Archives of “profitable trade” tag

rss

8 Trading Psychology Quotes

  
  Education
#  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #

Your biggest enemy, when trading, is within yourself. Success will only come when you learn to control your emotions. Edwin Lefevre’s Reminiscences of a Stock Operator (1923) offers advice that still applies today.

  1. CautionExcitement (and fear of missing an opportunity) often persuade us to enter the market before it is safe to do so. After a down-trend a number of rallies may fail before one eventually carries through. Likewise, the emotional high of a profitable trade may blind us to signs that the trend is reversing.
  2. PatienceWait for the right market conditions before trading. There are times when it is wise to stay out of the market and observe from the sidelines.
  3. ConvictionHave the courage of your convictions: Take steps to protect your profits when you see that a trend is weakening, but sit tight and don’t let fear of losing part of your profit cloud your judgment. There is a good chance that the trend will resume its upward climb. (more…)

Control Your Emotions

  
  Education
#  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #

1. Caution.

Excitement (and fear of missing an opportunity) often persuade us to enter the market before it is safe to do so. After a down-trend a number of rallies may fail before one eventually carries through. Likewise, the emotional high of a profitable trade may blind us to signs that the trend is reversing.

2. Patience.

Wait for the right market conditions before trading. There are times when it is wise to stay out of the market and observe from the sidelines.

3. Conviction.

Have the courage of your convictions: Take steps to protect your profits when you see that a trend is weakening, but sit tight and don’t let fear of losing part of your profit cloud your judgment. There is a good chance that the trend will resume its upward climb.

4. Detachment.

Concentrate on the technical aspects rather than on the money. If your trades are technically correct, the profits will follow.

Stay emotionally detached from the market. Avoid getting caught up in the short-term excitement. Screen-watching is a tell-tale sign: if you continually check prices or stare at charts for hours it is a sign that you are unsure of your strategy and are likely to suffer losses.

5. Focus

Focus on the longer time frames and do not try to catch every short-term fluctuation. The most profitable trades are in catching the large trends. (more…)

How close are you to perfect?

  
  Education
#  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #

Becoming the perfect trader is no easy task, and I daresay that nobody has been able to achieve this great feat. The perfect trader buys at the absolute low of the day and sells at the absolute high. And depending on whether the high happens first or the low happens first determines if he is long or short for the day. It’s really easy to calculate this metric. It is simply the absolute value of the daily range or the high minus the low.

To get an accurate handle on the concept, we first ask what time frame we will be using. For end-of-day traders or swing traders, the daily bar is your competition. If you day-trade off the five-minute bar, well then use the five-minute bar to gauge your performance.

This concept is used in system trading and because vast amounts of data are typically used, we system traders need to resort to our super-duper calculators, also referred to as our programming language. This is an example of what code looks like for our daily perfect trader. The language is TradersStudio’s version of Visual Basic, but you can get the idea and use it with any program you wish. It’s the basic loop function.

For i = FirstBar to LastBar step 1

Next

PerfectProfit = PerfectProfit + Range [i]

You’ll need to dimension your PerfectProfit variable as an array if you want it to tally up daily ranges. (more…)

SAVE YOURSELF!!

  
  Education
#  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #

Many of us will sit at our screens, cursing, praying, begging, but the best thing to do is to save yourself, by cutting bad trades quickly. DON’T DEPEND ON THE MERCY OF THE BANKS TO DO IT!!!!!! THEY ARE OUT TO EAT YOUR LUNCH ALWAYS ! THEY ARE YOUR ENEMY, AND THEY ARE RUTHLESS WITHOUT MERCY!!!!!

#1. DON’T LEAVE OPEN POSITIONS! Trade what You can see. When You are not in the market take your money out with You. That way You can save on all of those foul words to Your broker when he tries to explain the price slippage that caused price to go beyond Your stop loss.

#2. If You must leave trades opened, put in a physical stop losses..

#GRANDDADDY OF THEM ALL!!!!!!!!!

NEVER LET LOSSES RUN !!!!!!

NEVER LET LOSSES RUN !!!!!!

NEVER LET LOSSES RUN !!!!!!

CUT THE LEGS FROM UNDER THAT BEAST AS SOON AS POSSIBLE!!!!!!!!!!

Two things are essential if You are going to enjoy a very successful and lucrative trading career.

#1 Wait for a proper trade set-up

#2 Learn to save yourself. CUT BAD TRADES QUICKLY!!!!!! So what if it comes back in your favor, many times it will, but it only takes one good shakeout to leave your lifestyle in jeopardy.

Cut bad trades to leave the most capital possible for a more profitable trade set-up. THE MARKET IS VERY VERY GENEROUS, IT WILL ALWAYS GIVE YOU ANOTHER OPPORTUNITY TO MAKE SOME PAPER, BUT YOU HAVE TO CUT YOUR LOSSES QUICKLY SO THAT YOU HAVE THE MAXIMUM CAPITAL TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE RIGHT OPPORTUNITY WHEN IT PRESENTS ITSELF!!!

The market is swim, float or sink. Don’t let them sink You. SAVE YOURSELF!

The Psychology Of Market Timing

  
  Education
#  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #

The biggest enemy, when market timing the stock market via mutual funds, ETF’s, even individual stocks (or in any trading for that matter), is within ourselves. Success is possible only when we learn to control our emotions.

Edwin Lefevre’s “Reminiscences of a Stock Operator” (1923) offers advice that still applies today:

Caution Excitement (and fear of missing an opportunity) often persuades us to enter the market before it is safe to do so. After a down trend a number of rallies may fail before one eventually carries through. Likewise, the emotional high of a profitable trade may blind us to signs that the trend is reversing.

It is important to follow a tried and true timing strategy that puts you in the right position for established trends, and also gets you out of failed trends quickly to protect capital. Excitement results in losses more often than not.

Patience Wait for the right market conditions. There are times when it is wise to stay out of the market and observe from the sidelines. (more…)

7 Different common emotional mistakes:

  
  Education
#  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #

7emotion

1. Emotional bias: the tendency to believe the things that make you feel good and to disregard things that make you feel bad. In trading terms, this means ignoring the bad news and focusing on the good news. It’s called losing objectivity; you don’t recognise when things go wrong because you don’t want to.

2. Expectation bias: the tendency to believe in things that you expect. In financial terms this means not bothering to analyse, test, measure or doubt the conclusion you expect or hope for. It is also known as the law of small numbers – believing in something with little real evidence.

3. The disposition effect: the tendency to cut your profits and let your losses run – the opposite of what a trader should be doing. Making small profits and big losses is a recipe for disaster.

4. Loss aversion: the tendency to value the avoidance of loss more highly than the making of gain. (more…)

TRADING EMOTIONS

  
  Education
#  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #

The hardest thing to master as a trader once you understand Market Rhythm is not the market, it is YOU. Emotional trading will break you fast.

Trading is not hard, it is mastering your emotions that is. Trading will teach you more about your human short coming than visiting a psychiatrist. As a trader, you must learn the discipline of waiting for proper market set-ups. That is hard!

Your EMOTIONS are screaming for you to jump in or you will miss out. NOT TRUE!! If you miss one trade set-up, the market is generous and will give you another. Learn to trade in harmony with your trend and with proper signals.

The emotions that are deadly to your trading success.

REVENGE, we all know it and have done it. It happens when you are tricked by the market and decide to take another trade before looking at the big picture, then BAM you are on the wrong side of the trade again. Pissed off and refusing to move while your money is going further down the drain. Scared to let go for fear that you are going to get tricked again.

PANIC, that is when you lack the confidence to enter or ride a profitable trade. This happens when you have taken some hits and now you lack the confidence to trade profitably.

IMPATIENCE, this happens when you can’t wait for a proper trade set-up and jump on a price hiccup/retracement, often finding yourself on the wrong side of the trade.

ANGER, you know that feeling that comes over you when you have taken a hit or two and you want to kill your computer. (more…)

Learning From Mistakes

  
  Education
#  #  #  #  #  #  #

Layout 1The ability to learn from mistakes is an important part of the skill development process. In addition, those who trade well tend to adopt a “perpetual student” mentality toward the markets which also helps keep their ego in check.

However, learning from mistakes you make is not as simple as it sounds. Equally important and challenging is figuring out which mistakes offer a lesson and which mistakes are just a routine part of trading. For example, sometimes I run into traders who think that in every losing trade there is a lesson to be learned and that’s simply not true unless you see a specific pattern repeated in other unsuccessful trades. As any experienced trader will tell you, a trader can make all of the right moves and their analysis may be 100% correct, but that doesn’t guarantee a successful and profitable trade. Perfection and trading well do not go hand in hand and not all unsuccessful trades offer a lesson to be learned. It is in the ready identification of patterns when making mistakes that you see within the more experienced and high performers.

7 Deadly Sins

  
  Education
#  #  #  #  #  #  #
  1. Trying to pick top or bottom
  2. My gut tells me that we’re going to break out (Professionals love fading breakouts)
  3. No confirmation from my Volume indicators (wait for everything to line up)
  4. Hesitating on entry (typically when the trade is “hard” to take)
  5. Canceling my stop (OMG, the biggest Sin of them all !)
  6. Moving my profit target (got to let the winners run)
  7. Letting a profitable trade turn into a loser (luckily, a rarity)
Go to top