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Trading Nuggets

  
  Education
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Price — The Truth, The Light, The Way

  • Work to understand price
  • Price does not move in a straight line
  • Big moves take time
  • Volatility is your friend and helps to compress time
  • Although volatility is your pal, it can cut both ways
  • If a stock moves 30% a day, then you can’t trade with a 5% stop
  • Don’t expect a volatile stock to stop behaving as it has been and only move in your favor just because you’re now in it. Unless you’re Bill Clinton, what is, IS.

Random Thoughts:

  • Observe but be slow to shift gears — we are trend followers, not predictors
  • It’s the market’s “job” to shake you out
    • The market will do what it has to do to create the most pain (for the most people)
    • The market will often do the obvious in the most un-obvious manner
  • Err on the side of the longer-term trend
    • DO wait for entries
    • DO use protective stops
    • DO trail and scale as offered

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.

5 Reasons Traders Lose Money

  
  Education
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  1. Your method or system doesn’t work. This is a big one, and one of the hardest to fix. If you’re buying random stocks based on chatroom tips, that won’t work. If you’re buying based on what you think about the news, that won’t work. If you’re using some untested technical pattern, that won’t work. The only way you can build enduring success is to have a system that is your own and in which you fully understand the edge and variability of the system results. The only way (that I know) to do this is either to be taught such a system in enough detail that you own it, or do develop your own. Finding a system that works is not easy. I think most traders who fail probably failed because they were doing something that didn’t work and couldn’t work.
  2. You are impatient and take impulse trades. So, you have a system and it works, but if you don’t have the patience to wait for setups, then you essentially don’t have a system at all! Too many traders force trades or execute trades out of boredom. Don’t do this—it will destroy whatever edge you have in your system.
  3. You take trades on the wrong size. Any trading methodology depends on the balance of a large number of winners and losers. If you are randomly doing some trades bigger and some smaller, you can easily wipe out that edge. (On the other hand, some traders do make good, disciplined use of varying position sizes, but this is also a well-developed and tested part of their methodology.) Be consistent and disciplined in everything you do; that’s why the market pays you.
  4. You ignore stops. What do you do when a trade hits your stop? You get out. End of story. If you can’t develop this one skill, you can’t be a trader. You cannot afford, even once, to ignore your stop. Maybe the trade will work out this one time; maybe your prayers will be heard and the bad loss will turn around and become a winner? Ok, great, now what? Now you’ve just had a serious break of discipline and have had a bad learning experience as well because you got paid to do something wrong! The ongoing impact of a mistake like this and the false learning will ripple through your trading career for months or years. Don’t do this—respect your stops.
  5. You get out of winning trades without any reason. I think this is one of the great, underappreciated problems of learning to trade. Many people can develop the discipline to respect their stops, but then cave under the pressure of a winning trade. The thought of a winning trade reversing and giving back profit, the pressure of knowing the open winning trade would cover many losing trades, or the simple greed of wanting to ring the cash register—these can be overwhelming psychological pressures. It’s just as important to manage your winners with discipline, and that your trading plan has clear rules for when and how you get out of winning trades as well as losers.

The solution to most of these problems is not exciting: have a plan that works and execute that plan with discipline. Of course, there’s a lot more we can do at each step, but being aware of these errors will help protect against some of the worst, and most avoidable, mistakes that wait for the developing trader.

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