- First Things First
You sure you really want to trade ? It is common for people who think they want to trade to discover that they really don’t. - Examine Your Motives
Why do you really want to trade ? Did you say excitement ? Then don’t waste your money in market, you might be better off riding a roller coaster or taking up hand gliding.
The market is a stern master. You need to do almost everything right to win. If parts of you are pulling in opposite directions, the game is lost before you start. - Match The Trading Method To Your Personality
It is critical to choose a method that is consistent with your your own personality and conflict level. - It Is Absolutely Necessary To Have An Edge
You cant win without an edge, even with the world’s greatest discipline and money management skills. If you don’t have an edge, all that money management and discipline will do for you is to guarantee that you will gradually bleed to death. Incidentally, if you don’t know what your edge is, you don’t have one. - Derive A Method
To have an edge, you must have a method. The type of method is not important, but having one is critical-and, of course, the method must have an edge. - Developing A Method Is Hard Work
Shortcuts rarely lead to trading success. Developing your own approach requires research, observation, and thought. Expect the process to take lots of time and hard work. Expect many dead ends and multiple failures before you find a successful trading approach that is right for you. Remember that you are playing against tens of thousands of professionals. Why should you be any better ? If it were that easy, there would be a lot more millionaire traders. - Skill Versus Hard Work
The general rule is that exceptional performance requires both natural talent and hard work to realize its potential. If the innate skill is lacking, hard work may provide proficiency, but not excellence.
Virtually anyone can become a net profitable trader, but only a few have the inborn talent to become supertraders ! For this reason, it may be possible to teach trading success, but only upto a point. Be realistic in your goals. - Good Trading Should Be Effortless
Hard work refers to the preparatory process – the research and observation necessary to become a good trader – not to the trading itself.
“In trading, just as in archery, whenever there is effort, force, straining, struggling, or trying, it’s wrong. You’re out of sync; you’re out of harmony with the market. The perfect trade is one that requires no effort.” - Money Management and Risk Control
Money management is even more important than the trading method.
The Trading Plan- Never risk more than 5% of your capital on any trade.
- Predetermine your exit point before you get in a trade.
- If you lose a certain predetermined amount of your starting capital (say 10 to 20%), take a breather, analyze what went wrong, and wait till you feel confident and have a high-probability idea before you begin trading again.
- Trying to win in the markets without a trading plan is like trying to build a house without blue prints – costly (and avoidable) mistakes are virtually inevitable. A trading plan simply requires a personal trading method with specific money management and trade entry rules.
Archives of “money management” tag
rssCharacteristics Of A Losing Trader
1. Undiscplined
2. No money management
3. Unprepared
4. Overtrading habits
5. Easily tilted
6. Does not trade with probabilities
7. Trades emotionally without controlling: greed, hope, fear, and euphoria
8. Does not have a trading plan and strategy
Characteristics Of A Losing Trader
1. Undisciplined
2. No money management
3. Unprepared
4. Over trading
5. Easily tilted
6. Does not trade with probabilities
7. Trades emotionally without controlling: greed, hope, fear, and euphoria
8. Does not have a trading plan and strategy
Two Trading Plan for Traders
The Trading Plan comes first and should account for the following parameters: 1. Entering a trade. 2. Exiting a trade. 3. Stop Placement. 4. Position Sizing. 5. Money Management. 6. What to Trade. 7. Trading Time Frames. 8. Back Testing. 9. Performance Review. 10. Risk vs. Reward. The Game Plan consists of putting the parameters of the Trading Plan to work in day to day trading with the following benefits: 1. It will force the trader to select a trading style. 2. It will encourage market study. 3. It will aide in helping pick the correct trades. 4. It will prepare the trader for what the market has to offer. 5. It will help in properly monitoring and exiting trades. 6. It will keep the trader from overtrading. 7. It will help with finances. 8. It will keep the trader focused. 9. It will take the gambling out of trading. 10. It will make a better trader out of you. |
DAY TRADING LESSONS
Trading is a continuous learning process
The Right frame of Mind
The psychology of the trader plays a very important role in his trading decisions and style. The best traders keep their sentiments (greed and fear) out of their analysis and decide to trade with clear mind. Follow the advices below and you will notice a great deal of improvement in your trading style.
Never trade when your mind is occupied with other things. Try to be concentrated on the market. Try to feel the market, that is the Market Sentiment. When you feel overwhelmed of the information in your head, take a break. Then come back with clearer mind. Do not be trigger happy with your trades and always have a trading plan. Follow your Forex system with discipline. Apply the rules of Money Management with care. Always mind your loses! Then let the profits come. Stop loss orders are there to save you by yourself. Always use them and never stay on a false trade just to feed your ego. Ego never makes money! Even the best traders are often wrong. But market is always right!
The best traders have the vigilance to realize the market sentiment quickly and ride the market in the right position. Even when they are wrong at first, they quickly change their posiotions when they realize it!
d your ego. Ego never makes money! Even the best traders are often wrong. But market is always right!
The best traders have the vigilance to realize the market sentiment quickly and ride the market in the right position. Even when they are wrong at first, they quickly change their posiotions when they realize it!
Its all about managing risk
Trend Following is all about managing risk. As Trend Following is not about prediction, we do not know when we enter a trade whether it will be profitable or not, so we take calculated risk and put a position small enough not to hurt us bad in case the trade is a loss trade.This small risk taken over a lot of trades ends up in the right side of the balance sheet, which makes Trend Following a good strategy.
Risk Management strategy is called Position Sizing or Money Management (MM).
We have made our business managing risk.
We are comfortable with risk and we get our reward from risk.”
We are comfortable with risk and we get our reward from risk.”
Desire -Skill
The Desire
If you are trading just for the money you will quit before you are successful, Why? Anyone without a love for the game will quit during the long difficult learning process. After hundreds of hours of work and years of trading with nothing but a loss to show for all the effort anyone with common sense will think it is too hard and just quit. Those with a love and passion for trading will eventually succeed and usually make six figures or become a millionaire for their efforts. Those that do a cost benefit analysis in the first few years will generally quit due to the math.
The Skill
A trader must have the skill to trade in three dimensions. The management of the mind, the method, and money management are all crucial for success. Traders must have the discipline and perseverance to trade robust systems through different market environments without giving up. They must have the ability to accept and deal with their thoughts and emotions as they arise during both winning and losing streaks. Risk must be managed on every single trade without the ego causing bets so big that they put your future trading at risk. The trader must also have the skill to not let fear take away the traders ability to pull the trigger on a good entry.
13+1 Habits For Traders
1. Have a plan before you initiate a trade. A detailed trading plan is your blueprint to success. It will help you define you as a trader, the way you trade, will help you find, execute and manage trades with ease and most importantly will help you put the education puzzle together.
2. Always analyze all closed trades, winners and losers. Having a trading journal will help you identify what works for you and what not; it will funnel you in the right direction. It is by far the most helpful method of personal trading introspection.
3. Maintaining a positive trading attitude will improve your money management and risk management skills. A negative trading mentality will alter your thinking and mindset. Your attitude will determine whether or not you are profitable with your trading. Your attitude is more important than your market knowledge and even your level of experience. It is important how you react to the market and not what the market will do to you.
4. Controlling Emotions. Emotional swings and emotional stresses impact your mental state of mind and will affect your trading decisions. When you trade with emotions you don’t trade clearly and rationally. Some books talk about separating your emotions from trading. But how is this possible? To even try to separate emotions is like fighting a losing battle, taking control over them that is a different story. Trading involves the most emotional COMMODITY in the world which is….money. Money outlasts hate, love, greed and anything else you can ever imagine. The only way to control your emotions as a trader is to have a solid trading plan.
5. Trade in the zone –Focus is key in trading. Make sure you are do not have any distractions around, no internet browsing, no phone answering, no kids playing, it should be just you and the charts. Let the charts speak to you and they will tell you what to do. (more…)
Secrets of Jesse Livermore
1. Money Management:
* “I trade on my own information and follow my own methods.”
* “The desire for constant action irrespective of underlying conditions is responsible for many losses on Wall Street, even among the professionals, who feel that they must take home some money every day, as though they were working for regular wages.”
2. Business of Investing:
* “I believe that anyone who is intelligent, conscientious, and willing to put in the necessary time can be successful on Wall Street. As long as they realize the market is a business like any other business, they have a good chance to prosper.”
3. The Investor Self:
* “My satisfaction always came from beating the market, solving the puzzle. The money was the reward, but it was not the main reason I loved the market. The stock market is the greatest, most complex puzzle ever invented – and it pays the biggest jackpot…it was never the money that drove me. It was the game, solving the puzzle, beating the market that had confused and confounded the greatest minds in history. For me, that passion, the juice, the exhilaration was in beating the game, a game that was a living dynamic riddle…”
4. Market Analysis:
* “What beat me was not having the brains enough to stick to my own game – that is, to play the market only when I was satisfied that precedents favored my play.”
* “It cost me millions to learn that another dangerous enemy to a trader is his susceptibility to the urgings of a magnetic personality when plausibly expressed by a brilliant mind.”
5. Routines:
* “It is what people actually did in the stock market that counted – not what they said they were going to do.”
* “The game of speculation is the most uniformly fascinating game in the world. But it is not a game for the stupid, the mentally lazy, the person of inferior emotional balance, or the get-rich-quick adventurer. They will die poor.” (more…)
* “I believe that anyone who is intelligent, conscientious, and willing to put in the necessary time can be successful on Wall Street. As long as they realize the market is a business like any other business, they have a good chance to prosper.”
3. The Investor Self:
* “My satisfaction always came from beating the market, solving the puzzle. The money was the reward, but it was not the main reason I loved the market. The stock market is the greatest, most complex puzzle ever invented – and it pays the biggest jackpot…it was never the money that drove me. It was the game, solving the puzzle, beating the market that had confused and confounded the greatest minds in history. For me, that passion, the juice, the exhilaration was in beating the game, a game that was a living dynamic riddle…”
4. Market Analysis:
* “What beat me was not having the brains enough to stick to my own game – that is, to play the market only when I was satisfied that precedents favored my play.”
* “It cost me millions to learn that another dangerous enemy to a trader is his susceptibility to the urgings of a magnetic personality when plausibly expressed by a brilliant mind.”
5. Routines:
* “It is what people actually did in the stock market that counted – not what they said they were going to do.”
* “The game of speculation is the most uniformly fascinating game in the world. But it is not a game for the stupid, the mentally lazy, the person of inferior emotional balance, or the get-rich-quick adventurer. They will die poor.” (more…)