The capacity for rigorous thought; the flexibility and resilience to adapt to changing circumstances; the love of disciplined risk-taking; the hungry intellect: perhaps successful speculators already display those qualities in other life domains and then learn to apply them to markets.
You’ll notice that nothing is profound among the 8. You likely have heard some version of each of them before. But when the voices get loud and volatility picks up, it’s nice to have a reminder in what’s important and why we do what we do.
“The most risk is always going to be in the areas that had the biggest moves up already, and everybody’s talking about ‘em, and then you get sucked in at the most inopportune time — and then you don’t know what hit you.
Your job is to make sure it never happens to you — if you miss something, it’s OK! What’s not OK is you jumping on top of the pile, after the run, and burying yourself.”
Money management keeps them in the game of trading. It is a game and there are winners and losers. The vast majority are losers. More than 90%! Once traders realize they need an exact plan…traders retool their approach, once they analyzed their trading system with money management concepts. Money management keeps traders …trading…
Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future performance. The risk of loss in trading futures contracts, commodity options or forex can be substantial, and therefore investors should understand the risks involved in taking leveraged positions and must assume responsibility for the risks associated with such investments and for their results. You should carefully consider whether such trading is suitable for you in light of your circumstances and financial resources.
Everyone knows what they /SHOULD/ do… and everyone has trouble doing it. Why? Lots of reasons –
Market ambiguity compels you to make impulsive judgments … . Not enough sleep… . I can go on and on and on… and talk to you about your emotional architectures and using emotion analytics to better manage your risk as well as better deduce opportunity.
But here is a little “emotion analytics” trick –
Ask yourself – as you are contemplating entering or exiting a position “How will I feel if…. ?” … and then play out the scenarios, #1) the trade continues in my direction, #2) it pulls back and takes away some of my money, #3) it ….
By putting yourself into your potential future emotional contexts, you can make better “risk” judgments in the here and now.
(And oh yes, I know to some of you this sounds absurd…that is OK. Everyone that I have taught to do it, makes more money than when they just tried to use so-called discipline to intellectually overpower their desires to get in or out or… in and out … or ….)
1) Becoming Overly Focused on P/L During Trading – Watching your profits or losses tick up and down during a trade; becoming anxious about P/L and letting P/L, not a trading plan, dictate when you get out of a trade. It’s a recipe for performance anxiety. By focusing on process goals rather than P/L, you can stay grounded in good trading practices and minimize performance stresses.
2) Trading Much Larger After a Series of Winning Trades – It is common that traders become overconfident after a series of wins and decide to increase their risk by a factor of two or more. This often leads to large losing trades that wipe out much of the profit, generating frustation and discouragement. Just as it doesn’t make sense to plow into a trade after a large move has already occurred, it doesn’t make sense to plow into risk after a series of profitable trades.
3) Failing to Learn From Losing Trades – Traders often want to put losses behind them and not dwell on negatives. The downside is that they don’t learn from their losses and thus miss opportunities to understand what’s happening in markets and what they might be doing wrong. This is especially important following a series of losing trades: either you’re not seeing the markets well, or you’re not acting well on your perceptions. Both scenarios offer learning opportunities that can help generate profits down the line.
It’s common to think of trading as a stressful occupation, but much of the stress is self-generated. By staying focused on “best practices” in trading, we minimize fear and frustration and build confidence in our development.
In a narrow market,when prices are not getting anywhere to speak of but move within a narrow range, there is no sense in trying to anticipate what the next big movement is going to be up or down. The thing to do is to watch the market, read the tape to determine the limits of the get-nowhere prices, and make up your mind that you will not take an interest until the price breaks through the limit in either direction. A speculator must concern himself with making money out of the market and not with insisting that the tape must agree with him. Never argue with it or ask it for reasons or explanations. Stock-market post-mortems don’t pay dividends.
Do you wish to gamble blindly in the hope of getting a great big profit or do you wish to speculate intelligently and get a smaller but much more probable profit?
“The most risk is always going to be in the areas that had the biggest moves up already, and everybody’s talking about ‘em, and then you get sucked in at the most inopportune time — and then you don’t know what hit you.