- Expect long hours of study and research. Assume you will lose money in the beginning.
- A person interested in becoming a trader must have the mindset of an entrepreneur. Risk, irregular income, and spending money to make money, are all part of the business.
- You must trade like a business person and not a gambler. Gamblers need not apply; go to Vegas instead.
- Risk management will be your priority. Too much risk exposure will eventually lead you to be an unemployed trader with no trading capital.
- You are your own human resource department. Be prepared to manage your own greed and fear.
- To keep your morale up, you must keep all your losses small, and allow your winning trades to be as large as possible.
- Jesse Livermore’s quote for potential candidates: “The game of speculation is the most uniformly fascinating game in the world. But it is not a game for the stupid, the mentally lazy, the person of inferior emotional balance, or the get-rich-quick adventurer. They will die poor.”
Archives of “risk management” tag
rssFive qualities for Successful Traders
- 1)Capacity for Prudent Risk-taking.The young successful trader is not afraid to go after markets aggressively when the opportunity presents itself.
- 2)Capacity for Rule Governance. The young successful trader has the self-control to follow rules in the heat of battle, such as rules of position sizing and risk management.
- 3)Capacity for Sustained Effort.The trader uses productive time to do research, preparation, work on himself, outside of market hours.
- 4)Capacity for Emotional Resilience. All young traders will lose money early in their development and experience multiple frustrations. The successful ones will not lose self-confidence and motivation in the face of loss and frustrations.
5)Capacity for Sound reasoning. The successful young trader exhibits an ability to synthesize data and generate market and trading scenarios.
Risk, Reward and Uncertainty
“From an early age, we are all conditioned by our families, our schools, and virtually every other shaping force in our society to avoid risk. To take risks is inadvisable; to play it safe is the counsel we are accustomed both to receiving and to passing on. In the conventional wisdom, risk is asymmetrical: it has only one side, the bad side. In my experience—and all I presume to offer you today is observations drawn on my own experience, which is hardly the wisdom of the ages—in my experience, this conventional view of risk is shortsighted and often simply mistaken. My first observation is that successful people understand that risk, properly conceived, is often highly productive rather than something to avoid. They appreciate that risk is an advantage to be used rather than a pitfall to be skirted. Such people understand that taking calculated risks is quite different from being rash. This view of risk is not only unorthodox, it is paradoxical—the first of several paradoxes which I’m going to present to you today. This one might be encapsulated as follows: Playing it safe is dangerous. Far more often than you would realize, the real risk in life turns out to be the refusal to take a risk.”
Life is fraught with risk. There is no getting away from it. However we try to control the direction of our lives, there are times when we fail. Therefore, we might as well accept that life is a game of chance. If life is a game of chance, to one degree or another, we must be comfortable with assessing odds in the face of risk.
“Risk is the Possibility of Loss”
“Risk is the possibility of loss. That is, if we own some stock, and there is a possibility of a price decline, we are at risk. The stock is not the risk, nor is the loss the risk. The possibility of loss is the risk. As long as we own the stock, we are at risk. The only way to control the risk is to buy or sell stock. In the matter of owning stocks, and aiming for profit, risk is fundamentally unavoidable and the best we can do is to manage the risk. To manage is to direct and control. Risk management is to direct and control the possibility of loss. The activities of a risk manager are to measure risk and to increase and decrease risk by buying and selling stock.”
Accept These 7 Things -If U Are A Trader
If you truly are serious about being a trader then there are seven things that you will have to accept.
You will have to accept that over the long term at best only 60% of your trades will be winners. It will be much less with some strategies.
Accept that the key to being a successful trader is having big wins and small losses, not big bets paying off. Big bets can lead quickly to you being out of the game after a string of losses.
Accept that the best traders are also the best risk managers, even the best traders do not have crystal balls so they ALWAYS manage their capital at risk on EVERY trade.
If you want to be a better trader then you need to accept that trading smaller and risking less is a key to your success. Risking 1% to 2% of your capital on any single trade is the first step to winning at trading. Use stops and position sizing to limit your losses and get out when your losses grow to these levels.
You must accept that you will have 10 trading losses in a row a few times each year. The question is what your account will look like when they happen.
You have to accept that you will be wrong, a lot. The sooner you accept you are wrong and change your mind the better off you will be.
If you really want to be a trader then you are going to have to accept the fact that trading is not easy money. It is a profession like any other and requires much work and effort and even years to become proficient. Expect to work for free and pay tuition to the markets through losses until you learn to trade consistently and profitably.
17 One Liners for Traders
Trade the market, not the money
• Always trade value, never trade price
• The answer to the question, “What’s the trend?” is the question, “What’s your timeframe?”
• Never allow a statistically significant unrealized gain to turn into a statistically significant realized loss (ATR)
• Don’t tug at green shoots
• When there’s nothing to do, do nothing
• Stop adjustments can only be used to reduce risk, not increase it.
• There are only two kinds of losses: big losses and small losses, given these choices – always choose small losses.
• Don’t Anticipate, Just Participate
• Buy the strongest, sell the weakest (RSI)
• Sideways markets eventually resolve themselves into trending markets and vice versa
• Stagger entries & exits – Regret Minimization techniques
• Look for low risk, high reward, high probability setups
• Correlations are for defense, not offense
• Drawdowns are for underleveraged trading and research
• Develop systems based on the kinds of “pain” (weaknesses) endured when they aren’t working or you’ll abandon them during drawdowns.
• Be disciplined in risk management & flexible in perceiving market behavior
Ed Seykota’s 6 Rules from the Whipsaw Song
1. Do not be overly concerned about whipsaws a good trend pays for them all.
A whipsaw is when you enter a position but get stopped out quickly when the market reverses opposite to your position. If you are a trend trader this may happen many times in a row in a range bound market. This can be very frustrating to a trader and it may cause them to completely change their method. The fact is that one really good trend will pay for all of these whipsaws as long as you keep your losses small, and if you change your system you lose the benefit of that big trend.
To avoid whipsaw losses, stop trading. -Ed Seykota
2. When you catch a Trend, ride it to the end.
Your system must be able to take a position in a trending market, but then also be able to ride that trend to the end. Most new traders will jump out of trades before they are finished trending because they are scared the market has gone too far and will take back their paper profits. Let a trailing stop take you out of a trade when the trend is over, and only exit once you are stopped out.
“The trend is your friend except at the end where it bends.” -Ed Seykota (more…)
Risk Management for Traders
- Your first loss is the best loss.
- Let winning positions run and cut losing positions short. The market is always right.
- I finally understand why Kirk always says risk management is the most important thing.
- Always know your exit. Before any trade is made, you must always identify your stop beforehand and then follow it without hesitation if it triggers.
- Patterns and trends matter more than I thought…paying attention to them can provide better entry/exit points.
- Patterns and measured moves are key but you have to wait until a pattern is triggered and the trigger holds.
- Being patient and waiting for confirmation instead of trying to anticipate market movements.
- Risk is greatest when everyone who wants to buy has already done so – Apple is the latest example!
- Position sizing is my first and last line of defense.
- Leverage is for losers.
Trading Wisdom – Larry Hite
Larry Hite – Turned a $2 million managed account into $800 million in 8 years.
Throughout my financial career, I have continually witnessed examples of other people that I have known being ruined by a failure to respect risk. If you don’t take a hard look at risk, it will take you. If you argue with the market, you will lose. It is incredible how rich you can get by not being perfect. Never risk more than 1% of your total equity in any one trade. By risking 1%, I am indifferent to any individual trade. Keeping your risk small and constant is absolutely critical. I have two basic rules about winning in trading as well as in life:
- If you don’t bet, you can’t win.
- If you lose all your chips, you can’t bet. Frankly, I don’t see markets. I see risks, rewards, and money.