Reblog: Trading Limits – You Have to Start Thinking about the money


trading limits

Good traders are known to be masters of risk management. Risk management includes following a detailed trading plan, setting stop and limit orders and managing traders without succumbing to emotions.

Good traders also tend to follow a robust trading plan that focuses more on ensuring that the traders do not lose their capital, while the profits are seen as only secondary. As part of this pursuit in achieving trading excellence, professional and seasoned traders follow the concept of setting limits on their losses, on a daily, weekly and even monthly basis.

Trading with limits ensures that the traders do not end up sabotaging themselves in the heat of the moment as emotions can often override logic when a trade turns into a loss.

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Reblog: 20 Reasons Why 90% of New Traders Don’t Make It


  1. They risk too much to try to make so little.
  2. They trade with the probabilities against them.
  3. They think trading is easy money.
  4. Instead of focusing on learning how to trade they focus on getting rich.
  5. They blow up due to improper position sizing.
  6. With no understanding of the mathematical risk of ruin they are doomed after the first long string of losing trades.
  7. Blindly following a guru that leads them down the road of destruction.
  8. They don’t do their homework.
  9. They trade opinions not robust systems.
  10. They go looking for ‘trades’ instead of a methodology.
  11. They have no trading plan.
  12. They attempt to piggy back on the trades another trader but don’t understand the risks.
  13. Most new traders quit when they realized how much work is involved in trading successfully.
  14. Most traders quit when they learn how many losing trades they will have to have to get to the winners.
  15. New traders quit if they do not have a passion for trading itself.
  16. Many new traders will give up the moment they realize that trading does not have guaranteed income, you are an entrepreneur.
  17. They are not willing to pay the tuition to learn to trade in time, study, and losing trades.
  18. They are crushed by the learning curve that they do not work hard enough to get through.
  19. We lose a lot of new traders when they realize that trading is actually harder than their job.
  20. The traders that don’t make it quit when they were tired, frustrated, and stressed out, the winning traders quit after they had figured trading out.

The original article appears on newtraderu.com and is penned by Steve Burns. It can be accessed here.


Reblog: 25 Powerful Trading Lessons From Jesse Livermore


jesse livermore

Born in 1877, Jesse Livermore is possibly the most famous trader in history.

He started trading at the age of 14 from bucket shops. His tape reading skill was so good that these bucket shops eventually didn’t want to do business with him.

At his peak in 1929, he was worth $100 million. Ultimately, he lost his entire fortune when he broke his trading rules.

The same trading rules which made him millions, caused him to lose everything when he lost control of himself.

Still, there are valuable lessons to be learned from Jesse Livermore’s trading experience.

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Reblog: Do NOT Look For a Trading Strategy That Suits Your Personality


What Feels Comfortable and Natural Usually Doesn’t Work

Why do almost all speculator lose money? They lose because successful speculation requires that we consistently do that which is psychologically uncomfortable and unnatural” – Richard Weissman

There is a persistent overall tendency for equity to flow from the many to the few. In the long run, the majority loses. The implication for the trader is that to win, you have to act like the minority. If you bring normal habits and tendencies to trading, you’ll gravitate toward the majority and inevitably lose” – William Eckhardt

Most of what we naturally do and think do not work in trading. Here are a couple of examples:

  • We are naturally inclined to cut our winners short and let our winners run

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Repost: How not to fail in stock markets – 11 lessons from Rakesh Jhunjhunwala


Rakesh Jhunjhunwala is widely referred to as the Indian Warren Buffett. The investment maestro is very popular for picking up stocks that could turn into multibaggers, based on his own study of fundamentals and research models. Rakesh Jhunjhunwala is a Chartered Accountant by qualification and a trader by profession.

With the stock markets on fire of late, many investors who could not invest before the bull run began must be wondering if they have missed the rally, for the benchmark indices Sensex and Nifty have already returned about 20% each so far this year. But worry they must not, for, here we take a look at 11 key lessons on the stock market from the big bull investor himself, which may help investors to stop failing in the stock markets, cut losses, and turn profits.

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Reblog: Why You Should Take the Profits and Run!


This article is for those traders (new or experienced) who have trouble booking profits. Do you often see large profits evaporate as the market reverses against you, leaving you feeling powerless and confused? If so, you know how frustrating it can be and you know exactly what I’m talking about.

Poor target placement, lack of experience, greed, arrogance and stubbornness are all issues that can cause traders to not take profits off the table.

I appreciate this article may conflict with some of my core beliefs and teachings on taking profits since typically I encourage people to aim for a 2 to 1 risk reward or greater and to set and forget stops and targets. In theory, this makes sense, but in the real world, as you likely already know, there are still a great number of trades that almost hit your profit target or where a trade has moved quickly in the right direction and you’re staring at a giant profit… and then the next day or week, the market goes the other way and your once giant profit has become a much smaller profit or even a loss.

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Reblog: Know Your Range aka How to Set Your Stop Loss ⋆ 5-To-9 Trader


There is nothing more frustrating than getting stopped out of a trade only to watch the price go back to the initial direction you were trading in the first place.

It’s grating, I know.

Assets, like animals, have different types of characteristics. Some are fast, some are slow, some jump high, some jump low. Understanding the behaviours and patterns of your chosen assets will help you set your stops at reasonable levels.

With this post, I’ll share a simple method of placing your stops in a way that is realistic and decreases the chances of getting hit every single time.

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Reblog: How to Cut Losses and Let Winners Run


Loss Aversion – Cut Losses Short & Let Winners Run

If you’ve been trading for a while, you’ve probably heard the following ubiquitous mantra of trading: “Cut Your Losses Short & Let Your Winners Run”.

Why Should You?

Stocks can literally go to zero. It happened many times before and will happen in the future, regardless of how big the company is.

MANY oil and coal companies recently filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy and their stocks got delisted. You may also remember Lehman Brother and General Motors. What happens when your stock falls off a cliff and gets delisted? You simply lose all the money you invested in that stock.

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Reblog: How to Maintain Control and Discipline in Your Trading


If as a TRADER you want to have disciplined and profitable trading, The Core Concept you need to Understand is

As a Trader, you do not have any control on the market.

Nil Control on Market

You’ve either figured out or you will figure out the fact that not much at all remains under your control as a trader. Dealing with an endless set of variables using a mind that’s geared by nature to defining constants is a tough task.  Most of traders focus on returns and not focusing on the process of trading.

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Reblog: A Few Things I Learned Watching a Hedge Fund Manager Lose $4 Billion on One Trade


Maybe you also followed this story. Or maybe not. But basically a really big hedge fund manager, one of those guys who people quote and probably talk about at Harvard Business School, placed a super big bet on this company called Valeant.

Valeant is a pharmaceutical company trying to cure problems with skin and infectious diseases. They actually also own Bausch Lomb so that means they have a giant eye care business.

This hedge fund manager made a bet that Valeant would keep growing their business, diversifying, and acquiring. He once even called them the next “Berkshire Hathaway.”

This thesis turned out to be wrong. Like really wrong. The company crashed. People started to call Valeant out for jacking up the prices of their drugs. They also were apparently doing some dicey bookkeeping things. Just Google “Philidor Valeant scandal” if you want to learn more about that.

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