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W. D. GANN’S 24 TIMELESS STOCK TRADING RULES

Here are the 24 rules:

1. Amount of capital to use: Divide your capital into 10 equal parts and never risk more than one-tenth of your capital on any one trade.

2. Use stop loss orders. Always protect a trade.

3. Never overtrade. This would be violating your capital rules.

4. Never let a profit run into a loss. After you once have a profit raise your stop loss order so that you will have no loss of capital.

5. Do not buck the trend. Never buy or sell if you are not sure of the trend according to your charts and rules.

6. When in doubt, get out and don’t get in when in doubt.

7. Trade only in active markets. Keep out of slow, dead ones.

8. Equal distribution of risk. Trade in two or three different commodities if possible. Avoid tying up all your capital in any one commodity.

9. Never limit your orders or fix a buying or selling price.

10. Don’t close your trades without a good reason. Follow up with a stop loss order to protect your profits.

11. Accumulate a surplus. After you have made a series of successful trades, put some money into a surplus account to be used only in emergency or in times of panic.

12. Never buy or sell just to get a scalping profit.

13. Never average a loss. This is one of the worst mistakes a trader can make.

14. Never get out of the market just because you have lost patience or get into the market because you are anxious from waiting.

15. Avoid taking small profits and big losses.

16. Never cancel a stop loss order after you have placed it at the time you make a trade.

17. Avoid getting in and out of the market too often.

18. Be just as willing to sell short as you are to buy. Let your object be to keep with the trend and make money.

19. Never buy just because the price of a commodity is low or sell short just because the price is high.

20. Be careful about pyramiding at the wrong time. Wait until the commodity is very active and has crossed resistance levels before buying more, and until it has broken out of the zone of distribution before selling more.

21. Select the commodities that show strong uptrend to pyramid on the buying side and the ones that show definite downtrend to sell short.

22. Never hedge. If you are long one commodity and it starts to go down, do not sell another commodity short to hedge it. Get out at the market: Take your loss and wait for another opportunity.

23. Never change your position in the market without a good reason. When you make a trade, let it be for some good reason, or according to some definite rule; then do not get out without a definite indication of a change in trend.

24. Avoid increasing your trading after a long period of success or a period of profitable trades.

NICOLAS DARVAS AND HIS $2,000,000

icolas Darvas viewed Wall Street as nothing more than a gambling casino; therefore, he set out to learn how to gamble.

I would like us to take a look at Mr. Darvas’ understanding of the stock market, as outlined in his best selling book How I Made $2,000,000 In The Stock Market, originally penned in 1960, as we recognize that what was true over 50 years ago still holds true today.  In other words, trading the market today is THE SAME AS IT EVER WAS.

Mr. Darvas experienced an “important turning point” in his stock market career when he learned that “there is no such thing as cannot in the market.  Any stock can do anything.”  With this in mind Darvas developed his “box theory” based on the following realizations:

1.  There is no sure thing in the market.  I was bound to be wrong half the time. Darvas adopted what he called the “quick-loss weapon”.  He already knew he would be wrong quite often (half the time); therefore, he decided to accept his mistakes realistically and get out of a losing trade with a small loss.  “This way, I figured, I would never sleep with a loss.  If any of my stocks went below the price I thought they should, I would not own them when I went to bed that night.  I knew that many times I would be stopped out for the sake of a point just to see my stock climb up immediately after.  But I realized that this was not so important as stopping the big losses.  Besides, I could always buy back the stock by paying a higher price.”

2.  My pride and my ego would have to be subdued.  Darvas surmised that with a win ratio of 50% his profits had to be bigger than his losses.  Breaking even was not a sustainable option.  For that to happen he would have to take many losses while letting the winners run.  Egotistical pride would have to give way to humble reality.  “As if stocks were made to conform to my new attitude, I handled this quite successfully for quite a while.  I bought with bold confidence when I thought I was right and coldly, without a hurt ego, I took my limited losses when I thought I was proven wrong.”

3.  I must become an impartial diagnostician. Instead of trying to force his will upon market direction, Darvas allowed the market to direct him by becoming intimate with a few stocks at a time and by not listening to others.  “To try to fit the market into a rigid pattern was a mistake.  As I only handled five to eight stocks at a time, I automatically separated them from the confusing, jungle-like movement of the hundreds of stocks surrounding them.  I was influenced by nothing but the price of my stocks.  I could not hear what people said, but I could see what they did.  It was like a poker game in which I could not hear the betting, but I could see all the cards.  Of course, the poker players would try to mislead me with words, and they would not show me their cards.  But if I did not listen to their words, and constantly watched their cards, I could guess what they were doing.”

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Moody’s on UK banks outlook

Via reuters

Via reuters
  • UK large domestic bank’s assets quality will take hit from COVID-19
  • UK’s bank capital to remain strong
  • UK domestic banks profitability to recover from 2021
  • Capiltilization will remain robust
  • Negative impact of COVID-19 will impact creditworthiness in line with duration and extent of crisis
  • Capital levels will remain stable over the 2020-2022 period broadly in line with end of 2019 levels.
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