Ask most NEW traders, and they will tell you about some moving average or combination of indicators or a chart pattern that they use. This is, as the more experienced trader knows, an entry point and not a strategy.
Any trader who is more experienced will say a strategy should also include money management, risk control, perhaps stop losses and of course, an exit point. They might also say that you must let your profits run and cut your losses short. A well-read trader will also tell you that your strategy should fit with your trading personality.
BUT there is one other vital ingredient that many traders forget - and that is to fully understand the "personality" of what you trade. Some traders specialise in say, gold or Brent crude or currencies or they might specialise in a particular index such as the FTSE 100 or the Dow but many traders choose to trade shares. Indeed some traders dabble in a bit of everything. I think this is the area that causes many traders to fail or at least not reach their full potential.
In my view: You absolutely MUST specialise.
I am sure that on the surface most people would say that sounds sensible but here is why it is a MUST!
Superficially, many charts look the same. I bet if you had not seen the charts for some time and someone where to show you a chart of Brent Crude over 6 months and then a chart of Barclays PLC over the same 6 months you would be hard pushed to say which was which purely on the look of the chart.
However, I bet that if you found a trader who trades ONLY Barclays day in and day out and also found someone who trades ONLY Brent Crude day in and day out, both of them would easily identify which was which. WHY?
Because every share, index or commodity has it’s own "personality".
Some will be volatile intra-day, some will follow their sector or the main index (market followers), some will do their own thing, some will spike up and down regularly, some will stop at key moving averages and some will just plough through. Some will move by 5% on average before they retrace and some by 2%. Some will gap up or down regularly, some will not. You get the idea!
Therefore, no matter how good you are at analysing indicators, moving averages, trends and patterns, the same strategy WILL NOT work for everything. I would go so far as to say that a strategy that works well for Bovis Homes, for example, is likely NOT to work for BT Group - they have very different "personalities".
So let’s return to our question: What makes a good trading strategy? Let me answer with a series of ten questions that you need to find answers to, in order to build a REALLY GOOD strategy.
What do you want to trade (share, index, commodity, currency, etc)? If your answer is shares (plural) I would urge you to pick one typical share at this stage to really specialise. You can add more later.
What "personality" does that share, index etc have?
What entry system is the most reliable for that share?
What stop loss system is the most effective for that share?
What average risk will a typical trade carry?
What exit system works well for that share?
What is your trading personality (attitude to risk, losses, discipline, how much do you worry etc) and can you trade that strategy without overriding it?
What timescale do you want to trade? (Using intra-day or end of day data)
How much data do you keep on past trades to help identify strategy weaknesses?
How does all this fit with your trading objectives?
Once you have an answer to each question you need to do one final thing. Make sure all those things fit together and complement each other. For example, if the ideal stop loss position represents a big average risk and conflicts with your own attitude to risk, you need to start again. If you will override your exit point because greed makes you hang in for more, you need to think again. Perhaps you shouldn’t trade that stock in the first place - look for one with a different "personality" which will lead to a strategy you can trade comfortably.
It is a long and sometimes painful iterative journey. You might need to go round and round in ever decreasing circles over a long time. Testing and refining, testing and refining before you can truly have a reliable and repeatable strategy that REALLY WORKS for you.
THEN, you can look for other things to trade that have the same "personality" as your specialist stock, index, commodity or currency.
But if it were easy, everyone would be doing it right?
Good luck and enjoy your trading.
Some market technicians that use technical analysis to look for a nearing market bottom or market top have noticed over the past several years that the stock market will consistently move in a 5 wave pattern which is based on concepts from Elliott Wave Theory. When the stock market is trending upward a 5 wave pattern consists of 3 separate moves upward and 2 separate moves downward before a top occurs. Meanwhile when the stock market is trending downward a 5 wave pattern consists of 3 separate moves downward and 2 separate moves upward before a bottom occurs.
Let’s take a look at the Nasdaq and S&P 500 and analyze their one year charts using concepts from Elliot Wave Theory. Notice how both the Nasdaq and S&P 500 made a bottom in late July of 2002 (points A) and then made 3 separate moves upward (A to 1, 2 to 3 and 4 to 5) followed by 2 separate moves downward (1 to 2 and 3 to 4) before topping out in late August after completing a 5 wave pattern.
Now notice what happened from late August until early October of 2002 as the Nasdaq and S&P 500 made 3 separate moves to the downside (5 to 1, 2 to 3 and 4 to 5) and 2 separate moves to the upside (1 to 2 and 3 to 4) before making a bottom in early October after completing a 5 wave pattern.
Meanwhile lets continue using Elliot Wave Theory an trace out the 5 wave pattern from early October of 2002 until early December of 2002 when the stock market made a top. Notice there were 3 separate moves to the upside (5 to 1, 2 to 3 and 4 to 5) and 2 separate moves to the downside (1 to 2 and 3 to 4) as well.
After the Nasdaq and S&P 500 topped out in early December they formed another 5 wave pattern as they made a bottom in mid March of 2003. Once again there were 3 downside moves (5 to 1, 2 to 3 and 4 to 5) and 2 upside moves (1 to 2 and 3 to 4) before the 5 wave pattern was completed in mid March.
Now I’m not an expert in Elliot Wave Theory but it looks to me that the Nasdaq and S&P 500 may be nearing the completion of another 5 wave pattern with a potential stock market top coming into play. Notice there have been 3 upside moves (5 to 1, 2 to 3 and 4 to 5) and 2 downside moves (1 to 2 and 3 to 4) since mid March through late May of 2003.
Adding concepts from Elliot Wave Theory is another tool investors can use to help predict when a stock market bottom or top is nearing.
Regards,
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.
Scared money never wins, as the saying goes. If we are scared what are we scared of?
"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." Nelson Mandela
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