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Cut Your Losers

  
  Education
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A big debate among traders is whether to sell your losing stocks or hold onto them. Obviously, dependent on both the short and long-term outlook of a stock each side could have a winning argument.

Whether there is a right or wrong answer, when solely using technical analysis for your stock picking analysis, YOU MUST ALWAYS SELL YOUR LOSERS.

The great thing about technical analysis is that it takes emotion out of trading; however, emotion will always be there for other traders. That is why stocks can easily dip or jump higher in a single day – generally it is a reaction to a tangible action that just happened.

When executing trades through the signals of technical analysis, there are always stop points or places where the trade is consider a failure . For the most part, that point of interest is determined by recent price action of a stock. Learn more about the art of stops.

Technical analysis all about using the setup that gives the trader the highest probability of success. Once that setup is broken, your original probability is out the window. Get it?

Basically once your stock dips below the “failure” point the criteria that you essentially bought the stock on no longer stands. Now you are just swinging into the wind hoping for the stock to come back.

Instead I recommend you cut your losses and move on to the next trade. It’s all about keeping the odds in your favor.

A Betting Game

  
  Education
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Betting“There are just four kinds of bets. There are good bets, bad bets, bets that you win, and bets that you lose. Winning a bad bet can be the most dangerous outcome of all, because a success of that kind can encourage you to take more bad bets in the future, when the odds will be running against you. You can also lose a good bet, no matter how sound the underlying proposition, but if you keep placing good bets, over time, the law of averages will be working for you.”

Jesse Livermore’s trading rules

  
  Education
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Lesson Number One: Cut your losses quickly.

As soon as a trade is contemplated, a trader must know at what point in time he’ll be proven wrong and exit a position. If a trader doesn’t know his exit before he takes the entry, he might as well go to the racetrack or casino where at least the odds can be quantified.

Lesson Number Two: Confirm your judgment before going all in.

Livermore was famous for throwing out a small position and waiting for his thesis to be confirmed. Once the stock was traveling in the direction he desired, Livermore would pile on rapidly to maximize the returns.

There are several ways to buy more in a winning position — pyramiding up, buying in thirds at predetermined prices, being 100% in no more than 5% above the initial entry — but the take home is to buy in the direction of your winning trade –  never when it goes against you.

Lesson Number Three: Watch leading stocks for the best action.

Livermore knew that trending issues were where the big money would be made, and to fight this reality was a loser’s game. (more…)

4 Kinds of Bets in Trading

  
  Education
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betsThere are just four kinds of bets. There are good bets, bad bets, bets that you win, and bets that you lose.
Winning a bad bet can be the most dangerous outcome of all, because a success of that kind can encourage you to take more bad bets in the future, when the odds will be running against you.
You can also lose a good bet no matter how sound the underlying proposition, but if you keep placing good bets, over time, the law of averages will be working for you.

Courage

  
  Education
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Not all traders have the courage to stand up to their actions. It takes a lot of courage to deal with the fears a trader must overcome in his career. The first is the fear of success that is so common and is the most prevalent. We want success and are afraid of it at the same time too. As our account grows so does the fear of handling those amounts of money. Could you trade risking a bigger amount as the account grows? Sometimes we sabotage our own success as it puts us out of our comfort zone. Another aspect of the fear of success is the subconscious fear of not being able to sustain that success. Our ego is questioning our ability to avoid messing up and losing that prized status of a hero. Same holds true for a windfall success. We know we might be able to do it again but our ego says we will look bad if we cannot do it again. Professional Traders have developed the ability to methodically achieve success and the confidence to repeat it while reducing the odds of sabotaging themselves via their egos. Professional Traders know that trading is boring and is not full of fun and excitement. That is why they have the courage to give up the fun and excitement in exchange for trading capital preservation. They also have the courage to not become addicted to winning big all the time. They know there will be singles, doubles and losers along the way too. They have the courage to stay on the sidelines at times and miss trading opportunities. They also know when to get out of a trade bravely and have the courage to ask for help when needed. They have the courage to stick to their strategy, ask dumb questions, admit it when they are wrong and finally have the courage to trade for profit and not for pure excitement.

It's not the trade, it's the battle.

  
  Education
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Too many traders believe that their last trade is a reflection of just how good of a trader they are (but they are the only ones who feel that way about themselves). This boils down to one word – expectation. If you expect to win all the time, or even the vast majority of the time, you’re setting yourself up for a lot of heartache. That frustration, though, is the very same force that will truly make your negative perception of yourself a reality. And even a good trade can be damaging if you let it warp your disciplined approach. The fact of the matter is that this is a game of odds, and should be played over a long period of time. Focus on the war – not the battle.

Coach Yourself as a Trader

  
  Education
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What are the three things (i.e. courses of action, strategies, resources) that you’ve found most helpful in mentoring/coaching yourself as a trader?

And here is how I answered:

  • 1. Understand me. The most powerful tool I have found in life and in this specific case, the market, is what I, as a person, am capable of doing as a trader. I finally understand that personal characteristics that are engrained in my DNA will only allow me to trade successfully under specific circumstances. For example, I am much more consistent and profitable as a medium term and longer term trend trader than as a day trader (even more so on the long side). I don’t need to be everything, all the time as long as I continue to focus on the areas that bring me the greatest success. Understanding “me” has been my holy grail of understanding how to trade the market with some type of consistency and profitability.
  • 2. Learning to cut losses. It’s almost cliché but not many people can do it (in any aspect of life). I have learned to cut losses in my trading, my career, my hobby of competitive poker and everything else in life where the rule applies. Without this rule, there wouldn’t be a third rule.
  • 3. Study and work hard. Sounds so simple but we live in a very lazy society. It is extremely important to my success for me to continuously study the markets on a fundamental and technical level and learn from my successes and mistakes. If you think about it, we would all start at square one on every trade if we didn’t learn from past situations where we succeeded or failed. Applying the knowledge gained from past experiences allows me to properly analyze similar situations in the future with slightly greater odds of success (or at least I would like to think). Never stop learning is a phrase that I will never stop saying as it proves to be truer the older I get.

Trading Journals

  
  Education
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The image to the left should be recognizable by most of us as the American alphabet. It is from these 26 letters that billions of people are able to communicate on a daily basis. We learn the alphabet early on with rhymes and rote memorization so that we may contribute to society through our interactions. We all progress at different speeds, but eventually we all get to the point where we can recognize all the letters in the alphabet. It is at that point that we build upon that foundation and begin to spell words like C-A-T and T-R-E-E. These words are then combined to form sentences which consist of several words. From those sentences we form paragraphs and so on until we are able to write and communicate with others through pattern recognition.

This ability of pattern recognition isn’t anything new or even earth shattering–it’s common sense. Just like the alphabet, which is in a pattern, we can discern the different patterns in lots of things. Take a look at the image below and you can recognize a pattern as well where there are higher highs and higher lows. Unlike the alphabet and some other patterns that have a beginning and an end, some patterns are continuous. Such would be the case for a chart that shows price action in a publicly traded company.

We could begin to see patterns in the line above and learn to predict or assume what has the higher probability of occurring next. As an example, looking at this pattern above we might safely assume that the odds are greater that the line will move lower from here as it has in the past. This does not necessarily mean that it will, but the odds are in the favor of such a move. It is this assumptive process that will serve not as an ends, but more of a means to and end. This pattern recognition assumes that the next move would be lower and thus helps us to proceed further. Information that we’ve gathered from the past can help us predict what the future may hold and this is the basic tenet of technical analysis.

Technical analysis can even be performed on your own trading account and patterns begin to emerge where you can recognize when your trading is “on” as your account grows and when the dollar amount pulls back you can assume that your trading is “off.” This ability to recognize the patterns as your account fluctuates in price is a decent beginning, but nowhere near the wealth of information that can be gleaned from your trading history.

Trading journals are one of the most underused indicators that every trader has at their disposal. Why is it that such a powerful indicator is underused? I’d venture a guess that a majority of traders don’t keep a trading journal because of the time it takes to keep one. I could be wrong, but over the years as I’ve mentored traders from all walks of life, time was the number one reason for failure. Second on the list was not knowing what a trading journal was so after reading this article, you now have no excuses as to why you don’t keep a trading journal.

Below is a list of what I’d recommend to have in a trading journal and, as with anything in life, you’ll get out of the journal what you put into it.

•Date
•Symbol
•Position
•Setup
•Current Market Conditions
•Expectations
•Price Target and Reason
•Stop Price and Reason
•Entry Time and Reason
•Exit Time and Reason
•Outcome Of Trade and Analysis

 

If you are able, ATTACH CHARTS TO ALL ENTRIES! Remember the pattern recognition? Something may not have stood out in the heat of the moment, but several weeks later you may see similar chart patterns to this one. It is at that time that you begin to find common threads and themes of your trading which will allow you to exploit those things you do well and avoid those things you do poorly.

The above should be easily done and would suffice for the most part. However, if you really want to excel at this then a comment section is where the real clarity comes from as you listen to yourself. Take a moment and run through questions like this to get a better understanding of what’s going of for you at that moment and document it. Here’s some examples of what you could ask yourself:

•Why did you allocate what you did to each trade?
•Why did you enter the trade?
•Did it meet all of your criteria?
•Why did you trail the stop where you did?
•Why did you exit when you did?
•How is your percentage reliability of trades over time?
•Does it fluctuate? If so, why?
•What do you think about each trade as you make it?
•Are you most nervous about your best trades?
•Does your gut tell you anything consistently?
•Which trades worked the best and worst?
•Were there any common elements of your trades?
•Are there blocks you notice that cloud your objectivity?
•Are you making the types of returns that were your goal in terms of risk/reward?
•Why or why not?
 
If you take the time to address questions like these then patterns will begin to emerge and you begin to understand yourself and your individual trading style. As I’ve said before, you need to treat trading as a business as doing so helps you control your emotions. It is impossible to not be emotional when trading but it is possible to control your emotions.
 
The last suggestion I would have is that you simply open up a blog and use that as your trading journal. There are several free services out there that allow you to create a blog and upload images, etc. The neatest thing about using a blog for your trading journal is the search function as each post or entry you make allows the use of tags or keywords. As an example, for every trade you make that is bullish, put the keyword bullish as a tag and later you’ll be able to search for that keyword. With a few clicks of the mouse you can see every entry that you ever made in your trading journal that has the tag bullish in it. Take a few moments and read through them and start recognizing patterns.

Spotting the Best Trades

  
  Education
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Let me begin by telling you of my system for isolating trades with odds 10 to 1 in my favor. Those are million dollar odds. Unfortunately, I still haven’t developed a method for calling all the big moves all the time. What I have done is develop a set of criteria that will, when they coincide, tell you the odds are heavily in favor of either an up or down move.

This method seldom speaks, but when it does, you have as close to a sure thing as you’ll ever get. As you will see, this method will not call all the swings, but that’s not its purpose. Its function is to segregate the super trades from trades that are questionable.

Trading in this manner is much easier because it allows you to take a longer term view of the market. I have found there is no need to monitor the market on a trade-by-trade basis, or, at times, even a daily basis. The signals are so strong that you don’t need to concern yourself with a microscopic view.

I use two major tools for selecting “bankable trades”. They are: 1) premium relationships, and 2) open interest. When these two click, the odds are 75% in your favor. To further substantiate the 75% probability, I also check contrary opinion, the market’s reaction to news, trend direction, and a few chart formations.

by Larry Williams, excerpt from his book, How I Made $1,000,000 Trading Commodities Last Year.

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