“The trend is your friend” – perhaps the best known trading adage of all time, it is meant to remind traders to always identify the prevailing trend, and never to trade against it, but rather wait for retracements and then enter trades in the direction of the trend.
“The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent” – The way the market reacts to certain news or events may not seem rational at times, but there is no sense in trying to fight the market – it moves where it moves and does not care one bit about your opinion.
“A fool and his money are soon parted” – If you are not smart about where you put your money, you will most likely lose it.
“The trading rules I live by are: (a) Cut losses, (b) Ride Winners, (c) Keep bets small, (d) Follow the rules without question, and (e) Know when to break the rules.” – Rules are important, but following them blindly does not necessarily lead to success. Know which conditions produced those rules in the first place, so that when the conditions change, the rules can too.
“Amateurs Focus On Rewards. Professionals Focus on Risk.” – Experienced traders think first about how much they can lose on a trade, base their calculations on that, and then see if they are happy with the potential reward the trade offers. Novices usually do the opposite, blinded by the allure of quick riches.
Archives of “trades” tag
rss10 Trading Mistakes
1. Refusing to define a loss.
2. Not liquidating a losing trade, even after you have acknowledged the trade’s potential is greatly diminished.
3. Getting locked into a specific opinion or belief about market direction. From a psychological perspective this is equivalent to trying to control the market with your expectation of what it will do: “I’m right, the market is wrong.”
4. Focusing on price and the monetary value of a trade, instead of the potential for the market to move based on its behavior and structure.
5. Revenge-trading as if you were trying get back at the market for what it took away from you.
6. Not reversing your position even when you clearly sense a change in market direction.
7. Not following the rules of the trading system.
8. Planning for a move or feeling one building, but then finding yourself immobilized to hit the bid or offer, and therefore denying yourself the opportunity to profit.
9. Not acting on your instincts or intuition.
10. Establishing a consistent pattern of trading success over a period of time, and then giving your winnings back to the market in one or two trades and starting the cycle over again.
Control & Focus
Know what you can control and what you can’t. You can’t control the market, but you can control how you react to the market. Before you can become a consistent trader, you must first control how you respond to the market and your actions. We can always be in control of ourselves and how we act. Being able to regulate our actions has a lot to do with how we see ourselves as a trader, our vision for ourselves, and our confidence.Characteristics Of A Losing Trader
1. Undiscplined
2. No money management
3. Unprepared
4. Overtrading habits
5. Easily tilted
6. Does not trade with probabilities
7. Trades emotionally without controlling: greed, hope, fear, and euphoria
8. Does not have a trading plan and strategy
Trading Wisdom
How do you feel when your trading position goes against you? Do you react instinctively or do you follow a specific plan of action? Here’s what Richard Dennis has to say about this issue: “When things go bad, traders shouldn’t stick their head in the sand and just hope it gets better. You should always have a worst-case point. The only choice should be to get out quicker. The worst mistake a trader can make is to miss a major profit opportunity. 95 percent of profits come from only 5 percent of the trades.” Ignoring issues will usually carry negative consequences in the future. Have a well-researched plan and execute it with focus!
SIMPLIFY
When we follow a standardized process for trade execution, we help negate the impact that emotions can have on that process. And when we create a set of rules within which is a subset of rules that allow for less mechanical, more intuitive management of our trades, we can potentially realize additional profits from those intangible insights into market direction without over-exposing our account to risk. Here is how it works:
S – Scan your charts . Create a “Watch List” to help manage your inventory of trading opportunities.
I – Identify a high probability set up.
M – Map out the trade’s entry point, stop-loss exit point, and profit exit point.
P – Pull the trigger. By systematizing the process as we are talking about here, the anxiety associated with executing a trade is greatly reduced. Instead of focusing on whatever issues keep you from pulling the trigger, your focus is on following a procedure, a set of instructions. Mapping out and understanding exactly what our risk is also reduces the anxiety of entering a trade.
L – Let the market do its thing. It’s not very often that you won’t have to take some heat on a trade. It’s a great feeling when a trade goes in your favor immediately and stays that way. But that’s the exception and not the rule. As a good friend of mine would say, “Let it breathe!” (more…)
Great -Mark Douglas Trading Quotes
In trading your mind may be the ultimate technical indicator that determines whether you persevere and win in the markets or get broken in half by fear, greed, ego, stress, and uncertainty. No matter whether you are a an investor, retail trader, prop trader, or professional money manger your success will still be determined on the management of your mind. Never underestimate the importance of keeping a cool head in rough times.
Here are ten of the best quotes from Mark Douglas, an author who verbalizes the real nature of trading as well as I have ever seen it captured. If you can absorb these teachings it will help you get through that rough period when you have 10 losing trades in a row or experience a 10% draw down in your trading capital. If you are not matching risk correctly you may have to come back from a complete wipe out of your account like many other have had to do. But do not give up, you can do this if you really want to.
“I know it may sound strange to many readers, but there is an inverse relationship between analysis and trading results. More analysis or being able to make distinctions in the market’s behavior will not produce better trading results. There are many traders who find themselves caught in this exasperating loop, thinking that more or better analysis is going to give them the confidence they need to do what needs to be done to achieve success. It’s what I call a trading paradox that most traders find difficult, if not impossible to reconcile, until they realize you can’t use analysis to overcome fear of being wrong or losing money. It just doesn’t work!”
-Mark Douglas
“There is a random distribution between wins and losses for any given set of variables that defines an edge. In other words, based on the past performance of your edge, you may know that out of the next 20 trades, 12 will be winners and 8 will be losers. What you don’t know is the sequence of wins and losses or how much money the market is going to make available on the winning trades. This truth makes trading a probability or numbers game. When you really believe that trading is simply a probability game, concepts like “right” and “wrong” or “win” and “lose” no longer have the same significance. As a result, your expectations will be in harmony with the possibilities.”
-Mark Douglas (more…)
4 Points to be Successful Traders
1) Diversify: If you have a pattern you trade successfully, you don’t have to grow your size. Instead, look to diversify to a different pattern (different market, different time frame) not correlated with the first. You’ll smooth out your returns, as one pattern makes money while the other experiences drawdown. You’ll also achieve the portfolio manager’s goal of superior return for less risk exposure.
2) Review Entries: Review your trades for the week and see how much heat you took on your winners. This will give you an idea of how good your entries are.
3) Review Exits: Review your trades for the week and see if the market went in your favor or against you after you exited. This will give you an idea of how good your exits are.
4) Work Orders: Get into the habit of working orders to buy at bid, sell at offer or to place orders between the bid and offer to avoid paying a price that is out of line with “fair value”. For the frequent trader, the single tick saved by good execution adds up over time.
The successful traders I’ve worked with never stop working on themselves. This is equally true of successful athletes, musicians, and chess champions. Small, steady improvements can create massively greater performance over time.
MARKET WISDOM
A list of golden sayings and rules I have gleaned from many sources:
- Plan your trades, trade your plan.
- Trade Quality, Not Quantity.
- Keep it simple.
- Don’t look for a reason to enter the market, look for a reason NOT to enter.
- Don’t act due to “Newbie Nerves”
- Don’t make up a trade. If you have to look, it isn’t there.
- Never play with scared money.
- You are not the market.
- Buy dips in an uptrend, sell rallies in a downtrend.
- Do not try to pick tops and bottoms.
- It is only divergence if it came off a retracement – not a sideways market.
- Indicators warn, price action confirms.
- Divergence is early, cross-overs are late.
- You cannot expect your positions to go immediately into the money.
- Divergence means a detour, but not necessarily a new trend.
- No-one knows what will happen in the markets.
- Standing aside is a position.
- Subordinate your will to the will of the market.
- Large ranges beget small ranges, small ranges beget large ranges.
- Once a thing is set in motion, it tends to stay in motion.
- Sniper-rifle, not a shotgun.
- Cut your losses short, let your profits run.
- Only move stops in the direction of your position.
- Do not let a winner turn into a loser.
- Never add to a losing position.
- Forget losses quickly. Forget profits even quicker.
- Consistent behavior equals consistent results.
There are probably more, send ’em in…
20 Habits of Wealthy Traders
1) Patient with winners and impatient with losers
2) Making money is more important than being right
3) View Tech Analysis as a picture of where traders are lining up to buy and sell
4) Before they enter every trade they will know profit target or stop exit
5) Approach trade no.5 with the same conviction as the previous 4 losing trades
6) Use naked charts
a) As we mature we begin peeling off indicators
b) Prices action is key
7) Comfortable making decisions with incomplete information
8) Stopped trying to pick tops & bottoms long ago
a) They make their money in the meat/middle of a trend (wait for confirmation)
b) A trend is much more likely to continue than it is to reverse
9) Do not think of the market as expensive or cheap
a) Ignore whether you think something is overpriced or understand, think price action
10) Aggressive with trade size when doing well or modest when not
a) Do more of what is making, less of what is not
11) Realised that the market will be open tomorrow (more…)