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Successful Traders Must Have Discipline

Discipline is paramount for success over the LONG term. Every trader has a limited amount of capital (money) available to trade. The trader without discipline will make trades, be quick take the profit when he is right, and call his trade an investment when he is wrong. 

This action of cutting winners and letting losers run will almost certainly eventually lead to trading capital being wiped out. The natural tendency in humans is to take profits.  Learning to cut losing positions and let winners run is a skill that must be developed. 

 Have you ever caught yourself saying any of the following statements to justify inaction on cutting a losing position?

  •  I am holding on to this trade and hoping it recovers 
  • If I didn’t own it already I would be buying it here
  • I just want to get back to break even and then I will get out
  • The market is wrong

Everyone has said these things at some point in their trading lives, but let me tell you, any time your position requires HOPE it is likely HOPELESS!

If you say I would buy it here and you don’t want to buy more – you may be better off selling what you have!

The market doesn’t know or care what price you bought a position. The market price of a stock is the value of that stock right here, right now!  Even though the market presents opportunities, market pricing is not WRONG. 

While I am not giving buy sell or hold advice, I would strongly recommend that when you find yourself staring at a losing position consider selling it! If you  close it out completely,  you can really make an honest determination when you ask yourself, “Do I REALLY want to own it here?” 

Too often I see traders let their existing positions do the talking for them. Don’t fall into that trap!

3 Invaluable Quotes from Reminiscences of a Stock Operator

“A man must believe in himself and his judgment if he expects to make a living at this game. That is why I don’t believe in tips. If I buy stocks on Smith’s tip, I must sell those same stocks on Smith’s tip.” 
 

“The recognition of our own mistakes should not benefit us any more than the study of our successes. But there is a natural tendency in all men to avoid punishment. When you associate certain mistakes with a licking, you do not hanker for a second dose, and, of course, all stock-market mistakes wound you in two tender spots – your pocketbook and your vanity.”

…“One of the most helpful things that anybody can learn is to give up trying to catch the last eighth or the first. These two are the most expensive eighths in the world. They have cost stock traders, in the aggregate, enough millions of dollars to build a concrete highway across the continent.”

Use discipline to eliminate impulse trading

  • Have a disciplined, detailed trading plan for each trade; i.e., entry, objective, exit, with no changes unless hard data changes. Disciplined money management means intelligent trading allocation and risk management. The overall objective is end-of-year bottom line, not each individual trade.
  • When you have a successful trade, fight the natural tendency to give some of it back.
  • Use a disciplined trade selection system: an organized, systematic process to eliminate impulse or emotional trading.

  • Trade with a plan – not with hope, greed, or fear. Plan where you will get in the market, how much you will risk on the trade, and where you will take your profits.
  • Black Swans

    Black swan is regarded as a rare, unexpected event that could bring disastrous consequences for those that don’t have a contingency plan. Can you be prepared for something that by definition is unexpected? It depends on how do you look at the world. There is a difference between the impossible and the highly improbable. The latter is possible.  The  black swan is not the same for everyone. What looks like unexpected to one, could be totally predictable for another. For the turkey Thanksgiving day is a black swan, but this is not so for the butcher.

    There is a natural tendency for human beings to underestimate the odds of seemingly unlikely events. Few realize that once in a 100 years event is equally likely to happen tomorrow as it is to happen after 95 years. And if there are insufficient data to calculate the probability of a very bad outcome, as is often the case, that doesn’t mean we should assume the probability is zero and look at contingency plans as a waste of time and efforts.

    There is an Irish proverb, which I have always thought that relates very well to capital markets – The obvious rarely happens, the unexpected constantly occurs. The “unthinkable”, the “unimaginable” takes place much more often than most people are willing to accept. The stock market crash of 1987 was described at the time as a 27-standard-deviation event. That implies that the odds of such an event not happening were 99.99% with 159 more 9s after it. It was unheard of kind of event, but it happened. Those who weren’t prepared, those who were over-leveraged, didn’t survive.

    When it comes to objectively assessing the real risk of any investment, there is one important question to ask: What is the worst thing that could happen and how it may impact your solvency. Human beings are naturally biased and tend to look for information that only confirms an already established thesis. Not much thinking is devoted to figuring out what could go wrong and to preparation of a contingency plan of action. People are often not prepared and when something unpleasantly surprising happens they don’t know how to react. They panick and let their emotions to rule decision making, which invariably leads to losses.

    A good way to minimize the impact of emotions is to go long gamma. What are some of the characteristics of getting long premium:

    – more precise risk control

    When long or short equity, you don’t have full control of your potential losses. Stops are not very helpful when your position gaps against you or during sudden evaporation of liquidity. If you are long gamma, you know the exact amount of the potential maximum loss – the whole premium. Armed with that knowledge, position sizing becomes easy.

    – more precise time management

    You know exactly how much time you have  in order to be right. If your thesis happens to remain wrong until options expiration, your position is automatically wiped and you start clean all over again. Many investors realize in hindsight that they were right on their analysis, but wrong in their timing as the market was not ready to accept their  thesis. Being long premium takes away the whole aspect of having to worry about precise risk management. It is like paying for someone else to be your risk manager. You have an investment thesis and you want to go long GLD for the next 12 months. Going long gamma is the perfect way to do it. You pay a small amount to see if your thesis is right. Even if the option goes down a lot in the beginning to the point that it is worthless, you will still own it and you never know what might happen. Adverse market moves and emotions won’t shake you out of your position, because you already have a plan for the worst possible outcome – you will lose the paid premium.

    – overpaying for premium, but still able to make money

    You have to realize that in most of the time you will overpay for options. If you did proper due diligence that should not bother you as the move in the underlying asset will more than compensate the wasting effect of time and volatility. Especially when you move past one month options. There is a tendency to believe that people overpay for options because the research shows that IV is higher than realized volatility. That has to be the case for the seller to be willing to take the risk and to write you an option – he’s got to make some money. The difference is, he’s going to delta hedge and you’re not, so you are going to have to pay a little bit extra so that he gets compensated. You have to realize in advance, that yes you are overpaying. The seller is making his money of the delta hedge, and you are paying him a little bit by paying him more than what realized volatility is, but no one really knows in advance how big the realized volatility and the move of the underlying asset are going to be. Both the seller of the option and the buyer could make money. The profit for the seller comes from extracting the risk premia in the daily volatility and for the buyer it comes from the fact that most underlying assets tend to exhibit trending behavior. (more…)