 |
|
The source of the best business, financial and legal news |
|
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
|
|
|
|
 | |
| |
 |
Business Informations |
|
|
|
What I Learnt Losing 60,000 My First Year as a Full-time Trader
During my first year as a local (independent trader) on the floor of LIFFE, I bought and sold 8804 FTSE futures contracts, about 40 contracts per day on average. The result was a loss of 61,620 or -267 per trading day. I was profitable on 55% of days with an average gain of 1009, my average loosing day was -1780. My biggest one day gain was 7730 and my biggest loss -12,426. As you can probably imagine, this was a difficult time for me. I was trying to work out how to make money consistently. It was the consistency that seemed so hard to find. As you can see I was having a regular experience of making money, what was killing me were my losses. It seemed that every time I got ahead by 5-6000 over a period of a week or two, I would lose it all and a few thousand more in the space of a couple of days. At the time I was too unhappy with my performance to be willing to spend any time analysing my results. If I had I would have discovered that during this period all I needed to do to go from a loss of 61,620 to a small profit would have been to avoid just 10 trading days. Those 10 days cost me a total of 69,169! At the end of this period I was so frustrated, fed up and stuck that I decided to quit trading and return to a more secure career. It only took me a few weeks to abandon this plan and return to trading. I felt sure that I had the raw talent to become a consistently successful trader, what I needed, I reasoned, was some support. Support to stop me having the huge losing days that were crippling me financially. I approached a firm I knew that backed traders on the floor and they agreed to back me with 20,000 of trading capital. We would split profits 60:40 and I was set an initial daily loss limit of 500. If I hit my 500 limit the firm's floor manager would come and tell me to go home. The third day trading I lost about 3500 and nothing happened, no one came to ask me to stop trading. I felt very foolish, but continued to trade for the remainder of the week while avoiding any contact with the floor manager. The following Monday (the week's losses had totaled about 5000) I got a message to meet with the director with whom I had made the agreement (it transpired he had been away the previous week). I was sure that he was going to say that the deal was off. Instead, to my surprise, he told me how important it was that he could trust me, he needed to know that when the market was volatile he could trust me not to be racking up big losses. He suggested that I start afresh. Needless to say I was both relieved and grateful. So I went back to the trading pit that morning with the determined intention to not loose more that 500. The next two weeks turned out to be one of the toughest periods of my trading career and one of the most rewarding. Stopping when I was down was hard. I realised that what had been at the root of my large losses was my inability to accept loosing at all. To me loosing was unacceptable. Such was my intolerance for loss that I lost for ten consecutive days. But as the days progressed, even though I continued to loose 500 a day, I found my mood lifting. I actually started to feel OK about loosing as long as it was within my limit. At the end of this 10-day period of losses a seeming miracle happened; I started to make money. My target was to get to +1000 and then not give back more than 20% of my gain. So when I had a profitable day I was making between 800 and 2000, for an average of about 1200. Not only did I start to make money, I did so for 15 days in a row, three entire weeks without a loss. This marked the beginning of a new era of trading for me. In retrospect, I believe that I had been trading scared, scared that I was really a looser. The two weeks of rigidly sticking to my loss limit caused me to revaluate myself. I started to feel good about myself for sticking to my limit. Before it was bad if I lost money, now it was only bad if I lost more than my limit. Before, I never knew whether I was going to make 1000 or loose 5000; now I knew that the worst case was a loss of 500 and that was OK. I started to see that sticking to my trading limits was a sign of strength and my confidence started to rise. Looking back at my first year's loosing streak, if I had restricted my losing days to -500 my loss of 61,620 would have turned into a profit of 83,525. Not only that, I think that had I been sticking to a loss limit during that period, my confidence would have been that much greater and my percentage of profitable days would also have been higher. "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves: "Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?" Actually, who are we not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn't serve the world. There's nothing enlightening about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we're liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others." Whatever is at the root of our fear, in order to become consistently successful traders, we have to overcome it by developing trust in ourselves, trust that we will always act in our own best interest. When we trade fearfully, we undermine ourselves and end up taking the very action that confirms our fear. The question is how to develop an unshakeable trust in ourselves? We develop trust in others through repeated experience of them acting in ways that inspire trust. In the same way we develop trust in ourselves as traders by building up a history of action that supports our goal to become consistently successful traders. The more frequently we adhere to our own trading plan and limits the greater our self-trust. Now this sounds like a catch 22 situation, if you find like I did that you cannot help yourself, how do you start to develop self-trust through right action? In a way I was lucky, my back was against the wall, I knew that if I broke my limit I would be out. So I had to stick to my limit and in doing so I gave myself the opportunity to confront and finally reject my fear of being a loser. To go from being a net loosing trader to a consistently profitable one, we need to set ourselves achievable targets of behavior. My problem was allowing loosing days to turn into huge losing days, so to set myself the objective of stopping trading for the day when I was down 500 was appropriate for me. For others the primary problem can be the resistance to taking a trade when a signal comes up, be it intuitive or mechanical. An appropriate exercise would be to take a simple mechanical trading system (it does not have to be much good, break even would do) and set the goal of taking the next 10 signals without hesitation, regardless of how you feel. We need to build up our trading skills one at a time, when we are confident we can cut our losses we can move onto execution, then we can work on holding on to profitable trades etc. Tennis stars don't become stars just through competition; they hone their skills one by one on the practice court and they continue to practice throughout their careers. As traders we need to identify the individual skills we need to develop and focus on them one by one. Someone new to tennis does not expect to go out and win competitions straight away, they know they will have to spend a fair amount of time practicing and learning first. Short term trading, like tennis, is skill based, and those skills can be identified, practiced and mastered. Malcolm Robinson
MORE RESOURCES:
currency trading - Google News |
|
|
|
RELATED ARTICLES
Risk and Stock Trading Fees: The Two Barriers To Overcome If You Want A Successful Trading Career. You know the old joke:"How do you make a million in the stock market? Start with two million?"There is no way around it, risk and stock market fees are a part of trading that you can`t avoid. But, you can manage your risk. FOREX Trading Philosophy Keen on starting FOREX trading? Why would you not be? Many beginning FOREX traders are captivated by the allure of easy money. FOREX websites offer 'risk-free' trading, 'high returns' and 'low investment' - these claims have a grain of truth in them, but the reality of FOREX is a bit more complex. Disgruntled The following situation happens quite often to many traders. Look it over and see if it has been happening to you:You have been faithfully following your trading plan and the rules you've set for trading. The Yin and the Yang of Markets I am reading a fantastic book on trading, first published in 1924, by Richard D. Wyckoff, titled "How I Trade and Invest in Stocks & Bonds". The Margin Advantages of Trading FOREX. There is one aspect that is considered as one of the best advantages of FOREX Trading. This is related to the amount of money you need to place a trade, this is known as "margin", and in short, this is all that can be lost in a the case you had a bad trade. How Do Other Countries Devalue Their Currencies? Countries devalue their currencies only when they have no other way to correct past economic mistakes - whether their own or mistakes committed by their predecessors.The ills of a devaluation are still at least equal to its advantages. Forex Made Easy for Everyone Forex made easy is as simple as you would want it to be. The foreign exchange market is a worldwide market and according to some estimates is almost as big as thirty times the turnover of the US Equity markets. Facts of Day Trading Are you thinking of entering the fast-paced world of day trading? Arm yourselves with the information from this fact sheet on day trading.What is day trading?Day trading is an investment tactic that does online daily stock trading with a relatively short investment. Day Trading Training ... You need more than just going to a free stock market workshop to learn Day trading is all about making buy and sell decisions. When you make a trade either your going to lose money or your going to make money, and some other times you will break even. Reality of Online Forex Trading Foreign exchange trading is the trading of currencies. Most currencies can be traded. The Seven Most Traded Currencies in FOREX. Currencies are traded in dollar amounts called "lots". One lot is equal to $1,000, which controls $100,000 in currency. Choosing A Forex Broker With currency trading becoming ever more popular, the number of brokers is growing at a rapid rate. What should one look at when deciding which broker to open an account with? These are the important points to consider. Adaptation to the Realities of the Market Do you think adaptation to the realities of the market is the most important thing?Many times in the past I've written about the need to adapt, the need to be able to change your behavior relative to the market because the markets are ever changing. I've stated that mechanical systems may be workable, but for only a short time relative to the life of markets. Forex Profits The Forex Market-What, When and Why?Forex, FX and the Forex market are some common abbreviations for the Foreign Exchange market. Actually it is the largest financial market in the world, where money is sold and bought freely. Options Trading - Advantages and Disadvantages What is Options Trading?An option is simply granting someone the right to buy or sell something in the future. In the case of Dow index futures options, when someone buys a Dow call option they are buying the right to purchase that underlying Dow future at a specific price, known as the "strike price," at a future point in time, known as the "expiration date. Financial Crises, Global Capital Flows and the International Financial Architecture The recent upheavals in the world financial markets were quelled by the immediate intervention of both international financial institutions such as the IMF and of domestic ones in the developed countries, such as the Federal Reserve in the USA. The danger seems to have passed, though recent tremors in South Korea, Brazil and Taiwan do not augur well. Hedging Foreign Exchange Risks The exchange rate of the Macedonian Denar against the major hard currencies of the world has remained stable in the last few years. Because of the IMF restrictions, the local Narodna (Central) Bank does not print money and there are no physical Denars in the economy and in the local banks. Money Management, Part 1 There are some common mistakes I've seen traders make in the area of money management. First, let's understand what money management is all about. How To Control Fear And Greed In Trading There is an old saying that the market is driven by fear and greed. Anyone that has placed more than a couple of trades will surely have experienced these two emotions. Forex2u Forex Strategy On Successful Forex Trading The essence of the FX2u Forex strategy is that it does not have any Forex trading system but could forecast the market trend accurately.Every set of Forex trading system available has its disadvantages.
|
| home | site map |
| © 2006 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||
|
||||
|
