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Common Mistakes for losing Money

  
  Education
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Trading is an evolutionary process. Nobody can wake up being a Master Trader. Unfortunately there is no book or magic trick that can turn you into the highly profitable trader. Although the belief and the hope to obtain those skills instantly is still in place.

The statistics say that only the ones with the self-dedication and discipline succeed in this business.

The most common mistakes leading to losses:

-Trading against the market;

-No trade potential;

-No serious buyers or sellers in the stock;

-Wide stop-loss;

-Fear of loss.

Traders should stay calm during the trading, this helps to observe and analyze the situation on the market much better, see some small details and make a competent decision.

Panic, stress or fear, always lead to mistakes.

One of the serious problems in trading is rush and mania to be present on the market all the times, opening positions when there is no potential for a trade or where the market is either flat or going the other direction.

Tips to resolve the mistakes:

1. Always look at the market. If there is no clear picture of the market’s behavior, don’t risk your money.

2. Always look at a trade potential. If you look at the daily charts and see that the daily bars are just 20 cents long, then look for other stocks, where the potential is at least 40 cents.

3. Always look either at the Open Book or Market Maker window and Tape. If you don’t see any order flow on the Tape or the order sizes are small (less than a 1000 shares), then don’t enter the trade.

4. Always know where you are going to place you stop-loss order. If it is more than 10 cents away from your entry point, don’t enter the trade.

5. If you’re just not sure, or if the situation is uncertain, don’t enter the trade.

Following these tips requires some work and changes to our habits. It is not easy at all! We always hear sayings that the trader should be disciplined. What it actually means is changing your old habits and training yourself to have new ones. It is not comfortable, but it brings positive results, which will be noticeable on your month-end P/L report.

A Bad Teacher

  
  Education
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The World’s Worst Teacher

The market often rewards bad behavior. You exit a stock because your stop is hit. You are okay with this because you followed your plan. The market then immediately reverses. You begin to think, “If only I stayed with the position.” The next time the market goes against you, you decide you are not going to get tricked again. This time though, the market does not reverse and what started out as a small manageable loss is now huge.

The market will give you loss after loss forcing you to abandon a methodology right before it takes off without you. On the flip side, the market will lull you into a false sense of confidence. You trade larger and larger, taking on excessive risk. You print money until your risks become so excessive that one or two bad trades wipe you out.

Learn from the market, but realize that sometimes it can be a lousy instructor.

The Graham Number

  
  Education
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Ever heard of the Graham Number? This was a formula developed by Ben Graham, the father of securities analysis, to determine the fair value for a stock.
The Graham Number is:

The square root of [earnings-per-share * book-value-per-share * 22.5]

(Take note that earning-per-share divided by book-value-per-share is our good friend return on equity.)

8 Stock Market Sayings That Should Be Questioned

  
  Education
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8) There is a lot of cash on the sidelines.

There is always a lot of cash on the sidelines and that never changes. The buyer of a stock, thus taking cash off the sidelines, gives it to the seller who puts it back on the sidelines.

7) There are more buyers than sellers (or vice versa).

Maybe technically there are more bodies buying or selling than the other side but the number of shares traded has to be exactly the same as for every share bought is a share sold. It’s the aggressiveness of one side or the other that matters.

6) Stocks are attractive because they aren’t quite as overpriced as bonds.

If bonds are artificially priced, shouldn’t stocks be? Overpriced though can of course remain overpriced.

5) The higher stocks go the more attractive and less risky they are.

For long term investors, the more one pays in price today with respect to valuation, the less return they should expect in the future.

4) Stocks aren’t expensive because they are still cheaper than the valuations seen in March 2000.

Really?

3) There is no alternative.

In bull markets there is always no alternative to common stocks. In bear markets, there are always alternatives.

2) We’re going to get a rotation into stocks and out of bonds.

For every portfolio rotating out of bonds has to see someone rotating in and that buyer of stock has someone rotating out. Again, it’s the aggressiveness of the moves that matter.

1) The selloff in stocks was profit taking.

Does anyone refer to a rally as profit seeking?

Risk is the Possibility of Loss

  
  Education
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“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.”

Simple?

Worries of Day Traders

  
  Education
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Here is what traders choose to worry about (among others I am sure).  These so-called worries are usually in the form of a question and revolve around losing money:

1.  Will this trade make money?

2.  Will this trade hit a profit target?

3.  Will this trade reverse quickly against me?

4.  Will my gain turn into a loss?

5.  Will unknown news affect my trade?

6.  What if I have not done enough homework?

7.  What if my strategy is not sound?

8.  Will Cramer disagree (I had to throw this one in)?

9.  What if I get out too soon?

10.  Did I buy the right stock?

11.  What if I miss a potential move?

Markets Will Be Markets

  
  Education
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The stock market is bipolar creature, driven by sentiment and irrational expectations. One day, it is an ingenious forward-looking mechanism that anticipates and discounts future events beautifully. Another day, it is a stubborn schizophrenic that can’t see further than its nose.

Markets constantly overreact to both, identified risks and opportunities. It is in the nature of financial markets to exaggerate, to magnify. This is why they are not always discounting the future. Sometimes, they are correcting previously incorrect view. Sometimes, they just go bonkers and send prices to levels that cannot possibly be justified by any future scenario. Boys will be boys. Markets will be markets. They’ll fluctuate violently, up and down and to levels that will seem incomprehensible to many. Indexing, robo-advising and social media won’t change that. The Internet might have made people smarter; but it hasn’t made financial markets more efficient. You could complain and whine about financial markets’ irrationality or you could find a way to take advantage of it. Or don’t. It’s your choice.

If you understand people’s incentives, you are very likely to predict correctly their future behavior and sometimes even influence it. Most incentives have expiration date. What is important today, might not be as important tomorrow. This applies perfectly to life, but not always in financial markets that live in their own world. Incentives require the existence of rationality. We have already made the point that more often than not, markets are not rational, but emotional, at least in a short-term perspective. As Howard Marks eloquently puts it: (more…)

25-One Liners for Traders (Read and Understand ) -Anirudh Sethi

  
Analysis, Education
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  1.  If you need to spend your money in a relatively short period of time it doesn’t belong in the stock market.
  2.  If you want to earn higher returns you’re going to have to take more risk.
  3.  If you want more stability you’re going to have to accept lower returns.
  4.  The stock market goes up and down.
  5.  If you want to hedge against stock market risk the easiest thing to do is hold more cash.
  6.  Risk can change shape or form but it never really goes away.
  7.  No Trader is right all the time.
  8.  No  Trading strategy can outperform at all times.
  9.  Almost any Trader can outperform for a short period of time.
  10.  Size is the enemy of outperformance.
  11.  Brilliance doesn’t always translate into better Trading results.
  12.  “I don’t know” is almost always the correct answer when someone asks you what’s going to happen in the markets.
  13.  Watching your friends get rich makes it difficult to stick with a sound Trading plan.
  14.  Day trading is hard.
  15.  Outperforming the market is hard (but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible).
  16.  There is no signal known to man that can consistently get you out right before the market falls and get you back in right before it rises again.
  17.  Most backtests work better on a spreadsheet than in the real world because of competition, taxes, transaction costs and the fact that you can’t backtest your emotions.
  18.  It’s almost impossible to tell if you’re being disciplined or irrational by holding on when your investment strategy is underperforming.
  19.  Reasonable investment advice doesn’t really change all that much but most of the time people don’t want to hear reasonable investment advice.
  20.  Successful  Trading is more about behavior and temperament than IQ or education.
  21.  Don’t be surprised when we have bear markets or recessions. Everything is cyclical.
  22.  You are not George Soros or Jesse Livermore
  23.  The market doesn’t care how you feel about a stock or what price you paid for it.
  24.  The market doesn’t owe you high returns just because you need them.
  25.  Predicting the future is hard.

Paul Tudor Jones: The Secret To Successful Trading

  
  Education
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“The secret to being successful from a trading perspective is to have an indefatigable and an undying and unquenchable thirst for information and knowledge. Because I think there are certain situations where you can absolutely understand what motivates every buyer and seller and have a pretty good picture of what’s going to happen. And it just requires an enormous amount of grunt work and dedication to finding all possible bits of information.

You pick an instrument and there’s whole variety of benchmarks, things that you look at when trading a particular instrument whether it’s a stock or a commodity or a bond. There’s a fundamental information set that you acquire with regard to each particular asset class and then you overlay a whole host of technical indicators and that’s how you make a decision. It doesn’t make any difference whether it’s pork bellies or Yahoo. At the end of the day, it’s all the same. You need to understand what factors you need to have at your disposal to develop a core competency to make a legitimate investment decision in that particular asset class. And then at the end of the day, the most important thing is how good are you at risk control. 90% of any great trader is going to be the risk control.”

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