-Never play macho man with the market. Never over-trade relative to the equity in your account
-his first mentor has “steel hard emotional control”
-always liquidate half his position below new highs or lows
-after having 60-70% draw-down, he was so depressed he nearly quit. “Mr. Stupid, why risk everything on one trade? Why not make your life a pursuit of happiness rather than pain?”
-he then first decided to learn discipline and money management. Become disciplined and business-like about trading
-“Now I spend my day trying to make myself as happy and relaxed as I can be. If I have positions going against me, I get right out; if they are going for me, I keep them”
-Be quicker and more defensive. Always think about losing money as opposed to making money. He always has a mental stop. If it hits that number, he is out no matter what
-“Risk control is the most important thing in trading” Stop out at near 10% monthly draw-down. He never wants to lose 10% in a month
Archives of “mathematical finance” tag
rssLessons From Warren Buffett’s 2014 Letter to Shareholders
The education of any business person is incomplete if it doesn’t include a thorough reading of Warren Buffett’s annual letters to shareholders. I often say that I have learned more from reading his annual letters than I have reading anything else. And I spend much of my days reading! That said, this year’s letter was no different than usual. In fact, it was even more jam packed than normal because Buffett spends more and more time these days focusing on Berkshire AFTER Buffett. So his life lessons are more widely discussed than ever.You should go read the letter yourself, but in case you don’t have the time I’ve jotted down some of the key takeaways:
Macro Matters. As much as Buffett focuses on the micro (specific companies) he’s always mindful of the macro. And he certainly understands that his success couldn’t have happened without riding the biggest macro wave of the last 100 years – the amazing growth of the US economy:
“Who has ever benefited during the past 238 years by betting against America? If you compare our country’s present condition to that existing in 1776, you have to rub your eyes in wonder. In my lifetime alone, real per-capita US output has sextupled. My parents could not have dreamed in 1930 of the world their son would see.”
As I always say, it’s easy to look like a great swimmer if you can figure out the direction of the current. Figure out the macro and the micro more easily falls in place.
Accounting, accounting, accounting. If you read a Buffett letter you’ll notice that it’s filled with accounting tables. I’ve stated in the past that the language of economics is accounting. It is the way we communicate the health of our economy, our institutions and our people. Buffett knows this. Buffett’s a masterful businessman because he understands the language of economics. If you’re not well versed in accounting do yourself a favor and spend more time learning the language of economics – accounting. (more…)
Confidence in trading
The Oxford English Dictionary gives the definition of confidence as “The feeling or belief that one can have faith in or rely on someone or something”.
In relation to trading, confidence therefore is having:
- the belief in your ability to succeed as a trader;
- the belief that whatever method you use for selecting entries and exits will help generate a positive expectancy;
- the patience to wait for the right opportunities to present themselves;
- the discipline to follow your rules;
- the ability to keep taking suitable signals, when your criteria is met, even when suffering a run of losses.
Cold Truth About Emotional Investing
Consider an excerpt:
WSJ: What do you mean by emotional finance?
PROF. TUCKETT: What we try to do in emotional finance is start with the fact that the future is unknowable. The key thing about uncertainty is that it inevitably generates feelings. Because it matters to you, because your money’s on the line, so to speak, you’re bound to feel emotionally engaged.
WSJ: Some people think pros are more rational than individual investors.
PROF. TAFFLER: Although most of the fund managers we interviewed saw part of their particular competitive advantage as remaining, as they described it, unemotional or rational, in practice they were just as emotional as anyone else when they started to talk about the stocks they had invested in. There were lots of examples where they referred to them almost as if they were lovers.
If you’re entering into an emotional relationship with a stock, an asset or a company that can let you down, this leads to anxiety, which is often not consciously acknowledged. But it’s there, bubbling beneath the surface.
The Heston Recipe
Most traders are intimately familiar the implied volatilities of equity options. These implied volatilities are often smoothed to avoid the temporary spikes in the strike/maturity surface that can lead to butterfly and calendar arbitrage. Many trading desks and market makers use the Heston stochastic volatility model for smoothing.
To understand the genesis behind Heston model, and why it is so important, we must revisit an event that shook financial markets around the world: the stock market crash of October 1987. The consequence on the options market was an exacerbation of smiles and skews in the implied volatility surface which has persisted to this day. This brought into question the restrictive assumptions behind the Black-Scholes option pricing model, the most tenuous of which is that continuously compounded stock returns be normally distributed with constant volatility. A number of researchers since then have sought to eliminate the constant volatility assumption in their models, by allowing volatility to be time-varying. (more…)
20 One Liners From :The Little Book of Market Wizards by Jack Schwager
- They have the resilience to come back from early losses and account blow ups.
- They focus on what really matters in trading success.
- They have developed a trading method that fits their own personality.
- They trade with an edge.
- The harder they work at trading the luckier they get.
- They do the homework to develop a methodology through researching ideas.
- The principles they use in their trading models are simple.
- They have mental and emotional control is key while winning or losing.
- They manage the risk to avoid failure and pain.
- They have the discipline to follow their trading plan. (more…)
Why Traders Keep Losing Money
“Imagine a mutual fund run by several money managers. Some of these managers are relatively astute and quite attentive to market data and patterns. Others tend to take their eye off the market ball and consistently lose money. The overall performance of the fund, averaging the returns of these managers, is mediocre, as the losses of the poorly performing managers cancel out the gains of the astute ones.
What would you do if you were the chief executive officer (CEO) of this fund?
Easy, you say. You would identify the successful managers and place all the money in their hands. You would either fire the unsuccessful ones or ensure that they couldn’t make final decisions about the investment of funds.
Now imagine that, within yourself, there are actually several different traders, each of whom takes control of your account for a period of time each day. One or two of these traders are relatively astute; others are downright destructive. Your overall performance suffers as a result. As Chief Executive Observer of your own account, what should you do?
…If you harbor multiple traders within you—some careful, some impulsive, some successful, some losing—your first task is to avoid labeling these traders and instead take an Observing stance. You need to figure out why these lousy traders within you are trading! They evidently are not trading simply for the monetary reward; if that were the case, they would never overrule the successful traders within you. The chances are good that they are trading to achieve something other than a good return on equity: a sense of excitement, a feeling of self-esteem, or an imposed self-image.
You do not fail at trading because you are masochistic or because you love failure or feel you deserve defeat. Rather, you sabotage your trading because you have different facets to your personality, each with its own needs, each clamoring for access to the trading account. Your trading suffers because you are not always trading with the equity stake firmly in mind. In a strange way, a losing trade can be a success to that part of you that is, for example, looking for excitement—not profits—from the markets.”
3 Elements of Trading Success
What all winning traders must have, regardless of timeframe and system are as follows:
Trading System
- They trade a robust system or method that wins more money over time than it loses.
- Their system gives them a reward to risk ratio that is in their favor.
- Their system or method is proven to work with a live trading record over many markets, trades, or has historical back testing.
Trading with Managed Risk
- They manage the risk of ruin to avoid blowing up their account.
- They risk no more than 1%-2% of total account equity on any one trade.
- They manage risk through proper position size so they do not risk their account and their ability to trade in the future.
- They do not risk more than 6%-12% of their capital at one time, across multiple trades.
10 Enemies of Trader
- Stubbornness: Not cutting losses short and sticking with a trading method that does not work.
- Arrogance: Believing that you are far smarter than the majority of market participants before their is any evidence that you really are is very dangerous.
- Opinions: The only opinion a good trader should hold is what they believe the price action is telling them after they have done the research of historical prices. Opinions about the future are useless unless you posses a fully functional crystal ball or time machine.Trading the price action in the present moment is what leads to success and profits.
- Bias: Getting stuck in bull mode or bear mode is dangerous and can lead to losses if you keep playing on a team that is losing day after day. Stay flexible in your trading and go with the flow you can spend both bull and bear sided profits the same way. (more…)
Must Read Quotes For Traders
“Good investing is a peculiar balance between the conviction to follow your ideas and the flexibility to recognize when you have made a mistake.“-Michael Steinhardt
Do not stay bullish or bearish. Go with the current flow of the market. Be on the team that is making the money.
“There is only one side of the market and it is not the bull side or the bear side, but the right side.” -Jesse Livermore
When putting it all together, it is more than just numbers. Successful traders trade in three dimensions.
“Successful trading depends on the 3M`s – Mind, Method and Money. Beginners focus on analysis, but professionals operate in a three dimensional space. They are aware of trading psychology their own feelings and the mass psychology of the markets. Each trader needs to have a method for choosing specific stocks, options or futures as well as firm rules for pulling the trigger – deciding when to buy and sell. Money refers to how you manage your trading capital.” – Alexander Elder
The money is in the primary market trend, not jumping in and out.
“I think it was a long step forward in my trading education when I realized at last that when old Mr. Partridge kept on telling other customers, “Well, you know this is a bull market!” he really meant to tell them that the big money was not in the individual fluctuations but in the main movements-that is, not in reading the tape but in sizing up the entire market and its trend.” – Jesse Livermore (more…)