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How to know when to exit your position?

This started as a quirky post but quickly turned into something probably more useful. I admit the post is based on personal experiences. Luckily, I do not make these mistakes any more….at least not very often ;). Enjoy!

1) It is time to sell when…..you find yourself using extra technical indicators on charts to justify holding your position that you didnt use to get into it in the first place!

2) It is time to sell when…..you find yourself going to yahoo message boards to see if someone has some positive news that you don’t know!

3) It is time to sell when…..you find yourself justifying to yourself holding a position for fundamental reasons when you entered it for technical reasons!

4) It is time to sell when…..when you ask an “expert” on twitter or some blog to chart a stock checking for entry when you are already in it!

Let me know if you readers have any other such fun “indicators” and I shall add them

9 Trading Lessons for Traders

  1. You have to be able to lose in order to win.
  2. Always be realistic with your monthly target.
  3. It is absolutely OK, and most of time, helpful to shutdown all social networking such as twitter, stocktwits, facebook. Think about it, if your friend is affecting your work, tell him to come back later. Trading is about concentration, and definitely a personal and lonely business. To be a successful trader, we must walk alone in our days and do it alone.
  4. If you are really seriously addicted to twitter, try to challenge tweets who call trade, instead of following them.
  5. When your position is right, you have to do nothing instead of doing nothing when you are wrong! [constantly taking early profit will do you more harm than good]
  6. You must keep your losses small and take more small losses than small winners to come out ahead. You will become the best trader you can be by being wrong small, not right small.
  7. It is your job to know your are wrong and not the market’s job.
  8. You have to press your winners if you really consider yourself to have the ability to make a living or extra income from trading.
  9. When you place a trade, don’t ever think this is the only trade to make. There are thousands of trades you can make. You aren’t going to miss a move for long if you trade correctly. You aren’t going to chase markets if you trade correctly. You must have a plan to enter positions based on each market’s criteria.

Mystery Trader Revealed…And His Name Is 'Hope'

The UK’s Daily Mirror newspaper has uncovered the FX trader who dropped over $300k in a Scouse club. It is a 23-year old ‘self-taught’ barrow-boy named (somewhat ironically in our view) Alex Hope. Self-described as “talented (three years in and a six-figure salary, hhmm), charismatic (its amazing how much ‘charisma’ a GBP125k bottle of bubbly will buy), and thoroughly likeable (ditto) man. Alex Hope exudes knowledge…” and is willing to share it with you according to his website. How did he become this B.S.D. of the FX markets? “I took two months off my job at Wembley, got really obsessed with reading charts and got the guts to start trading properly.” This self-made rosy-cheeked young man with a penchant for mind-numbingly-arrogant-looking photos on his website may have just become the poster boy for all that is ‘great’ about the free market – or perhaps a skim through his blog and media exposure will reassure us all that anything is possible as we note he does have some good taste (not just in Champagne) in RTing our posts on Twitter.

 We can only HOPE that the next time he decides to go down the rub-a-dub-dub for a Leo Sayer, maybe he’ll take some of us Septic Tanks with him on the frog-and-toad…as the days of the ship-it-in-large-on-the-left John, done-a-yard by-breakfast spot FX trader are clearly back with us.

 
And here is his Bio, enjoy:
 

 London born and bred, Alex Hope, 22, is a self-taught trader who specialises in the Foreign Exchange Market. Despite his tender years, Alex is a name to watch out for in the city; an expert in the UK economy, he works the currency markets, regularly trading millions.  (more…)
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