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Trading quotes

 

And the great sea with its friends and its enemies. And bed, he thought. Bed is my friend. Just bed, he thought. Bed will be a great thing. It is easy when you are beaten, he thought. I never knew how easy it was. And what beat you, he thought. ‘Nothing’, he said aloud. ‘I went out too far.’

– Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

‘At that point I ought to have gone away, but a strange sensation rose up in me, a sort of defiance of fate, a desire to challenge it, to put out my tongue at it. I laid down the largest stake allowed – four thousand gulden – and lost it. Then, getting hot, I pulled out all I had left, staked it on the same number, and lost again, after which I walked away from the table as though I were stunned. I could not even grasp what had happened to me.’

– The Gambler, by Fyodor Dostoevsky

If you must play, decide upon three things at the start: the rules of the game, the stakes, and the quitting time.

– Chinese Proverb

Luck never gives; it only lends.

– Swedish Proverb

Depend on the rabbit’s foot if you will, but remember it didn’t work for the rabbit.

– R.E. Shay

Warp Speed or Turtle Speed?

A lot of statistics are published about the number of traders that are ’successful’ even though we don’t always receive their definition of successful.

Whether it is 70% or 95% of new traders that are said to lose all of their capital in the first 30-60 days, the real question is WHY??

In almost every case that I hear about when a person states that they quit trading because they lost all of their money in the first 30-60 days so they got discouraged and said that trading was not for them, these individuals attempted to move too fast when they started. They had acquired very little, if any, type of training and then jumped into a live account without any direction or plan.

Anyone who steps into the trading world (or any endeavor) without training to acquire the skills needed to approach the new program is setting themselves up for a very challenging situation and generally more failures than successes.

You can approach a new situation in life at warp speed and take the consequences or at the speed of a turtle and build your skills and experience so as to eventually acquire warp speed movement, but with turtle-like results, which is what the turtle always experienced when he raced the rabbit….. Success!!

UK And US Among Top 5 Weekly Sovereign Deriskers

The week’s biggest (sovereign) CDS movers have been released, and we have some new entrants in the most endangered species list. While by now nobody will be surprised that the UK is a consistent top 2 player (coming in this week with $319 million in net notional derisking, this making it the 8th week or so the country has made the top 3), only behind Italy and its $452 million in net notional, and just in front of last week’s #1 Brazil, the presence of the United States at #4 should be a little unsettling. It has been months since the US appeared in the top 5. And just like in the long gold case, the same types of existential questions once again arise when the interest in US CDS picks up: who gets to pay off your contracts in the case of an event of default? Elsewhere, the presence of Korea and Turkey (or Australia) in the top 10 should not come as too surprising. On the other end, short covering was violent in CDS of Spain, Hungary and Portugal – Europe’s newest lepers. Is the CDS community concerned the EU can actually pull out a rabbit out of the hat that actually works for once? Hardly. The top 10 reriskers also saw the inclusion of France and long-forgotten insolvent Greece.

Focus & Discipline

The stock market is always one step ahead of you. The sooner you accept this fact, the better for your trading results. It helps to think of the market like the rabbit on the rail at the greyhound racetrack. As an investor, you should never mistake yourself for the rabbit or else the market will have to humble you and remind you that you are just a dog. The best you can expect to be is a greyhound in close pursuit, tethered to this market rabbit by an invisible rope. The fact is that the market rabbit is not really in the race. You are racing your fellow greyhounds. They are the ones whom you want to stay out in front of.

The questions you should ask are twofold. The first question is how to stay tethered to this rabbit. The second question is how closely tethered you actually want to be. Candidly answering the first may result in your answering the second by default. So focus on the first question and then ask yourself this: what you are willing to do each day to maintain your connection to the market? Your personal daily circumstances as well as your emotional commitment and discipline should guide you to generate a reasonable answer. With those inputs, you can then decide whether you allocate 30 minutes a day or 30 minutes a week. (more…)

Warp Speed or Turtle Speed?

A lot of statistics are published about the number of traders that are ’successful’ even though we don’t always receive their definition of successful.

Whether it is 70% or 95% of new traders that are said to lose all of their capital in the first 30-60 days, the real question is WHY??

In almost every case that I hear about when a person states that they quit trading because they lost all of their money in the first 30-60 days so they got discouraged and said that trading was not for them, these individuals attempted to move too fast when they started. They had acquired very little, if any, type of training and then jumped into a live account without any direction or plan.

Anyone who steps into the trading world (or any endeavor) without training to acquire the skills needed to approach the new program is setting themselves up for a very challenging situation and generally more failures than successes.

You can approach a new situation in life at warp speed and take the consequences or at the speed of a turtle and build your skills and experience so as to eventually acquire warp speed movement, but with turtle-like results, which is what the turtle always experienced when he raced the rabbit….. Success!!