Yoohoo's guide to becoming a great trader

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Quote from puretruth:

I have talked with someone working for a prop house.

ALL of them use stops, they are not even allowed to trade without using a emergency stop



Of course they have "emergency stops".

Another "armchair book reader" who simply does not understand.

"i talked to someone" :D
 
Quote from rollingstatic:

tests have proven again and again and again that STOPS HURT PERFORMANCE regardless of style. If you would like, I would be happy to post references upon references.

Do you accept everything people say at face value?

As you've found out and others have replied, stops are not compatible with a mean reverting system, profit targets are.

The opposite is true for trending systems, profit targets limit your profits while a statistically constructed trailing stop will keep you in the trade longer.

That aside, a stop loss well outside the market should also be used if you're doing interday trades.
 
Quote from rollingstatic:

a 1% stop over 394k trades results in 26.89% winners

a 3% stop over 321k trades results in 47% winners

a 5 % stop over 286k trades results in 57.54% winners

all the way to

NO stop results in 69.81% winners over 236k trades.


STOCKS REVERT< STOCKS REVERT

lesson of the day, folks.



WHERE IS YOUR TESTING THAT INDICATES OTHERWISE--oh, let me guess, you depend of OLD WIVES TALES and internet message boards for your FACTS

if you STILL believe in STOPS-- ask yourself-- are you a tiny pisser, armchair trader, or simply a DELUDED nice guy? cause you AINT a pro Trader.

%winners is irrelevant. What were the stats? PF? DD? Sharpe? etc.?
 
Quote from yoohoo:

5 Simple Keys to becoming a great trader

You can be a better trader than you are now. Everyone can. If you are very successful you have much more to learn. If you are totally confused here is a way to succeed. These are the Simple Keys I used to develop a method that allows me to win every day…

1. READ THE BEST BOOK EVER WRITTEN ON THE PRACTICE OF TECHNICAL ANALYSIS
· The best book you will ever read is your own screen-shot journal with brief notes of every market move that interests you.
· Be careful of the market you choose to trade. Some are extremely volatile while others are easier to begin with.
· Experiment with a few markets until you find one that appeals to you
· Study each reversal, pause, continuation, trend, chop, spike and impulse for the signal that moved the market
· Draw S&R and Trend Lines by hand on paper. You will learn much better than on a computer.
· Compare line, candle and bar charts
· Google Bar Signals and Candle Signals, mark them on your charts. These are your entry and exit signals.
· When you can’t see how to enter or exit or why the move took off, look at different styles like Time, Volume, Range & Tick Charts.
· Match your Bar, Candle and Line signals with S&R levels and Trend Lines
· Study your journal every day before and after the market and at weekends
· Continually add to your journal and remove older pages that a have less important observations
· Use lots of different time frames: it allows more practice on one instrument to build a better understanding of market dynamics

2. CONSTRUCT A DREAM OF HOW YOU WANT TO TRADE
· It’s a lonely walk, a personal journey of discovery about yourself as much as the market behaviour
· Everyone has advice to give, the successful and even the perpetual failures. Ignore all and follow your own path.
· It’s your dream, your perception, how your eye perceives structure, movement, speed, time, size and colour. Trust yourself.
· As you study your journal by investigating price movements, you will begin to favour a time frame and a style.
· Do not allow anyone to tell you what you must, or must not do. What is impossible for one is the best way for another.
· As your dream begins to take form learn all you can to answer every question you ask of yourself
· INO TV.com can be a good resource. Cheaper than books and you can have it play as you watch the charts
· Know this: everything works! But mastering a few of the hundreds of tools requires extreme dedication
· Ignore all who want to argue to convince you they know best. Those who know are at peace.
· Use at least two monitors and three different time frames, but in time increase both of these
· There are no impossibilities, but reaching great heights require great investments of time and effort

3. USE THE RULE BOOK
· Now take your observations and begin to write trading rules based on what you see
· Test your rules in paper trading over and over until you have a high success rate
· Investigate every failure and find rules to help you avoid its weakness
· Do not back-test indicators: the results are appalling. Indicators work best in multiple time frames.
· If you want to learn how indicators work, it will require much more effort than learning price action
· Make sure you have rules for placing and moving stops
· Use a simulator to test your rules
· When you have completed your Book of Rules and are making a profit on the simulator, it is time for serious trading.

4. MAKE YOUR DREAM A REALITY
· Now it’s time to add emotional control into the mix
· Open an account with a broker who offers low commissions
· Deposit enough to cover your contract cost at least three times over.
· Do not trade on margin – you have not proven you can trade without doing yourself damage.
· Download the ORDER ENTRY SCREEN and paper trade it until you are familiar with how it works.
· You might want to use a better front end that you can customise than using the one your broker provides
· When you are familiar with how to place an order and always with a stop, you are ready to trade.
· Do not trade without a stop
· Place the minimum amount of money possible on your trade
· At the start you will make mistakes until your brain becomes accustomed to all the activities going on
· If you are not making a profit stop and go back to point 1. Go through the whole process again.
· If you are making a profit, when you are not trading go back to point 1 and repeat the process again.

5. GET A LIFE
· Trading is all consuming. For a long time it demands everything… now get a life
· Refreshing your soul is important to keep a keen edge
· Give to others. Hoarding money after meeting your future needs is symptomatic of a sick soul
· Be happy. You are winning at one of the most challenging ways to earn a living
· To be happy practice virtue for the love of money is the root of all evil
· Sometime live with the poor as one of them, even if only for 2 weeks. It will shape your values and give you balance
· Give some poor people a leg up in life, but select them wisely like you would an investment

Simple – Yes! Easy – No!

These are 5 simple keys? The high level stuff was useless, did not drill down into the "50-60 not so simple sub-keys..."

you need the following:

an edge with significant positive expectancy

superior money management skills

everything else is mostly fluff...
 
Quote from TraderZones:


you need the following:

an edge with significant positive expectancy

superior money management skills

everything else is mostly fluff...

This seems very close to being a complete list. I would add one other thing - the bets produced by your system with an edge need to have a reasonably balanced risk/reward profile.

For example, suppose you have the opportunity to make $1 bets where one time in a billion you will get $2billion back. For sake of argument say you can bet any multiple of $1 you like and get a correspondingly bigger or smaller return, but you can only make 1 such bet per day.

This bets has a huge edge - your return is a whopping +100% on every $ bet. But your money management rules, if correct, will require that you bet very small to ensure you still have capital left when you finally hit a winner. Worse, you've got millions of trials on average before you see the first winner - the bet, while positive expectation, is in effect useless.

In contrast, give me a 50/50 coin flip with a 5% edge in payout once a day, and I'll ramp my account up in no time.

That said, I have no problem with the OP. There's a difference between what you need to win and how you go about developing the edge. You're talking about different things.
 
STOPS ARGUMENT

Good topic to use as an example of solving a problem. This falls mostly under the 2nd Key to great trading i.e. Don't listen to anyone else. By that I don't mean not to consider what they say at all. I simply mean the limitations imposed on them by their system is not related to your trading unless you trade exactly the same way they do. I am trying to teach you how to develop a fluid methodology that copes with anything you throw at it rather than a rigid rigid mechanical system like Connor's that dies a death trying to cope with percentage whipsaws.

So let's dig a little deeper into Connors trading style. Here are some of the system rules that led to his conclusions...

* Use 2 period RSI for entry
* Use the VIX to help time trades
* Don't use stops
* Trade at the end of the month
* Don't buy below the 200 MA

Here is what one user of the Connor System found...

“I have tested the 2 period RSI strategy by picking almost 50 stocks at random and found out that the strategy fails more than 50% giving sell signal during consolidation periods or when the stock is moving higher. I also noticed that failures are greater with weekly than daily charts. In this case most often the stock keeps moving higher even though the weekly 2 period RSI is overbought.”

Someone else takes a different approach to analyzing the Stops problem...

“Another issue raised in the book is that stops hurt performance.
This is true because the market makers anticipate the location of the stops and can run through them. My experience has been that this situation can be avoided by placing stops in areas where most others traders are not likely to place them. I have done tests using almost 50 trades where stops are placed near support and in this case the authors are right in that the stops are run by the market makers creating further selling and when the stops are flushed the stock moves higher. On the other hand if stops are placed in areas not predictable by market makers, this situation does not occur.
Also note that on page 130 in the authors interview with the navy seal (MACH), the interviewee stresses on the necessity of using stops to help you reach your trading goals by avoiding destruction by a few bad trades. This seems contradictory to the authors earlier comments regarding stops.”

Here's my golden rule: find out how to break your trading limitations. First of all if a trader of mine was using this system to trade I'd be disappointed. Why?

1. Using mechanical percentage stops based on a system is not flowing with PA
2. Entering with a 2 period RSI is going to get you whipped
3. Only buying above the 200 MA means at times the energy of the climb above 200 is dissipated and the RSI will give a weak signal
4. Trade at the end of the month (I could add only buy when there is a full moon!)

Percentage stops are a way of saying I have not a clue where PA is telling me supply and demand is so give me am Excel spreadsheet and I will perform a back test to see what is the best distance away from entry to place my stop.

Guys, there are so many failings and limitations on this strategy, but if that's where you want to be then that's where you end up – in a box. My 5 Keys are to help you break out of the box.

Try trading a really volatile market without a stop and you will soon get your head handed to you or you allow wild draw downs that destroy emotions and limit increasing size. But if you don't know how to flow with PA then you will decide the problem is the stop and not with your trading.

We are told another 911 type even will happen but to expect even worse. There was nothing like today's level of algo trading on 911 and within a few seconds the liquidity will be gone. Try getting out of the market without a stop when there are no buyers, especially with size.

The issue is more than the question should you trade with or without a stop. The real issue is WHY the conclusion either way is reached. In this case Connors is correct. Trading with a stop doesn't work for him because of the design limitations of his system and using percentage stops.

If you understand PA, supply and demand, quality set ups, S&R and the tells of the market you will buy irrespective of where the 200MA is, disregard the time of the month, and qualify the RSI2 so you filter false signals.
 
Quote from rollingstatic:

Total Garbage! Folks, this is classic armchair trader, book reader crap. It's all over the internet: Lines like this

<i>· When you are familiar with how to place an order and always with a stop, you are ready to trade.
· Do not trade without a stop</i>


The simplist fact is that STOPS HURT PERFORMANCE--- ask any system designer.

EVERY line in this diatribe is RIGHT OUT OF BOOKS written by NON TRADER authors... WAKE UP !

What a MORON! Man, we can pick you book pro's and phony baloneys out from a mile away, but I bet you will get a book deal from prentice hall!!

You have zero clue who you're talking about.
 
Quote from rollingstatic:

Stops are psychological comfort-- FACTS are they HURT performance. The tighter the stop the worse the performance. You folks have really DRANK THE KOOLAID.

See page 32 in Connor's "short term trading srategies that work" for the test results over 100 of thousands of trades.

http://store.tradingmarkets.com/books/stocks/short-term-trading-strategies-that-work.html

You can either listen to the statistical facts, or continue down your merry way of listening to armchair traders, tiny pissers, and those who want your MONEY ie BROKERS.

have it your way, the FACTS speak for themselves.


Probably you are a fu...... shill form tradingmarkets that wants also money and that's another FACT because strategies that work are not sold for peanuts ($40 ...LOL) on a snake oil site...
 
Connor's system is actually very poor by good discretional trader standards.

And if one is idiotic enough to backtest the way this system was tested, then of course stops hurt performance.

The other way around if one has at least minor understanding of what good timing is.
 
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