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2 Questions & Answers For Traders

  
  Education
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It is impossible to make money trading without an edge.

There are many ways to create an edge in the markets, but one this is true—it is very, very hard to do so. Most things that people say work in the market do not actually work. Treat claims of success and performance with healthy skepticism. I can tell you, based on my experience of nearly twenty years as a trader, most people who say they are making substantial profits are not. This is a very hard business.

Every edge we have is driven by an imbalance of buying and selling pressure.

The world divides into two large groups of traders and investors: fundamental traders who base decisions off of financial analysis, understanding of the industry and a company’s competitive position, growth rates, assessment of management, etc. Technical traders base decisions off of patterns in prices, volume or related data. From a technical perspective, every edge we have is generated by a disagreement between buyers and sellers. When they are in balance (equilibrium), market movements are random.

Links For Traders

  
Education, LINKS
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Close view of links in a chain
Interesting reads:

 

15 Crucial Points for Traders

  
Analysis, Education
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  1. You don’t have a crystal ball, and therefore accept you cannot predict a non-existent future. All you can do is can place your bets, control your risk, and then sit back and watch what happens.
  2. Price can only do one of three things: go up, go down, or go sideways. Ultimately, it is only when price moves that a profit or loss is generated. Therefore, as a trend follower it makes sense to focus your attention on price.
  3. Accept that you can only control the things you can control – namely when to enter or exit a trade, which markets to trade, how much equity to risk etc. All these elements should be part of your trading plan. Your entry parameters should be designed to identify when a trend may start developing, and your exit parameters when a trend has finished.
  4. Equally, accept that once you are in a trade you are no longer in control. You cannot control the market – to make money you have to let the trades play themselves out.
  5. Acknowledge that you can lose money even when all your criteria are met. You need to accept that you are playing an odds game, and there are no “can’t lose” trades out there.
  6. Being very conservative in the amount of equity you risk on each position means that you can have an emotional indifference towards each individual profit or loss generated.
  7. You MUST take full responsibility for your trading decisions, and adherence to your system rules.
  8. If things go against you do not blame anyone else, or any other external factor. You make all your trading decisions off your own back.
  9. Accept that luck (good or bad) may play a part on any one individual trade, however over the long run luck plays no part in your success or failure.
  10. Using a system with positive expectancy, allied to good risk control, and having control over your emotions will mean that, in the long term you will make money. However, there is a complete randomness about which trade will produce a profit or a loss. All you do is look for a set up which matches your own criteria, and then open the trade once the desired entry price level is reached.
  11. Once in a trade, your only concern is controlling your open risk, by cutting losses aggressively, By the same token, you need to let profits run. Providing the trend is still intact, then you should remain in the trade. Correct placing of your stops will keep the trade open until that happens.
  12. If done properly, trend following can take up very little of your normal day. Other than placing orders to open new trades, or to update stops on existing positions, there is very little to do in market hours. The process of identifying potential new setups can be done when the markets are closed, in the evening or at weekends.
  13. You only ever get taken out of a trade when price breaches your stop level. Do not close a position simply because price has moved a reasonable amount in your favour. Do not fear an open profit evaporating.
  14. Once a trade is closed, review the trade. Did you enter when you should have done? Was your initial stop correctly placed, and consequently were your position size and equity risk correct as per your trading plan? Was the trailing stop placed properly? If you can answer yes to all these questions, then it was a good trade, irrespective of whether you ended up with a profit or a loss.
  15. You know that, if you have a high level of trading efficiency, then it proves you are able to follow your trading rules, both emotionally and operationally. If the system you are using is proven to have a positive expectancy, then you will make money.

Diagnosing trading problems.

  
  Education
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1) Problems of training and experience – Many traders put their money at risk well before they have developed their own trading styles based on the identification of an objective edge in the marketplace. They are not emotionally prepared to handle risk and reward, and they are not sufficiently steeped in markets to separate randomness from meaningful market patterns. They are like beginning golfers who decide to enter a competitive tournament. Their frustrations are the result of lack of preparation and experience. The answer to these problems is to develop a training program that helps you develop confidence and competence in identifying meaningful market patterns and acting upon those. Online trading rooms, where you can observe experienced traders apply their skills, are helpful for this purpose.
2) Problems of changing markets – When traders have had consistent success, but suddenly lose money with consistency, a reasonable hypothesis is that markets have changed and what once was an edge no longer is profitable. This happened to many momentum traders after the late 1990s bull market, and it also has been the case for many scalpers after volatility came out of the stock indices. Here the challenge is to remake one’s trading, either by retaining the core strategy and seeking other markets with opportunity or by finding new strategies for one’s market. The answer to these problems is to reduce your trading size and re-enter a learning curve to become acquainted with new markets and methods. Figuring out how you learned the markets initially will help you identify steps you need to take to relearn new patterns. 
3) Situational emotional problems – These are emotional stresses that are recent in origin and that interfere with decision making and performance. Some of these stresses might pertain to trading, such as frustration after a slump or loss. Some might stem from one’s personal life, as in a relationship breakup or increased financial pressures due to a new home or child. Very often these problems create performance anxieties by putting the making of money ahead of the placing of good trades. The answer to these problems is to seek out short-term counseling to help you gain perspective on the problems and cope with them effectively.  (more…)

JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH ON STOCK MARKET MEMORY LOSS

  
  Education
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Where else but in the markets can short term memory loss be both beneficial and profitable?

John Kenneth Galbraith, an economist, says the financial markets are characterized by…

“…extreme brevity of the financial memory.  In consequence, financial disaster is quickly forgotten.  In further consequence, when the same or closely similar circumstances occur again, SOMETIMES IN A FEW YEARS, they are hailed by a new, often youthful, and always extremely self-confident generation as a brilliantly innovative discovery in the financial and larger economic world.  There can be few fields of human endeavor in which history counts for so little as in the world of finance.” [emphasis mine].

3 Quotes For Traders

  
  Education
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number-3Successful traders are always students of markets, always learning, and always adapting. They have periods of feast and famine, and they learn to keep themselves afloat during the lean times so that they can participate when things get better. In that context, learning when to not trade is a crucial component of trading success.

One of the most common mistakes traders make is that they address performance problems by thinking harder. Like the insomniac who stays awake longer and longer thinking about trying to get to sleep, the trader who analyzes and worries about performance loses that “zone” in which probability distributions present themselves implicitly.

People make money in markets two ways:  by investing and by trading.  Investing means generating a big picture view and riding out short term noise en route to seeing that view materialize.  Investors are top-down thinkers:  they’re analytical and their skill lies in putting pieces of research together to form a picture that others haven’t yet seen.  Traders are bottom-up thinkers:  they recognize patterns as they form and act on them quickly.  Where the investor thinks deeply about opportunity over time, the trader thinks broadly about what’s happening in markets at a given time

THE BEST OF JESSE LIVERMORE

  
  Education
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On emotions: 

The unsuccessful investor is best friends with hope, and hope skips along life’s path hand in hand with greed when it comes to the stock market. Once a stock trade is entered, hope springs to life. It is human nature to be positive, to hope for the best. Hope is an important survival technique. But hope, like its stock market cousin’s ignorance, greed, and fear, distorts reason. See the stock market only deals in facts, in reality, in reason, and the stock market is never wrong. Traders are wrong. Like the spinning of a roulette wheel, the little black ball tells the final outcome, not greed, fear or hope. The result is objective and final, with no appeal.
I believe that uncontrolled basic emotions are the true and deadly enemy of the speculator; that hope, fear, and greed are always present, sitting on the edge of the psyche, waiting on the sidelines, waiting to jump into the action, plow into the game.
Fear keeps you from making as much money as you ought to.

On herd behavior:

I believe that the public wants to be led, to be instructed, to be told what to do. They want reassurance. They will always move en masse, a mob, a herd, a group, because people want the safety of human company. They are afraid to stand alone because they want to be safely included within the herd, not to be the lone calf standing on the desolate, dangerous, wolf-patrolled prairie of
contrary opinion.

On cash:

First, do not be invested in the market all the time. There are many times when I have been completely in cash, especially when I was unsure of the direction of the market and waiting for a confirmation of the next move….Second, it is the change in the major trend that hurts most speculators. (more…)

Ten Anecdotal/Historical Book Ideas for Investors

  
  Education
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About a month or so ago, I finally got around to reading Marty Schwartz’s classic, Pit Bull, which I can best describe as a colorful autobiography that uses the 1980s options world as a palette for many amusing anecdotes that are expertly conveyed. The book was such a fun read that I went through the whole thing in no more than 2-3 days, cobbling together bits and pieces of ‘free time’ in order to do so.

 

Schwartz’s book is pure entertainment and touches only briefly on methodologies and techniques, yet I was able to pull quite a few investment-related nuggets from it in a short period of time, with the added benefit that the learning process was all fun and no pain. The process got me thinking that perhaps the fastest way to effortlessly bombard the brain with useful investment ideas are those easy reads that provide a personal historical window into the markets.

 I am contrasting this process with the process I went through in trying to read and digest the ideas in Alan Farley’s The Master Swing Trader, which, despite the many interesting ideas, is about as fun to trudge through as Hegel.

 With this in mind, I offer the following ten books as relatively effortless ways to cross-pollinate your investment thinking with that of some of the better minds in the field, both past and present.

 Roughly in order of how quick and easy they are to read:

  • How I Made $2,000,000 in the Stock Market (Nicolas Darvas) – You can probably read this book in a little over an hour. There are only a few salient ideas, but these are destined to stick with you long after you have read the book. I also found that the path Darvas took along the way to developing his system bears a strong resemblance to my own.
  • Pit Bull (Marty Schwartz) – A fast-moving and superbly written account of a champion options trader. A great companion for a cross-country plane trip.
  • Reminiscences of a Stock Operator (Edwin Lefevre) – This is on almost everyone’s reading list, so I will say little about it, other than to point out that it is chock full of insight, yet still reads like a novel.
  • A Journey Through Economic Time (John Kenneth Galbraith) – A very different book from the others on this list, this is certainly one of the easiest economics reads out there, yet the survey of the economic landscape from WWI to after the fall of the Berlin Wall will give the reader a lot to think about.
  • My Life as a Quant (Emanuel Derman) – Another physicist who writes extremely well, Derman provides a thoughtful accounting of his personal journey through the (then) unlikely intersection of theoretical physics, finance and risk.
  • Investment Biker (Jim Rogers) and Adventure Capitalist (Jim Rogers) – These two books are probably best read back to back, in chronological order, starting with the Investment Biker’s 1990-1992 world tour, then using the 1999-2001 Adventure Capitalist jaunt to see how the world had changed over the course of a decade. This is first-person global macro analysis at its best, though you may not have the stamina to do your own world tour in one sitting…
  • Market Wizards (Jack Schwager), The New Market Wizards (Jack Schwager), and Stock Market Wizards (Jack Schwager) – I never thought I’d willingly place the Schwager wizards trilogy at the bottom of any list, but they end up here because they are more densely packed than the other books. Like the Jim Rogers duo, these are best consumed in small bites, on an empty stomach, leaving ample time for proper chewing and digestion. Schwager’s interview style and editing is such that he is able to deliver an astonishing amount of information in an easy to read fashion. The best news of all is that while the books are a great place for beginners to start, they somehow manage to improve with repeated reading.

Losing is Part of the Game

  
  Education
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The great traders realize that losing is an intrinsic element in the game of trading. This attitude is linked to confidence. Because exceptional traders are confident that they will win over the long run, individual trades no longer seem horrible; they simply appear inevitable.

There is no more certain recipe for losing than having a fear of losing. If you cant stand taking losses, you will either end up taking large losses or missing great trading opportunities – either flaw is sufficient to sink any chance for success.

Thoughts on Deception

  
  Education
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Here are some thoughts on deception in the stock market:

deception1. It is a known signal that when the broker gets an odd number of shares to buy or sell, it is the last part of the order. Why not start with the odd number instead?

2. So as not to signal panic, always cover the short going against you with a limit order, not a market order.

3. Don’t always ask why xyz stock is up ( or down) just because the position is going against you.

4. When you meet the management of the stock you’re short, play extra nice to charm them and commend them on all their accomplishments.

5. Pretend you do not know anything about the stock when speaking to the analyst. This way you will find out what he/she really knows about the company.

6. Emphasize your losses and hide your winnings when talking to people outside your firm.

7. When meeting your broker tell him or her that you haven’t been active in his or her region lately but that you’re about to enter it shortly. Then continue to use dma.

8. Call the analysts with the opposite recommendation of your position first to find out their story.

 

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