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30 One Liner For Traders -Must Read

  
  Education
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1. Buying a weak stock is like betting on a slow horse. It is retarded.

2. Stocks are only cheap if they are going higher after you buy them

 3. Never trust a person more than the market. People lie, the market does not.

4. Controlling losers is a must; let your winners run out of control.

5. Simplicity in trading demonstrates wisdom. Complexity is the sign of inexperience.

6. Have loyalty to your family, your dog, your team. Have no loyalty to your stocks.

7. Emotional traders want to give the disciplined their money.

8. Trends have counter trends to shake the weak hands out of the market

. 9. The market is usually efficient and can not be beat. Exploit inefficiencies.

10. To beat the market, you must have an edge. (more…)

10 Quotes from the Book “Hedge Fund Market Wizards”

  
  Education
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  1. All markets look liquid during the bubble (massive uptrend), but it’s the liquidity after the bubble ends that matters.

  2. Markets tend to over discount the uncertainty related to identified risks. Conversely, markets tend to under discount risks that have not yet been expressly identified. Whenever the market is pointing at something and saying this is a risk to be concerned about, in my experience, most of the time, the risk ends up being not as bad as the market anticipated.

  3. Traders focus almost entirely on where to enter a trade. In reality, the entry size is often more important than the entry price because if the size is too large, a trader will be more likely to exit a good trade on a meaningless adverse price move. The larger the position, the greater the danger that trading decisions will be driven by fear rather than by judgment and experience.

  4. Virtually all traders experience periods when they are out of sync with the markets. When you are in a losing streak, you can’t turn the situation around by trying harder. When trading is going badly, Clark’s advice is to get out of everything and take a holiday. Liquidating positions will allow you to regain objectivity.

  5. Staring at the screen all day is counterproductive. He believes that watching every tick will lead to both selling good positions prematurely and overtrading. He advises traders to find something else (preferably productive) to occupy part of their time to avoid the pitfalls of watching the market too closely.

  6. When markets are trending up strongly, and there is bad news, the bad news counts for nothing. But if there is a break that reminds people what it is like to lose money in equities, then suddenly the buying is not mindless anymore. People start looking at the fundamentals, and in this case, I knew the fundamentals were very ugly indeed.

  7. If you don’t understand why you are in a trade, you won’t understand when it is the right time to sell, which means you will only sell when the price action scares you. Most of the time when price action scares you, it is a buying opportunity, not a sell indicator.

  8. Normally, I let winners run and cut losers. In 2009, however, as a result of the posttraumatic effects of going through the September 2008 to February 2009 period—talking to clients who are going out of business and seeing 50 percent of your fund redeemed is all very wearing—I got into the habit of snatching quick 10 to 15 percent profits in individual positions. Most of these positions then went up another 35 to 40 percent. I consider my pattern of taking quick profits in 2009 a dreadful error that I think came about because I had lost a degree of confidence due to experiencing my first down year in 2008.

  9. As an equity trader, I learned the short-selling lessons relatively early. There is no high for a concept stock. It is always better to be long before they have already moved a lot than to try to figure out where to go short.

  10. Now that you have switched from net long to net short, what would get you long again? – Buying. If all of a sudden stocks stopped going down on bad news that would be a positive sign.

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

  
Analysis, Education
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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.

10 Wall Street Pick-up Lines to Avoid

  
  Education
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“If your proposed marriage contract has 47 pages, I suggest you not enter.”

This quote by Charles Munger hammers home the role of trust in an investment relationship.Michael Kitces of Nerds Eye View wrote a post entitled “What is the philosophy of your financial planning firm? It deals with what an advisor doesn’t believe in and what he/she wouldn’t recommend to clients. Engaging an advisor whose philosophy is based on trust, and who chooses to be a fiduciary for clients has many benefits for the average investor. Unfortunately, most financial advisors are not fee-only RIAs. Those who are only looking to have a “suitable relationship” with their customers may structure their business philosophy in a different manner. Many advisory firms have embraced a culture of sales and monthly quotas. Clearly that is a philosophy, but it is not necessarily a good one for the end user. If you find yourself surrounded by financial types using any of these types of pitches, be very afraid.

1. “Its like a CD.”

2. “Buying on margin will greatly increase your returns.”

3. “This fund did really well last year.”

4. “As long as the music is playing, you have to get up and dance.”

5. “Do you want the confirmation sent to your office or your mansion?”

6. “I have a very strong work ethic. The problem was my ethics in work.”

7. “I’ve got the guts to die. What I want to know is have you got the guts to live?”

8. “Greed is good.”

9. “Don’t pitch the b*tch.”

10. “Screw the credit derivative desk, I don’t understand half the sh*t they do anyway.” (more…)

5 Mistakes -Traders Always Do

  
  Education
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Over trading

Most new traders think that they must always be long or short the market. They lose a lot of money during certain market stages like corrections, high volatility, or bear markets. Sometimes the best position is cash. Sometimes the best trade is no trade. Sometimes their is no signal just chaos. Profitable trading is taking signals for trades that have good odds for success and the right risk/reward ratio for your win rate expectations. Cash is a position in itself. The less I trade the more money I make.

Ignorant of their own ignorance

The more you don’t know, the more sure you are that you know everything. New traders many times do not understand the danger of big losses. They also do not understand the mental and emotional strain of having on trades with real money in real time. A lot of hubris and arrogance is born out of not being humbled by the markets. Looking at historical charts and past history is nothing like holding positions in real time.With skin in the game and not being able to see the hard right edge of the chart as it unfolds is a different experience than theories, back tests, and reading trading books. The real traders I know that have a ton of experience are humble and know that they don’t know the future. (more…)

Traders -3 Points U All Must Read

  
  Education
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Valuation alone is insufficient reason to get short a stock — History teaches us that cheap stocks can get cheaper, dear stocks can get more expensive

ALWAYS work with a pre-determined loss – either a physical or mental stop loss — Never leave yourself open to infinite losses

Fundamentals tell you WHY to short something, not WHEN to short it. ALWAYS have some technical confirmation before shorting. Make a short selling wish list, then WAIT for technical confirmation.

Is The Market Always Right?

  
  Education
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George Soros likes to joke that market has predicted seven of the past two recessions. And he is right. Since the market is forward looking, it will sometimes discount fundamentals that will never become a reality.

Prices reflect people’s expectations about the future, mostly about the near-term future. To say that the market is always right means to assume that people’s expectations about the future always come true. We all know that this is not the case. No one has a crystal ball. People are often wrong.

Is the market always right?

No, but this does not stop people who follow price trends to make a lot of money. The market could remain “wrong” (irrational) for a very long period of time and even become “wronger”. (more…)

What is a ‘Zero-Sum Game’?

  
  Education
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Zero-sum games are the total opposite of win-win situations – such as an agreement that creates value between two counter-parties – or lose-lose situations, like war and mutually destructive relationships for instance. In real life, however, things are not always so clear-cut, and winners and losers are often difficult to quantify. New traders get confused and do not understand that in trading, profits come from the people on the other side of your trade that are making the wrong decision. The reason that trading is difficult is because you have to out smart someone to get their money, how you do this is what gives you your edge if you are profitable. In all financial markets buyers and sellers are always equal and the time frame in which they are trading determines if their decision was the right or wrong one at the time of their trade. Your entry is someone else’s exit and your losses are in some one else’s account as profits.

A zero-sum game is a situation where one person’s gain is always equivalent to another person’s loss, so the total wealth for the players and participants in the game is always a net change of  zero as a whole.  The financial contract markets of futures and options are a zero-sum game with several million players. Zero-sum games are found in game theory, but are less common than non-zero sum games. Poker and gambling are popular examples of what a zero-sum game is since the sum of the amounts won by some players equals the combined losses of the others. The money at a poker table at the start of the game does not grow it is just redistributed to the winners from the losers by the end of the game. All of the casino’s profits come from the gambler’s losses and all the gamblers profits are taken from the casino. Games like chess and tennis also fit this model becasue there is one winner and one loser they are always equal. In the financial markets, option contracts and future contracts are examples of zero-sum games, excluding transaction costs, for every long contract their is someone short the same contract. Some one has to sell a contract to create open interest and someone has to buy it, there has to be a winner and a loser at all times, one long and one short. Brokers and market makers disrupt the perfect balance of winners and losers by taking commissions or profiting from the bid/ask spreads. But, for every person who profits on a contract’s value going in their direction, there is a counter-party who loses who is on the other side. (more…)

Hedge Fund Market Wizards – Joe Vidich

  
  Education
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A critical distinction of all great investing books is that every time you re-read them, you find insights that you somehow missed the previous times. Recently I had the opportunity to re-read some of the chapters in Hedge Fund Market Wizards. The section about equity traders is my favorite one, so I delved into it again. In this post, I am featuring some interesting observations from Jack Schwager’s conversation with Joe Vidich:

1. Position sizing is a great way to manage risk

The larger the position, the greater the danger that trading decisions will be driven by fear rather than by judgment and experience.

If you are diversified enough, then no single trade is particularly painful. The critical risk controls are being diversified and cutting your exposure when you don’t understand what the markets are doing and why you are wrong.

It is really important to manage your emotional attachment to losses and gains. You want to limit your size in any position so that fear does not become the prevailing instinct guiding your judgment. Everyone will have a different level. It also depends on what kind of stock it is. A 10 percent position might be perfectly okay for a large-cap stock, while a 3 percent position in a highflying mid-cap stock, which has frequent 30 percent swings, might be far too risky.

2. Charts are extremely important.

One of the best patterns is when a stock goes sideways for a long time in a narrow range and then has a sudden, sharp up move on large volume. That type of price action is a wake-up call that something is probably going on, and you need to look at it. Also, sometimes whatever is going on with that stock will also have implications for other stocks in the same sector. It can be an important clue. (more…)

Warren Buffett Warns Amateur Investors Against This Common Mistake

  
  Education
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Today’s Smart Investor tip comes from billionaire investor Warren Buffett, who outlined the biggest mistakes amateur investors make for Adam Shell at USA Today.

The Oracle of Omaha warns investors against an incredibly common mistake: You shouldn’t try to time the market. He says it’s a mistake to predict or listen to others who predict the short-term movement of stocks. By the same token, he says you shouldn’t try to flip stocks like high-frequency traders do.

Instead, Buffett says the best thing the average investor can do is buy an index fund over time. That’s it. From USA Today: (more…)

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