Category Archives: trading videos

It’s Probably Not a Duck Just as recognizing market behavioral patterns is important, recognizing and accepting the failure of patterns can be vital to your success. When a market fails to do something, the reversal is often at least as if not more powerful. If you think about it for a minute it makes sense. If a lot of traders have the same position and all of a sudden the market starts to reverse, there are not only those who want to go with it but also a bunch of traders who want to exit. If you hold a position and the market falters then it’s very useful to be able to identify this swiftly. One – you protect your profits. Two – you potentially can jump onboard for a reversal. Here’s an example in the ES on Thursday 29th March 2012. The ES looked in some respects like it …

Biases and Marginal Trades There are two big problems traders have to tackle amongst the many factors which are involved in their success. Taking marginal trades is the blight of the small and yet-to-be-consistent trader and historical and/or positional bias on the interpretation of trading activity finishes a close second. As you might well imagine, combine the two and your trading day could go down like a lead balloon. Whilst suggesting these self-inflicted problems don’t happen when you are profitable is folly, the difference is that you have a much better chance to deal with and avoid them. Conscious awareness of how they affect your ability to profit on a single trade, the day overall and your current psychological state can lead to a trading with more control. So what am I talking about exactly? Historical/Positional Bias I’m afraid that this is a difficult one and it can be what …

Examples Trading distilled is about logic, decision making and money management. There’s not much which is particularly hard to understand or even that complicated. It’s just that it takes some putting together of ideas to form a useful plan. I think that with varying speeds a trader’s journey goes something like:- Want to trade – Think it’s easy – Get stuffed by the market – Observe and learn, gaining market understanding – Define or learn market logic – Create an effective trading plan – Come up against psychological hurdles to effectively trade the plan – Consistently profitable trader. The stage at which many traders find themselves is that they have an understanding of the market, yet they’re not profitable. This is where market logic needs to define certain situations. As straight forward as this sounds, many people don’t do it. It takes time and it takes effort to organize your …