- It is hard to understand if it is an aberration or the new rule. Many people go down with the ship or by the time they find the advantage it disappears.
- Risk always catches up with you. Not realizing risk does not mean the absence of risk.
- Career traders look for things they can repeatable do. Learning is where the pressure comes from. Learning is does not factor if you are relying on Pavlovian responses.
- Not every trade is the same. You can never learn how to trade larger risking the same dollar amount. The dollar amount you are down is more important of a factor in position size than market conditions.
- All “risk free” trading is backward looking. It is relying strictly on what happened in the past and those successes. If the regulatory bodies got one thing right it is the standard disclaimer that most people ignore, “Past results are no indication of future performance”.
Archives of “successes” tag
rssLearning through Failure
Very often we learn more from our failures than from our successes. The path to success travels inevitably through certain failures.
A look at successful traders and entrepreneurs shows that they have been able to survive failure as many times as they have had to. They use failure as feedback. They learn from it and make changes and go on. Many super traders have experienced crushing loss in their early trading years. All of them picked themselves up, made adjustments, and with the sure belief that they could make it back through better trading, did just that.
Successful traders are able to ride through periods of drawdown easily because they believe the drawdown to be only temporary. They distinguish the difference between simple losses and loss that comes from mistakes. Their confidence in their methods and their ability and their vision of what the markets can provide reassures them about their future success. Any period of loss is viewed as transitory.
Fear of failure keeps many traders from the success they so dearly want. They are afraid to fail and therefore either afraid to trade or to admit the failure and learn from it. I’m not saying you should like loss. Winning traders don’t want to punish themselves, but successful traders don’t dread loss either because they know that whatever happens, they can make it back. And they can learn.
Strangely enough, failure is often a necessary stepping stone to success. Those who are too fearful of failure may never get to the success they long for. Fear can lead us not only away from the thing we fear but also away from the thing we seek. Ironically, fear can also lead us directly into the thing we fear. My thesis is that underneath fear of failure is a sense of scarcity.
Confronted with a drawdown, a trader who fears failure will often stop trading or change methods or systems only to junk the new methods or systems at the next drawdown.
The winning trader will not inflexibly keep doing what doesn’t work. His open mindedness allows him to recognize the difference between market conditions and methodologies that do or don’t have a probability of success. A trader with a sense of abundance and a verified method for trading won’t crumble under temporary loss because he’ll know he’s simply passing through a difficult time that will end. He distinguishes between loss and inept or error prone trading.
The flexible trader with the willingness to admit mistakes will learn from the failure, honor that failure as feedback; make corrections, and proceed with the improvements. The winning trader, just as the winning athlete, is in a constant and never ending process of development and growth.
Look at the history of your trading and write down several major failures. As you study each failure, look for similarities and differences between them. Look for the lessons. Identify and define the problems. Look for valid solutions.
As you trade each day, do the same thing with individual mistakes. Write them down as they occur along with the lesson learned. Look for repetitions. Commit to your own development and growth as you learn through experience. Remember, if you can’t make a mistake, you can’t make anything, including money.
Confronted with a drawdown, a trader who fears failure will often stop trading or change methods or systems only to junk the new methods or systems at the next drawdown.
The winning trader will not inflexibly keep doing what doesn’t work. His open mindedness allows him to recognize the difference between market conditions and methodologies that do or don’t have a probability of success. A trader with a sense of abundance and a verified method for trading won’t crumble under temporary loss because he’ll know he’s simply passing through a difficult time that will end. He distinguishes between loss and inept or error prone trading.
The flexible trader with the willingness to admit mistakes will learn from the failure, honor that failure as feedback; make corrections, and proceed with the improvements. The winning trader, just as the winning athlete, is in a constant and never ending process of development and growth.
Look at the history of your trading and write down several major failures. As you study each failure, look for similarities and differences between them. Look for the lessons. Identify and define the problems. Look for valid solutions.
As you trade each day, do the same thing with individual mistakes. Write them down as they occur along with the lesson learned. Look for repetitions. Commit to your own development and growth as you learn through experience. Remember, if you can’t make a mistake, you can’t make anything, including money.
12 Market Wisdoms from Gerald Loeb
It is funny how the best traders of all times basically repeat the same things with different words. 
Gerald Loeb is the author of ‘The Battle for Investment Survival’ and is one of the most quotable men on Wall Street. Here are 12 of the smartest things he has ever said about the stock market:
1. The single most important factor in shaping security markets is public psychology.
2. To make money in the stock market you either have to be ahead of the crowd or very sure they are going in the same direction for some time to come.
3. Accepting losses is the most important single investment device to insure safety of capital.
4. The difference between the investor who year in and year out procures for himself a final net profit, and the one who is usually in the red, is not entirely a question of superior selection of stocks or superior timing. Rather, it is also a case of knowing how to capitalize successes and curtail failures.
5. One useful fact to remember is that the most important indications are made in the early stages of a broad market move. Nine times out of ten the leaders of an advance are the stocks that make new highs ahead of the averages.
6. There is a saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” One might paraphrase this by saying a profit is worth more than endless alibis or explanations. . . prices and trends are really the best and simplest “indicators” you can find. (more…)
13 Things- Learned About Humans and the Financial Markets
- Predictions do not work as tomorrow is uncertain. We will only boast about things we have predicted right and talk nothing about the other half we got wrong.
- Skills can bring us moderate success. However, luck is needed to be a big success. (credit to Jon)
- We tend to credit our successes to good skills and blame our failures on poor luck.
- Some of us rely on luck (most unknowingly) by investing for high returns (and losses). A few of us will make big money but most of us will end up much poorer.
- Some of us deliberately limit the luck factor by choosing investment products with capital guarantee and guaranteed returns. None of us will make big money but none of us will be very much poorer.
- We need to know how much we can afford to lose (financially and emotionally) before deciding to be No. 4 or No. 5, or somewhere in between.
- We have many biases. The degree of success in investing or trading depends on how much we can keep our biases in check. No, we cannot remove our biases totally.
- Confirmation bias – we see what we want to see. We seek out evidence to validate our investment decision and ignore those that suggest otherwise.
- Availability bias – we are influenced by the things we observe. If people we knew made a lot of money through property investment, we will think that properties are the best investments in the world and develop a preference for it.
- Loss aversion bias – we want to be compensated for high returns before we decide to take the risk to invest. We often wait for markets move and show high returns before we want to invest. We are not interested if markets are not moving.
- Hindsight bias – we tend to say “I knew it” after an event has happened.
- Survivor-ship bias – we only get to hear stories of successes but many stories of failures were untold. See No 2 and No 3.
- Most us do not know what we want in life. We think we will be happier with more money.
Battle of Waterloo and Trading
I often talk about the Battle Of Waterloo and how it relates to trading in general and specifically strategy development. If you don’t know the battle (which I recommend reading about if you have time), just listen to this once popular country song and you’ll get a sense to why I think this is so important.
While I’m no historian, I do think traders can learn a lot about trading through learning about important battles in history. The Battle Of Waterloo offers a great example as it offers many lessons for us to consider:
Make your planning and risk analysis commensurate with the size of your project. For major endeavors, contingency plans are critical.
Know when to cut your losses if necessary. Don’t let your desire to succeed be the enemy of good judgment.
Be sure that the justification is clear for your project, and that your entire team is sold.
Don’t become over-confident, especially after many successes. Remember the basic principles.
Never attempt an unpopular endeavor in isolation.
Don’t make enemies. You are only as good as your allies.
Adopt leader style politics, not the Machiavellian style. Look for the win-win.
Many of these lessons apply to good trading, especially the ones about the importance of having contingency plans, knowing when to cut losses, having clear justifications for your trades, the importance of avoiding overconfidence and finally how important it is to attack from a strong position like having plenty of capital and cash reserves.
Needless to say, every trading strategy has their own weaknesses. So, what the most common weakness I’ve found? That’s easy – human error. That’s right, usually most strategies that have been backtested and proven to work continue to work well unless we do things to either deviate from the plan and/or we apply leverage to it rendering it extremely vulnerable. It is fairly often that I see traders come forward with a hot strategy they’ve used and are in the process of levering it up, creating havoc and exposing themselves to great risk. There is good reason for the expression – leverage always kills. In my experience, that has been true. Beyond that, many strategies are based on things that don’t account for the constantly evolving nature of the market. (more…)
Fix Your Eyes Forward and Not In The Past
Some of the greatest successes have been accomplished not long after a person had reached the end of their rope.
They had been beat down so much they had their backs to the wall and were ready to quit. but they did not.
Trading can easily cause us to get to this point unless we decide that when we hit the most difficult times in our trading is the exact time when we can emerge with more power and passion than every before.
Give yourself a push and decide what you truly want to accomplish and then forget about any past difficulties or disasters and fix your eyes forward to what you can do to become better.
12 Market Wisdoms from Gerald Loeb
1. The most important single factor in shaping security markets is public psychology.
2. To make money in the stock market you either have to be ahead of the crowd or very sure they are going in the same direction for some time to come.
3. Accepting losses is the most important single investment device to insure safety of capital.
4. The difference between the investor who year in and year out procures for himself a final net profit, and the one who is usually in the red, is not entirely a question of superior selection of stocks or superior timing. Rather, it is also a case of knowing how to capitalize successes and curtail failures.
5. One useful fact to remember is that the most important indications are made in the early stages of a broad market move. Nine times out of ten the leaders of an advance are the stocks that make new highs ahead of the averages.
6. There is a saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” One might paraphrase this by saying a profit is worth more than endless alibis or explanations. . . prices and trends are really the best and simplest “indicators” you can find. (more…)
12 Market Wisdoms from Gerald Loeb
It is funny how the best traders of all times basically repeat the same things with different words.
Gerald Loeb is the author of ‘The Battle for Investment Survival’ and is one of the most quotable men on Wall Street. Here are 12 of the smartest things he has ever said about the stock market:
1. The single most important factor in shaping security markets is public psychology.
2. To make money in the stock market you either have to be ahead of the crowd or very sure they are going in the same direction for some time to come.
3. Accepting losses is the most important single investment device to insure safety of capital.
4. The difference between the investor who year in and year out procures for himself a final net profit, and the one who is usually in the red, is not entirely a question of superior selection of stocks or superior timing. Rather, it is also a case of knowing how to capitalize successes and curtail failures.
5. One useful fact to remember is that the most important indications are made in the early stages of a broad market move. Nine times out of ten the leaders of an advance are the stocks that make new highs ahead of the averages. (more…)
Losses & Discipline in Trading
Losses
- Remain mentally and emotionally focused while trading.
- Losses are part of all systems; knowing when to take losses is important.
- Always try to be extremely disciplined, and exit your losing trades when your system requires you to do so.
- Not taking losses when indicated is dangerous.
- Riding losing trades for too long usually results in larger losses and risk of ruin increases.
- It’s not a good idea to keep changing stops to avoid a loss.
- System traders use stops consistently.
- Separate yourself as a trader from yourself as a person.
- No system can trade the markets without taking losses at times.
- Clumping can happen on the losing side as well as the winning side.
- Your ability to take losses quickly is a great asset to your trading.
Discipline
Now this is vital to trading success. Imagine a person trying to become a pro athlete, but he or she sleeps in every day, eats excessively, stays up late and parties every night. Is this person going to become an elite athlete or not? The answer is no, and the reason why has everything to do with the amount of discipline. Discipline, in my mind, is like homework, only it’s homework that pays off in dollars in the trading industry. Here are a few rules that I use when it comes to discipline in my life as a trader:
- Good trading discipline is vital to my success.
- My three successes to the market are: doing my market homework, following through, and using my stop losses.
- I train my mind every day to be disciplined and focused.
- I see myself every day doing my market homework and following the signals, setting stops.
- I track my system exactly as it dictates.
- If my system gives me daily signals, I follow them every day.
- If my system gives me intraday signals, I follow them during the day.
- I do not allow outside influences to affect my discipline.
- Placing my orders correctly as my system dictates increases my odds for success.
- Discipline to follow through with my system is my friend.
- A system without stop losses puts me in a position of unlimited or unknown loss.
- I understand that a major aspect of being disciplined is using stops.
Winning Attitude
One of the most important tools that a trader possesses is his or her mind. Attitude can either make or break you as a trader.
To become a successful trader it begins with believing in yourself and having a winning attitude.
Everyone wants to be a winner, at least they think so. Unfortunately, most are not willing to perform the tasks necessary to become a consistent winner.
Winners generally achieve success by being focused on a goal. Being focused allows winners to remain committed to the tasks at hand. Most winners perform a lot of hard work, including a willingness to deal with sometimes mundane duties. Most of all, winners perform with an “I am responsible for both my failures and successes” attitude. (more…)