> R = 4
- w = 10% >> R = 9
These 7 Things -Traders Must Avoid
- Trading with no stop losses. You can’t control how big your profits are, the market will trend as far as it does. However, you can control and limit the size of your losses with a stop loss and a carefully managed positions size. Not having an exit plan if you are wrong can be very expensive when a trend takes off against your position and you start hoping instead of just cutting your losses and moving on.
- Your opinion can cost you money. Trading your opinion against all other market participants can be very expensive. The market goes where it wants and when you disagree with where it is going it will cost you. Going with the flow in your time frame is the best way to make money. Fighting the flow of the market can be expensive.
- Egos are expensive things. Inflated egos cause a trader’s #1 priority to be proving they are right and refusing to admit when they are wrong. It is very expensive for ego gratification to be higher on a trader’s list than making money.
- Trading off predictions can cost a lot of money when they are wrong. There is more to be made by reacting to what the market is doing instead of predicting what you think it will do later. The future does not exist and it is expensive to pretend like it does.
- Stubbornness causes small losses to become big losses. It causes a trader to make the same mistake over and over because they do not assimilate feedback. Instead they keep doing the same thing over and over and expect different results but keep getting the same results. Stubbornness is expensive.
- Not having an exit strategy for a winning trade can be very expensive. It is possible to ride a big winning trade back to even. If there is no plan to lock in profits while they are there a winning trade can even turn into a big loser. Trailing stops and targets can put the profits in the bank.
- Trading too big of position sizes for your account can be very costly because no manner how good your winning trades are you are set up to give back the profits with a few big losing trades in a row,