Here’s an example of some of what how I’m working on as part of my new trading method for futures. I’m currently only actively trading on 2 instruments – the DAX and the ES. (That is aside from the normal stocks trading I still do). I’m using the NinjaTrader simulator and I’ve been taking trades daily. I love this tool and just got a full lifetime license.

Anyways, just a small disclaimer, I’m not running it as a tight ship yet and I’m at the beginning of the process so below is just a brain dump. The reasons it’s not full on for met yet are:

1. My rules aren’t firm yet. This has a whole host of issues but I’ll get back to this in another post probably.

2. I’ve got ‘no skin’ in the game. I’m not risking real money during this development phase and that affects things. I’m not “cheating” as that will be silly but the dynamics are different – in my case I think I actually do a lot better when I do risk money in the market to test ideas.

3. I’m stretching myself and spreading a bit thin with the various markets and instruments. I expect this situation to improve after the inital steep learning curve that comes with new ventures like this.

Anyways, right to it. Some of the first considerations and decisions I had to make were way before even considering specific trading methods and rules. In some cases I drew on my experience in stocks and in other cases I had to forget and actively ignore habits and knowledge that came with trading stocks.

1. Which instruments? I decided to go with the most liquid instruments I could find in different timezones. A good trading strategy should work on almost any tradeable market. Besides liquidity I also wanted easy access, low operating costs, good intraday moves, tight spreads.

2. What timeframe? This invovles a lot of trial and error, there’s no forumla, you got to bring up charts for the various instruments you’re considering trading and just try different values to see what suits your personality and style and how fast or slow you want to go. I went with 5000 constant shares on the ES and varying constant shares on the DAX depending on the day’s action.

3. What basic trading style / approach? I’m a trend follower by nature, I’m not attracted to counter trend / range trading. I can take the lower win rates that come with it and have patience to ride longer trends. It’s also actually less work :-) Within the trend following approach I’m most comfortable with taking pullbacks. So I went with that. Price action, identifying trends, finding good risk:reward entry spots and taking a stab at it.

The next set of steps was then to:

1. Scan charts, I do this manually forward walking charts and eye-balling ideas. This is extremely inaccurate and very misleading at times as the eye/brain often sees what it wants to see. But being aware of that helps and it’s a very fast way of throwing different ideas on the table.

2. Come up with some preliminary rules on entry, exit, position size.

3. Start implementing the ideas and taking trades to test the waters. Different markets move and behave differently, there’s no substitute for taking trades on real dynamic data (i.e. either live real-time or playback).

4. Record new ideas, thoughts, lessons learned and analyse the raw data captured by NT which is really extensive.

5. Make adjustments and repeat the above.

So finally coming to an example, here’s a capture of the MAE / MFE analysis for the DAX taken from the Account Performance tab. The MAE / MFE is covered extensively in John Sweeney’s Maximum Adverse Excursion: Analyzing Price Fluctuations for Trading Management.

These results are just based on 55 trades over a few days with a win rate of about 50%. So definitely far from sufficient data, this is just to illustrate the thought process. What we can see is that after entering those trades the average move against the position (MAE) was 2.77 points, the average move in favor of the position (MFE) was 6.05 points. This is not too bad, it shows that the entry + inital stop more often than not put me in a favorable spot to benefit from some trend going my way. The bad part though is that the ETD – average End Trade Drawdown was a very large percent of the MFE. My main take-away from this small part of the analysis was that I was doing something wrong with my exits giving back a huge part of open profits. And that has an adverse effect on the profit factor.

There are many other aspects to developing trading rules. This is just part of how I go about doing it. Different traders approach things in different ways, whatever works and makes money for the individual trader is the way to go.

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I’m recently going through a bit of a paradigm shift in the way I view trading. It started sometimes earlier this year I think and recently has been reinforced. Like most traders, I went through the typical learning process I think and have made most of the mistakes possible too. With the exception of blowing out and pulling stops. Survival has always been an underlying key theme for me so thankfully I never went through that.

So, starting in Stage 1. In the very beginning I used to view my role as a trader in buying and selling stocks trying to sell it higher than I bought. Either selling short first or buying first has always been immaterial.

Then, after a while I moved to Stage 2. I got a little more experienced and I started seeing my job as developing my trading plan and executing it consistently. Later on that view has evolved again, following my plan isn’t an objective, it’s a pre-requisite if I wanted to make money in a consistent way. I also learned to accept it’s not possible to follow your plan 100% of the time no matter how mentally tough you are, that’s just how humans are built. Luckily that’s not needed to make money, as long as you’re not too far off from 100% (90% or 80%, who knows). Incidentally, Automated Trading Bots also can’t be at 100%, first of all they’re designed, built and configured by humans, secondly technical problems are never going to be zero.

Anyway, with more experience I moved to Stage 3. I started viewing my job in the context of my edge, analysing it, refining it, testing it and (hopefully most of the time) improving it. This lasted quite a while and is still something I’m involved in.

However on a macro level my view has now changed again, to Stage 4. In simple terms, I now see my job as finding the best ways to put my money at risk in the financial markets. Buying and selling? That’s my broker’s job. Executing the plan? Sure, either a given pre-requisite by me or let a trading bot do it. Refining the edge? Yes, an ongoing ‘maintenance’ job. So the real objective now is making the most of my limited resources – time and capital.

What this means operationally is that my aims are to: 1. Automate whatever I can in areas where I’ve become the bot, if I can get it to fully automated mode – great, if not then I’ll get it the closest I can. Aim number 2. With the time saved as a result of achieving aim number 1, I intend to explore different markets, trading styles and timeframes that are of interest to me and that I’ve not touched on till now since I was too busy being a trading bot or mentally recuperating from being a bot. An underlying theme for me as always is I need to pace myself instead of moving from 5th gear to neutral and back again every few months.

P.S. I’m pretty certain there will also be Stage 5 at some point, what’ll be? Time will tell..

בפוסט זה הובאה תלונתה של המשתמשת טלי שנכתבה בפורום בורסה בדה מרקר עם הכותרת “שיטת המסחר של טריידנט – מאיר ברק”. אולם תוכן הפוסט הוסר בעקבות איומים של מר מאיר ברק מחברת טריידנט וקולמקס

מאחר ואני לא חברה שמתמקדת בפרסום ויחסי ציבור ותשלומי שירותים של אחרים אלא סוחר יומי מקצועי שמרוויח מהשוק אז אין לי זמן מיותר להתעסק עם מכתבי האיומים של מר ברק. מי שירצה יוכל למצוא את הפוסט המדובר במקומות אחרים באינטרנט. זה לא ממש קשה. על כל אחד מוטלת האחריות לבדוק במה הוא משקיע את כספו. בכל מקרה בתחתית הפוסט ישנם לינקים למקורות שונים שבדקתי שניתן ללמוד מהם, רובם בחינם.

לשוקלים להירשם לקורס מסחר כלשהו יש לי עיצה מקצועית על סמך הנסיון שלי במהלך השנים:

אני ממליץ לכל מי ששוקל ללמוד בקורס מסחר פרקטי כלשהו לבקש מהמרצה לראות את תדפיס חשבון הברוקר שלו למספר שנים על מנת לוודא שהמרצה אכן יודע את העבודה. זה יכול לחסוך הרבה אי נעימויות, גם לכיס, וגם מפחי נפש. אני נתקל באופן קבוע במתחילים שפונים אלי בבקשת עזרה לרוב אחרי הפסדים כבדים ולימוד לא נכון של המקצוע מקורסים ומרצים מפוקפקים.

אם ניקח דוגמא מהתחום הרפואי, המשפטי, התעבורתי, וכו’ בעלי מקצוע מקבלים תעודה מסמיכה שמאשרת שמותר להם לעסוק בתחום ויש להם את הידע הנדרש והם עמדו למבחן. יש מישהו שמוכן ללכת לניתוח על ידי רופא שיש ספק אם הוא אכן קיבל תעודה ומורשה לעבוד בתור רופא? בתחום המסחר, התשואה מדברת, יש הוכחות בדוקות של תשואה חיובית לאורך שנים – מעולה. אם אין הוכחות בדוקות  – אל לו למי שמפסיד את כל כספו במסחר מניות להתלונן אלא על עצמו. אין כאן עניין של פרטיות שכן המרצה מתיימר להציג עצמו ולשווק את יכולתו תמורת תשלום ועל כן מוטלת עליו האחריות להביא אסמכתאות התומכות בטענותיו. כל אחד יכול לייצר קליפים של ווידאו, סיפורי גבורה ותדפיסים של אקסל, המבחן האמיתי זה תשואות מוכחות מתדפיס הברוקר ולאורך זמן.

דרך מומלצת לדעתי ללמוד לסחור זה ממקורות כאלו, כולם מספקים תוכן טוב ובחינם:

קורס מסחר יומי בסיסי – עשרה שיעורים במגוון נושאים בחינם לגמרי

וידאו לימוד מסחר והשקעות, 4 וידאו חינם כולל אחד חדש כל כמה ימים

אסטרטגיות מסחר כמו פריצות וניתוח טכני, האתר הזה בתשלום אבל הם נותנים נסיון חינם ששוה לנצל.

מסוחרים אמיתיים כמו זה לדוגמא

ספרים מומלצים על מסחר

כל אלה נותנים בסיס טוב על שוק ההון, מניות ושיטות מסחר שונות, שממנו אפשר לבנות ולהתפתח הלאה. ותשמרו טוב טוב על הכסף שלכם.

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Tags: Day Trading, israel, learning to trade, meir barak, Stock Market, Stocks, stocks trading, tradenet, trading, מאיר ברק, מסחר מניות, מסחר בבורסה, מסחר יומי, אסטרטגית מסחר, אסטרטגיות מסחר, ניתוח טכני, פריצות, קורס מסחר, קולמקס, שיטת מסחר, תמיכה והתנגדות, תוך יומי, לימוד מסחר, טריידנט

Dave wrote a post about something we talked about a couple of days ago. Have a look and see what you think..

stocktickr blog » Blog Archive » Which Trading Mistake Is Worse?

… Which mistake do you treat more seriously and why? Do your actions line up with your goals with respect to these mistakes?

There have a been a few posts on movethemarkets.com about becoming a trader and trading for a living. This, together with some improved results over the last few weeks made me think about going fulltime. I think I need to determine for myself what would it take for me to go that route. I know there’s never going to be any guarantee to this sort of thing but there are some steps that one can take in order to feel more comfortable doing that. For example:

X months worth of living expenses secured?
Y months profitable trading performance?
Z amount of $ made per month?
an arsenal of more than one market edge in case one disappears?

Anything else?

Some might ask why quit the day job if you can do both. Well I can do both, but just barely, while sacrificing a lot of other things such as general mental and physical wellbeing and slower speed of getting better at trading. Besides, I far more enjoy trading and trading research than my day job. So for the first time ever I feel I actually don’t HAVE TO have a day job and I might do nicely just on trading. Anyways just throwing my 2c into the discussion.

I found this post and email quite true.

It’s funny, but part of the problem I’ve had is wrapping my head around the idea that not every day is a good day to trade, which leads me to believe that realistically, I might only have 2 or 3 days a week that are optimal trading days. That’s great and everything, but I’m used to being someone’s slave working 12+ hour days at all hours of the day and night. Working only 2 or 3 days a week and making ungodly sums of money is just…weird.

From Say no to crack. Trade on active days. I found the site via TraderMike.

Dr. Brett Steenbarger has written a very good post on his TraderFeed blog on one of the psychological pitfalls of trading – size.

Large changes in trading size lead to outsized gains and losses and departures from prudent risk management. These large emotional swings are processed by the mind in a manner similar to psychological traumas, creating very negative (and difficult to change) conditioned responses (different in degree, but not kind, from post-traumatic stress reactions).

My heartfelt message: Treat size with caution. Increase size incrementally, ensuring that trades don’t feel different when you enter and manage them. The best treatment for trading psychology problems is preventive medicine.

Self-Inflicted Problems of Trading Psychology

I increase the size of my risk by small increments, quite infrequently and with more emphasis on the psychological impact than the P&L one.