Forex Motivational Quotes
11. "I'm only rich because I know when I'm wrong. I basically have survived by recognizing my mistakes."
-George Soros.
12. "It was clear to me that other people could trade for a living, and if it was possible for other people to do it, then I could persevere long enough to figure it out."
-Rob Booker.
13. "The biggest risk is not taking a risk. In a world that's changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks."
–Mark Zuckerberg.
14. "I have two basic rules about winning in trading as well as in life: 1. If you don't bet, you can't win. 2. If you lose all your chips, you can't bet."
-Larry Hite.
15. "I just wait until there is money lying in the corner, and all I have to do is go over there and pick it up. I do nothing in the meantime."
-Jim Rogers.
16. "I believe in analysis and not forecasting."
-Nicolas Darvas, 'How I Made $2,000,000 in the Stock Market', 1986.
17. "The purpose of trading is not being right, the purpose is to make money, and I think that's my number-one rule. Don't get hung up on your current positions."
-Dana Allen.
18. "Learn to take losses. The most important thing in making money is not letting your losses get out of hand."
-Marty Schwartz.
19. "Whatever method you use to enter trades, the most critical thing is that if there is a major trend, your approach should assure that you get in that trend."
-Richard Dennis.
20. "The fundamental law of investing is the uncertainty of the future."
-Peter Bernstein.
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Trading quotes #1 — Paul Tudor Jones
“Where you want to be is always in control, never wishing, always trading, and always, first and foremost protecting your butt.”
“If you have a losing position that is making you uncomfortable, the solution is very simple: Get out…”
“Don’t focus on making money; focus on protecting what you have.”
“The most important rule of trading is to play great defense, not great offense.”
The legendary trader, Paul Tudor Jones, made these quotes on separate occasions, but apparently, he’s trying to pass the same message: protecting your trading capital is key to achieving any success in trading.
You may think that trading is all about making money. Yes, the ultimate goal is to make money, but you can’t make a dime if you lose your capital. So, the primary goal is to protect your capital.
And how do you do that? Always be in control: trade a position size that won’t affect your emotions. When in a losing position that’s making you uncomfortable, get out — ideally, you should use a stop-loss order that would get you out before it gets uncomfortable.
Trading quotes #2 — Ray Dalio
“What is most important isn’t knowing the future — it is knowing how to react appropriately to the information available at each point in time.”
“The biggest mistake investors make is to believe that what happened in the recent past is likely to persist. They assume that something that was a good investment in the recent past is still a good investment.”
Many traders think that it’s only when they know what would happen in the future that they can make money. So, they make many assumptions about the future, including the belief that what is happening at the moment would persist forever — the trend would continue or the range market would persist. They trade as if the present condition is the default condition of the market.
Ray Dalio reminds us of one fundamental truth about trading: we can’t predict the future with certainty, and interestingly, we don’t need to. What matters is your ability to use the information available at every moment to make the most appropriate decision.
Trading quotes #3 — Bill Lipschutz
“If most traders would learn to sit on their hands 50 percent of the time, they would make a lot more money. I don’t think you can consistently be a winning trader if you’re banking on being right more than 50 percent of the time. You have to figure out how to make money being right only 20 to 30 percent of the time.”
There are two ways to look at what Bill Lipschutz is saying here. The first one is that depending on the timeframe you are trading, reliable trade setups that are worth the risk don’t form that frequently. If you are a swing trader, for example, you may only get two or three good setups per week, depending on the number of markets you are monitoring. So, for the most part, you won’t be making any trade — until a good setup appears.
Another way to look at the quote is that you don’t need to be right up to 50% of the time to make money if you employ a good reward/risk ratio. If you have a strategy that offers you a 4:1 reward/risk ratio, you can be profitable even if you win only 30% of the time.
Trading quotes #4 — Brett Steenbarger
“We become what we consistently do.” “Routine is necessary for efficiency; breaking routine is necessary for adaptation.”
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”
Truly, to master anything in life, you have to do that thing consistently over a long time. At a time, it becomes a routine, and that consistency helps you to become efficient in it. However, in trading, while the market conditions change from time to time, so to be good at trading, you should learn when to break the routine so you can adapt to the new condition. This is simply what the renowned trading psychologist, is trying to say.
“The core problem, however, is the need to fit markets into a style of trading rather than finding ways to trade that fit with market behavior.”
Brett Steenbarger identified the problem of not adapting to the changing market conditions as trying to fit the markets into our trading styles, instead of trading in a way that fits the market condition at that moment. For example, some crypto traders, in the latter part of the second quarter of 2021, continued buying dips even when it’s obvious that cryptocurrencies have entered a bear market.
Trading quotes #5 — Bruce Kovner
“I know where I’m getting out before I get in. Whenever I enter a position, I have a predetermined stop. That is the only way I can sleep. The position size on a trade is determined by the stop, and the stop is determined on a technical basis.”
First, it helps to have an exit order in place so you can get out without your emotions getting the better of you. It is difficult to make a logical decision in the middle of trade; emotions would always come in.
However, Mr. Bruce Kovner is saying something interesting here regarding stop loss and position size. Many traders approach this the other way around: they choose a position size to trade and then calculate the size of stop loss that would allow them to risk a particular amount of dollars they plan to commit in the trade.
But that is wrong, as it forces you to use far more leverage than is good for your account size and trading experience. Mr. Bruce is telling you to place your stops at a point that, if reached, will reasonably indicate that the trade is wrong — not at a point determined primarily by the maximum dollar amount you are willing to lose.
Trading quotes #6 — Van K. Tharp
“When you understand what’s involved in winning, as do professional gamblers, you’ll tend to bet more during a winning streak and less during a losing streak. However, the average person does exactly the opposite: he or she bets more after a series of losses and less after a series of wins.”
Of course, each trade is different, and wins and losses are randomly distributed. But like any randomly distributed variable, wins and losses can come in streaks. In a winning streak, you may be more likely to win the next trade, while in a losing streak, you may be more likely to lose the next trade.
Van K. Tharp understands this strategy, which is also used by professional gamblers. They bet more in a winning streak since there’s a tendency to win the next bet/trade in that state. On the other hand, during a losing streak, they reduce their bet size because there’s a tendency to lose the next trade. This approach can help you maximize the periods when you win and reduce risk during the losing period.
Trading quotes #7 — Rob Hanna
“No one can upset you unless you give them permission.”
You may be wondering how this simple statement relates to trading the financial markets. But then, the statement becomes clear when you realize that Rob Hanna is a renowned quant trader. In quant trading, mathematical models are used to analyze the market for opportunities and are implemented with the use of computer algorithms and artificial intelligence. So, there’s no room for human emotions in making trading decisions — quant traders don’t give the market permission to upset them.
But this is not just about quant trading or even the general automated trading ecosystem. If you are a discretionary trader, you can also apply this lesson in your trading. The primary way to do this is by having a trading plan that tells you what to do in any market situation. You can also write out the criteria of your trading strategy so you know exactly when to enter and exit a trade without second-guessing the market.
Trading quotes #8 — Ed Seykota
“The markets are the same now as they were five or ten years ago because they keep changing-just as they did then.”
It seems as if Ed Seykota and his quote contradict what we know about the market, but it is basically the truth. The market is still the same and behaves the same — it trends when it wants to and moves sideways when it wants to. If you know that the market is always there and behaving the same way, generating trading setups, you won’t have to chase after a missed trade or make other trading mistakes. Your primary goal would be to protect your capital so you can take the next setup that appears.
“Win or lose, everybody gets what they want from the market. Some people seem to like to lose, so they win by losing money.”
Truly, the market gives you what you deserve. If you risk too much, you lose a lot. But if you trade carefully and minimize your risks, you will be able to play enough hands for your edge to manifest.
Trading quotes #9 — Jack Schwager
“There are a million ways to make money in the markets. The irony is that they are all very difficult to find.”
Jack Schwager states the obvious here: there are arguably as many different trading strategies as there are many traders in the market. And for strategies with an edge in the market, when executed properly over a large number of trades, they will make money. The problem, as he pointed out in the second sentence, is taking time to create a trading strategy with an edge and being disciplined enough to implement it correctly. This brings us to another quote from him:
“Being wrong is acceptable, but staying wrong is totally unacceptable.”
Here, he is talking about being disciplined while trading. It’s normal to make a wrong trading decision. But once you notice that your decision is wrong, you correct it immediately instead of holding on to it.
Trading quotes #10 — Jesse Livermore
“To anticipate the market is to gamble. To be patient and act only when the market gives the signal is to speculate.”
Jesse’s message here is simple: in trading, you don’t try to predict what the market might do in the future; you simply trade the signals you see at the moment. If you are not seeing any signal, you wait until the market shows you one. He emphasizes patients again with this other quote:
“It was never my thinking that made the big money for me; it was my sitting.”
Truly, it is that period of waiting that the money is made. First, sitting it out and waiting for a profitable trade to ride its course till the end of the trend can determine how much you make from a trade. But more importantly, waiting for the right setup to appear saves you from several potentially losing trades.
“Instead of hoping, he must fear; instead of fear, he must hope. He must fear that his loss must develop into a much bigger loss and hope that his profit may become a big profit.”
Here, Jesse Livermore describes the type of emotions a trader must have in different situations. If a trade is going against you, especially if it has crossed the level you marked for your stop loss (hard stop is better), you should be afraid that the loss can get bigger, instead of hoping that the price might turn and go in your favor. On the other hand, when you are in a winning trade, instead of fearing that the trade may turn against you, you should hope that the profit becomes bigger.
Trading quotes #11 — Jim Rogers
“One of the best rules anybody can learn about investing is to do nothing, absolutely nothing unless there is something to do… I just wait until there is money lying in the corner, and all I have to do is go over there and pick it up… I wait for a situation that is like the proverbial ‘Shooting fish in a barrel’…”
The truth is that many traders feel that they always have to be doing something in the market. They would make a big play that turned out huge profits and would say, “Boy, I’m killing it; I just tripled my money.” Then, they hop in the market again to do something else with that money. They just can’t sit there and wait for another signal to developing before going back into the market. Jim Rogers says that this overtrading often leads to a disaster.
Trading quotes #12 — Jim Simons
“Patterns of price movement are not random. However, they’re close enough to random so that getting some excess, some edge out of it, is not easy and not so obvious — thank God. God probably doesn’t care. Thank whoever.”
Often regarded as ‘the man who solved the market’, Jim Simons launched the quant revolution, using mathematical models to analyze and trade the markets. In this quote, he points out that in the apparent randomness of the price action, there are patterns that can be exploited to gain an edge in the market.
“We search through historical data looking for anomalous patterns that we would not expect to occur at random.”
To find a pattern that gives you an edge in the market, you need to search through the historical price action. It’s there you can find what has been working that can still work in the market. He emphasizes this in his other quote:
“Past performance is the best predictor of success.”
Truly, while past performance may not be indicative of future performance, it is the best predictor of success there is. So, it makes no sense to use a strategy without first backtesting it to know how well it performed in the past.
Trading quotes #13 — Larry Connors
“I get real, real concerned when I see trading strategies with too many rules (you should too).”
Of course, there are obvious reasons for Larry Connors‘s concerns. When there are too many rules, the trader can easily get confused and start trading erratically, making a lot of mistakes, such as jumping the guns (placing a trade when the setup has not been completed) and missing trading opportunities.
A trading strategy should be as simple as possible, with a few rules that are easy to execute. That way, you know what you are looking for and what to do at any point. As you know, it is not easy to make decisions in the heat of the moment when trading. So, the criteria for every action — entry, exit, moving stop loss, etc. — must be clear. If the rules are not clear, it becomes difficult to make trading decisions.
Trading quotes #14 — Larry Hite
“I have two basic rules about winning in trading as well as in life:
If you don’t bet, you can’t win
If you lose all your chips, you can’t bet”
Larry Hite‘s rules are simple but all-encompassing. They don’t just tell you what you shouldn’t do but also hints at the emotions that affect traders. If, out of fear of losing, you choose not to trade, you have definitely denied yourself the opportunity to win. Without participating in the game, you cannot win, so you have to conquer that fear that holds you back from pulling the trigger.
On the other hand, if, out of greed, you trade more than you can and end up losing all your capital, you won’t be able to trade again until you raise another capital. So, you have to protect your capital with all your might.
Trading quotes #15 — Larry Williams
“The most common bad habit I have seen in traders — good and bad ones — is the inability to react correctly to market action.”
This observation is very true, especially among new traders who are always trying to do what every other person is doing, without seeking to understand how the market works. Larry Williams captures that mentality in this statement:
“What you will be looking for is a day that closes above the prior day’s high and most likely ‘breaks’ out to the upside to close above a trading range. This is the twitching worm that causes the public to leap before they look.”
Whatever that instruction means is left to the trader’s interpretation — a new trader will definitely get confused. So, it pays to understand the market and your trading personality. With that, you can create a suitable trading strategy, rather than following another person’s instruction.
Trading quotes #16 — Linda Raschke
“Some of the best trades come when everyone gets very panicky. The crowd can often act very stupidly in the markets. You can picture price fluctuations around an equilibrium level as a rubber band being stretched — if it gets pulled too far, eventually it will snap back. As a short-term trader, I try to wait until the rubber band is stretched to its extreme point.”
Surely, there are different ways of trading the market; you don’t have to do what others are doing. For example, when a breakout trader is cheering for a good breakout signal, a contrarian may be taking the opposite direction and still make profits. What matters is understanding the market action relative to your style of trading. Being a short-term trader, Linda Raschke favors the mean-reversion approach.
Trading quotes #17 — Mark Douglas
“Anything can happen.”
After placing a trade, anything can happen — the market can go massively against you, go in your favor, or simply fluctuate around your entry point. You have to have a plan for whatever happens after you place the trade.
“You don’t need to know what is going to happen next in order to make money.”
This truth is quite interesting; you don’t need to predict whether any particular trade will go in your favor to make money with your strategy, provided it has a demonstrable edge in the market. Whether any particular trade is a winner or loser doesn’t matter that much.
“There’s a random distribution between wins and losses for any given set of variables that define an edge.”
No matter the strategy you use, some of your trades would be winners, some would be losers. The distribution of winners and losers is random. So, you won’t know which will end up as a winner or loser, and interestingly, you don’t need to know.
“An edge is nothing more than an indication of a higher probability of one thing happening over another.”
What matters to you is to make sure that your strategy has an edge in the market you are trading. That is, over a large number of trades, either the number of winners is more than the losers or the amount of money made from the winners supersedes the amount lost from losers when there are more losers.
“Every moment in the market is unique.”
The same trading setup that played out as a winner in the previous trade can play out as a loser in the current trade because the present moment is unique and different from that previous one.
“When you genuinely accept risk, you will be at peace with any outcome.”
Realizing the five quotes above, the legendary Mark Douglas expects you to accept to genuinely accept the risks inherent in each trade — knowing that it can be a loser and being fine with that. Once you achieve this, you will be at peace with whatever outcome you get from each trade.
Trading quotes #18 — Marty Schwartz
“The most important thing in making money is not letting your losses get out of hand. When I became a winner, I said, ‘I figured it out, but if I’m wrong, I’m getting the hell out, because I want to save my money and go on to the next trade.”
It seems that almost every successful trader talks about managing risks. Marty Schwartz is basically repeating the same thing others said: protect your trading capital so that you make the next trade.
Trading quotes #19 — Michael Carr
“Don’t worry about what the markets are going to do, worry about what you are going to do in response to the markets.”
The quote looks simple, but it carries a lot of meanings. Michael Carr wants you to focus on the thing you can control and not on what you can’t control. You obviously can’t control what the market is going to do, so there’s little sense in worrying about that. What matters to you is how you respond to whatever the market throws at you. You must have a plan for every market situation.
Trading quotes #20 — Michael Marcus
“Being a successful trader also takes courage: the courage to try, the courage to fail, the courage to succeed, and the courage to keep on going when the going gets tough. Perhaps the most important rule is to hold on to your winners and cut your losers.”
Obviously, you need a lot of courage to succeed in trading because it is highly likely that you will blow up your first trading capital or more. And when that happens, you may lose hope about ever succeeding in trading and may not bother raising another capital to trade again. Michael Marcus means that even if you manage to raise another capital, you may become afraid to pull the trigger when your setup occurs in the market.
Trading quotes #21 — Michael Steinhardt
“Make good decisions even with incomplete information. You will never have all the information you need. What matters is what you do with the information you have.”
As long as trading is concerned, you will always feel like you don’t have enough information to make your trading decision. If care is not taken, you will keep chasing more and more information by applying all sorts of indicators on your chart. At the end of the day, the so-called extra information does not add anything new but you end up with analysis paralysis. Michael Steinhardt advises us to learn how to make a decision with the information we have to avoid falling into the trap of analysis paralysis.
Trading quotes #22 — Nicolas Darvas
“I believe in analysis and not forecasting. All a company report and balance sheet can tell you is the past and the present; they cannot tell future.”
Like other successful traders, Nicolas Darvas emphasizes on focusing what the market tells you at the moment, rather than trying to predict what will happen in the future. Every data you have at any point in time can only tell you about the present and the past; the future remains unknown but shouldn’t matter.
Trading quotes #23 — Alexander Elder
“The goal of a successful trader is to make the best trades. Money is secondary.”
Alexander Elder is one of the legendary traders that created several trading indicators and methods of analyzing the markets. You can imagine how he so much enjoyed the process of identifying trading opportunities that he started creating indicators. For him, it’s all about getting the process right — understanding your strategy and executing your trades the best possible way.
Money is only a by-product of getting the process right. Your focus should be on the process; don’t bother about money. If you have a strategy with an edge and consistently execute your trades well, you will definitely make money in the long run.
Trading quotes #24 — Steve Clark
“Do more of what works and less of what doesn’t.”
Trading is a personal journey. In this journey, you learn by applying yourself and finding out for yourself what works and what does not. Steve Clark tells you that success comes by doing more of what you find out works for you and doing less of what you notice does not work.
Trading quotes #25 — Tom Basso
“I think investment psychology is by far the more important element, followed by risk control, with the least important consideration being the question of where to buy and sell.”
Tom Basso is right about this: mastering your trading psychology and risk control is far more important than knowing where to buy and sell. You can buy a trading strategy that tells you where to buy and sell, but it’s you who have to learn and master risk control and how to manage your trading emotions.
“As long as you learn something from a loss, it’s not really a loss.”
One of the important aspects of trading psychology is knowing how to take a loss. You have to learn something from the loss. That way, it adds value to you as a trader.
Trading quotes #26 — Stanley Druckenmiller
“I believe that good investors are successful not because of their IQ, but because they have an investing discipline.”
Stanley Druckenmiller is an American investor, hedge fund manager, who worked for George Soros’s Quantum Fund as the lead portfolio manager. What he is saying in that quote is that achieving success in trading is not a question of intelligence; instead, it is dependent on the trader’s ability to be disciplined enough to execute his strategy all the time. A profitable trading strategy if not implemented with discipline would never make any profit.
Trading quotes #27 — William Eckhardt
“The desire to maximize the number of winning trades (or minimize the number of losing trades) works against the trader. The success rate of trades is the least important performance statistic and may even be inversely related to performance.”
William Eckhardt is a renowned commodities and futures trader and fund manager who conducted the famous Turtle Trading experiment with his friend, Richard Dennis. In this quote, he indicates that the win rate of any trading system is not the most important factor. You can have a low win rate and still be profitable because the reward for any win is far more than the loss in a losing trade. A good system should have a good reward/risk ratio.
Trading quotes #28 — Steven Cohen
“I always tell my traders that they would’ve loved the 1990s because it was a fairly easy time to make money. It’s hard to find ideas that aren’t picked over and harder to get real returns and differentiate yourself. We are entering a new environment. The days of big returns are gone.”
What Steve Cohen is saying here is that it is difficult to find an edge in the market these days, and he is right, especially for discretionary trading. With the advent of algorithmic trading, the market has become more efficient, which makes it difficult to find inefficiencies to exploit.
Trading quotes #29 — Richard Driehaus
“If there’s a large move on significant news, either favorable or unfavorable, the stock will usually continue to move in that direction.”
Richard Driehaus is often seen as the father of momentum investing. In this quote, he indicates that once the price gains momentum in one direction, it is likely to remain in that direction. For example, during a news release, the market may interpret the news as favorable or unfavorable and move in the corresponding direction, and it is likely to continue moving in that direction until something else changes its direction.
Trading quotes #30 — Gil Blake
“Whenever I take a position, I like to imagine what it would be like under the worst-case scenario. In doing so, I minimize the confusion if that situation actually develops. In my view, losses are a very important part of trading. When a loss happens, I believe in embracing it.”
What Gil Blake is saying here is that by trying to imagine the worst-case scenario after placing a trade, one can get his or her mind prepared for anything the market does. If the trade ends in a loss, it is easier to accept without getting too attached to the outcome.
Trading quotes #31 — Mark Ritchie
“If I find myself praying about a position, I liquidate immediately.”
Mark Ritchie is a veteran of commodity trading, so he knows what it means to be at the mercy of the market. As a trader, you must put the control in your hands. If the market is going against your position, the best thing is to exit from the trade to avoid a catastrophic loss. There is no point hoping and praying that the market turns around in your favor. Hope is a dangerous thing in trading.
Trading quotes #32 — Joe Ritchie
“Successful traders tend to be instinctive rather than overly analytical.”
Joe Ritchie is an options and commodities trader who founded Chicago Research and Trading (CRT) in 1977. He believes that too much analysis is not always good in trading because there will always be new information you may want to factor into your analysis but trying to do that may lead to analysis paralysis. To be a good trader, there must be a balance between analyzing more information and using your guts.
Trading quotes #33 — Michael Lauer
“This business is not about investing in great companies; it’s about profiting from inefficiently priced stocks.”
This Michael’s quote is one of the tenets of technical analysis. As a technical trader, Michael Lauer believes that everything is already reflected in the price and volume data, so if a trader can find a consistent inefficiency in those, he or she can exploit it to make money. Trading based on technical analysis means that you only need to study the charts to find tradable patterns that reflect market inefficiency and have a high probability of success.
Trading quotes #34 — Dana Galante
“One thing I look for is companies with slowing revenue growth who have kept their earnings looking good by cutting expenses. Usually, it’s only a matter of time before their earnings growth slows as well. Another thing I look for is a company that is doing great but has a competitor creeping up that no one is paying attention to.”
Dana Galante is famed for using a short-only strategy. This quote shows how she spots stocks that are good for short positions. Her idea is to short stocks of companies that are not performing well and has a formidable competitor.
Trading quotes #35 — Steve Watson
“You have to be willing to accept a certain level of risk, or else you will never pull the trigger. You can’t be afraid to take a loss. The people who are successful in this business are the people who are willing to lose money.”
Steve Watson says it the way it is. Trading requires taking a certain amount of risk to stand a chance to gain. If you are afraid of taking the risk, you won’t be able to pull the trigger. But you should only risk what you can afford to lose because, on many occasions, you will actually lose, and you must be willing to take that loss if you want to succeed.
Trading quotes #36 — Victor Sperandeo
“The key to building wealth is to preserve capital and wait patiently for the right opportunity to make the extraordinary gains.”
Often called Trader Vic, Victor Sperandeo is renowned for having ‘predicted’ the stock market crash of 1987. In this quote, he admonishes traders to preserve their capital and wait for the right moment. There is no point in trying so hard to make money in an unfavorable market and risk losing your capital. Preserve that capital and wait until the market is favorable and you see a high-probability setup before you make a bet.
Trading quotes #37 — Claudio Guazzoni
“I was particularly attracted to the concept of buying undervalued assets, which I became aware was not something that was confined to just leveraged buyouts. Every period of time has its own opportunities where one can find investments that are extremely discounted and have a very well-protected downside.”
Claudio Guazzoni and his strategy is to buy undervalued stocks because they are trading at a discount and, thus, may be said to have lower downside potential. Many successful investors use this value investing approach. Warren Buffet is a huge fan of value investing. The key to using this approach is knowing when to enter the market because it can be dangerous to try to catch a falling knife — it can cut deeply.
Trading quotes #38 — David Shaw
“I grew up with the idea that, if not impossible, it was certainly extremely difficult to beat the market. And even now, I find it remarkable how efficient the markets actually are. It would be nice if all you had to do in order to earn abnormally large returns was to identify some sort of standard pattern in the historical prices of a given stock.”
In this quote, David Shaw points out how difficult trading can be. Some people tend to think that trading is easy — just hitting the buy or sell button based on a certain pattern in the market. Mastering the act of trading goes beyond finding a pattern and placing a trade order.
Trading quotes #39 — Michael Masters
“There’s a temporal difference between speculative flows and price formation, and supply and demand flows”
Michael Masters is trying to let us understand that price movements from retail speculators are different from those caused by smart money. If you want to catch the major price movements, you have to look for patterns of price movement created by smart money.
Trading quotes #40 — Steve Lescarbeau
“I do not attempt to prognosticate the market. I react to what happens in the market.”
Steve Lescarbeau states the obvious here: you don’t impose your expectations on the market; instead, you should react to what you see in the market at that moment. Trading your expectations, rather than what you see in the market can lead to frequent losses. For example, don’t expect that the market will reverse at a particular support or resistance level just because it did the last time it went to that level. Wait until the market actually reverses before you make your trade.
Trading quotes #41 — Mark Minervini
“During a difficult trading environment, your gains will be smaller and less frequent than during a healthy market. When this occurs, remember three words (with a nod to Nike): “Adjust” Do It! Always think of risk in relation to reward. You must adjust your risk as a function of potential reward.”
What Mark Minervini is saying in this quote is that you should be flexible in executing your trading system. Market volatility changes from time to time. You don’t use the same reward size when volatility is low. Adjust your parameters according to the market condition.
Trading quotes #42 — Mark D. Cook
“Most aspiring traders underestimate the time, work, and money required to become successful. To succeed as a trader, one needs complete commitment. Just as in any entrepreneurial venture, you must have a solid business plan, adequate financing, and a willingness to work long hours. Those seeking shortcuts are doomed to failure.”
Mark Cook lays out what an intending trader needs to do to stand a chance at succeeding in trading.
Trading quotes #43 — Ahmet Okumus
“Simple logic: My top ten ideas will always perform better than my top hundred.”
Ahmet Okumus believes in focusing on a few things at once than spreading your hands to capture as many as you can. Concentrating efforts on a few ideas or a few stocks will yield a better result than spreading out to many.
Trading quotes #44 — Alphonse Fletcher Jr.
“Never make a bet you can’t afford to lose!”
This is a very important point; it will save you both your trading capital and emotional capital. Always bet with an amount you can afford to lose. Experienced traders like Alphonse Fletcher advise beginners to not risk more than 1% of their account balance in each trade.
Trading quotes #45 — Randy McKay
“When you’re trading well, you have a better mental attitude. When you’re trading poorly, you start wishing and hoping. Instead of getting into trades you think will work, you end up getting into trades you hope will work. I basically learned that you must get out of your losses immediately.”
In this quote, Randy McKay explains the psychological process that goes on within us when we are trading. The worst thing we can do when trading is to wish and hope that our trades move in our favor when we’re losing. Always cut short the losses and save your capital.
Trading quotes #46 — Howard Seidler
“You can be following your rules exactly and still lose money. In that situation, you certainly haven’t performed poorly as a trader.”
What Howard Seidler said here is very important. The outcome of each trade is random, and there’s nothing you can do about that; there is no way of knowing which trade will have a positive outcome. So, you simply focus on executing your strategy and ignore the outcome of each trade, knowing that provided your strategy has an edge, you will eventually make money.
Trading quotes #47 — Blair Hull
“It’s not the mathematical skill that’s critical to winning; it’s the discipline of being able to stick to the system.”
Blair Hull emphasizes what most traders have said before: having the discipline to stick to your system is what makes you a good trader. Creating the system is just the beginning; the real work is in training your mind to be disciplined.
Trading quotes #48 — Jeff Yass
“The moral is that in trading it’s important to examine the situation from as many angles as possible because your initial impulses are probably going to be wrong. There is never any money to be made in the obvious conclusions.”
Jeff Yass tells us to have a system that allows us to run a comprehensive analysis of the market situation before placing our trades because our first impulse might be wrong.
Trading quotes #49 — Charles Faulkner
“The people who excel in any field are people who realize that the moment is there to be seized and that there are opportunities at every turn. They are more alive to the moment.”
The market is always there, and trading opportunities will always come. Your work as a trader according to Charles Falkner is to seize any trading opportunity you see in the market, but don’t go about chasing after a missed opportunity, because another opportunity will come — just be present to take it.
Trading quotes #50 — Richard Dennis
“You have to minimize your losses and try to preserve capital for those very few instances where you can make a lot in a very short period of time. What you can’t afford to do is throw away your capital on suboptimal trades.”
Richard Dennis was very famous for performing the Turtle Trading experiment with his business partner, William Eckhardt. What he is saying here is that you must do anything you have to do to protect your trading capital so that you can trade when great opportunities come around.
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Adam Harris
The key is to develop a case where the probabilities of the market going in your favour is greater than it going against you.
Adam Harris
Albert Einstein’s quotes can apply to trading
It’s not that I’m so smart; it’s just that I stay with problems longer.
Albert Einstein
Alexander Elder
Beginners focus on analysis, but professionals operate in a three dimensional space. They are aware of trading psychology their own feelings and the mass psychology of the markets.
Alexander Elder
The goal of a successful trader is to make the best trades. Money is secondary.
Alexander Elder
You can be free. You can live and work anywhere in the world. And you can be independent from routine and not answer to anybody.
Alexander Elder
You have to identify your weaknesses and work to change. Keep a trading diary – write down your reasons for entering and exiting every trade. Look for repetitive patterns of success and failure.
Alexander Elder
Andreas Clenow
Beware of trading quotes.
Andreas Clenow
Anne-Marie Beiynd
It is always the best discretion to let the market show us where it is going and just simply follow (this would be prudent), rather than predict where the market is going and place a position (this would be gambling).
Some quotes from Anthony Hopkins to apply to your trading
We are dying from overthinking. We are slowly killing ourselves by thinking about everything. Think. Think. And think. You can never trust the human mind anyway. It’s a death trap.
Anthony Hopkins
Some quotes from Anthony Robbins to apply to your trading
It’s not what we do once in a while that shapes our lives. It’s what we do consistently.
Arthur Zeikel
Stock price movements actually begin to reflect new developments before it is generally recognized that they have taken place.
Arthur Zeikel
Babe Ruth
It’s hard to beat a person who never gives up.
Babe Ruth
Benjamin Franklin quotes you can apply to your trading
An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.
Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Graham
In the short run, the market is a voting machine, but in the long run it is a weighing machine.
Benjamin Graham
Bernard Baruch
In trading/investing, it’s not about how much you make but rather how much you don’t lose.
Bernard Baruch
Bill Lipschutz
If a trader is motivated by the money, then it is the wrong reason. A truly successful trader has got to be involved and into the trading, the money is the side issue… The principal motivation is not the trappings of success. It’s usually the by-product – simply stated, “the game’s the thing”.
Bill Lipschutz
If most traders would learn to sit on their hands 50 percent of the time, they would make a lot more money.
Brett Steenbarger
The core problem, however, is the need to fit markets into a style of trading rather than finding ways to trade that fit with market behavior.
Brett Steenbarger
Bruce Kovner
I know where I’m getting out before I get in.
Bruce Kovner
If you personalise losses, you can’t trade.
Bruce Kovner
Michael Marcus taught me one other thing that is absolutely critical: You have to be willing to make mistakes regularly; there is nothing wrong with it. Michael taught me about making your best judgment, being wrong, making your next best judgment, being wrong, making your third best judgment, and then doubling your money.
Bruce Kovner
My experience with novice traders is that they trade three to five times too big. They are taking 5 to 10 percent risks on a trade when they should be taking 1 to 2 percent risks.
Best Charlie Munger’s trading quotes
I don’t think you can get to be a really good investor over a broad range without doing a massive amount of reading. I don’t think any one book will do it for you.
Charlie Munger
It’s waiting that helps you as an investor, and a lot of people just can’t stand to wait. If you didn’t get the deferred-gratification gene, you’ve got to work very hard to overcome that.
Charlie Munger
Christopher Isaac Stone
Timing, perseverance, and ten years of trying will eventually make you look like an overnight success.
Christopher Isaac Stone
Chuck D.
Never let a win go to your head, or a loss to your heart.
Chuck D.
Confucius
It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.
Confucius
David Sikhosana
Losses are necessary, as long as they are associated with a technique to help you learn from them.
David Sikhosana
Most people dont understand the process. They get frustrated by it. Dont Be. Focus
David Sikhosana
Doug Gregory
Trade What’s Happening… Not What You Think Is Gonna Happen.
Ed Seykota best trading quotes
Setting your stop properly is most of the job
Before I enter a trade, I set stops at a point which the chart sours.
Ed Seykota
Cut your losses. Cut your losses. And cut your losses. Then maybe you have a chance.
Ed Seykota
I set protective stops at the same time I enter a trade. I normally move these stops to lock in a profit as the trend continues.
Ed Seykota
If you can’t take a small loss, sooner or later you will take the mother of all losses.
Ed Seykota
In order of importance to me are: (1) the long-term trend, (2) the current chart pattern, and (3) picking a good spot to buy or sell.
Ed Seykota
Handling risk is the key for longevity
Pyramiding instructions appear on dollar bills. Add smaller and smaller amounts on the way up.
Ed Seykota
Risk no more that you can afford to lose, and also risk enough so that a win is meaningful.
Ed Seykota
The elements of good trading are (1) cutting losses, (2) cutting losses, and (3) cutting losses. If you can follow these three rules, you may have a chance.
Ed Seykota
The trend is your friend until the end when it bends.
Ed Seykota
There are old traders and there are bold traders, but there are very few old, bold traders.
Ed Seykota
Trading systems don’t eliminate whipsaws. They just include them as part of the process.
Ed Seykota
Win or lose, everybody gets what they want from the market. Some people seem to like to lose, so they win by losing money.
Ed Seykota
Fred McAllen
You don’t make money by trading, you make it by sitting. It takes patience to wait for the trade to develop, for the opportunity to present itself. Let the market come to you, instead of chasing the market. Chart patterns are very accurate. They have proven their accuracy and predictability time and time again, but you have to wait for them to develop.
Gary Vaynerchuk
I hate how many people think, “glass-half-empty” when their glass is really four-fifths full. I’m grateful when I have one drop in the glass because I know exactly what to do with it.
Gary Vaynerchuk
Best trading quotes from George Soros
It’s not whether you’re right or wrong that’s important, it’s how much money you make when you’re right and how much you lose when you’re wrong.
George Soros
Markets are constantly in a state of uncertainty and flux, and money is made by discounting the obvious and betting on the unexpected.
George Soros
Short term volatility is greatest at turning points and diminishes as a trend becomes established.
George Soros
Gerald M. Loeb
Accepting losses is the most important single investment device to ensure the safety of capital.
Gerald M. Loeb
Helen Gurley Brown
Money, if it does not bring you happiness, will at least help you be miserable in comfort.
Helen Gurley Brown
Henrique M. Simões
An average trader loses money, so in this profession, you need to be way above average to make consistent money trading the markets.
Henrique M. Simões
In order to win as a contrarian, you need perfect timing and the perfect size.
Henrique M. Simões
In trading, the impossible happens about twice a year.
Henrique M. Simões
The best traders have trading habits, daily routines they repeat day after day.
Henrique M. Simões
Henry Ford
When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.
Ifan Wei
Patterns don’t work 100% of the time. But they are still critical because they help you define your risk. If you ignore patterns and focus on hunches, feelings, and hot tips, just forget about achieving consistency.
Ifan Wei
J.J. Evans
Take your profits or someone else will take them for you.
Jack Schwager’s best trading quotes
Jack Schwager best trading quotes
Amateurs think about how much money they can make. Professionals think about how much money they could lose.
Jack Schwager
Dangers of watching every tick are twofold: overtrading and increased chances of prematurely liquidating good positions
Jack Schwager
The hard work in trading comes in the preparation. The actual process of trading, however, should be effortless.
Jack Schwager
There are a million ways to make money in the markets. The irony is that they are all very difficult to find.
Jack Schwager
There is no single market secret to discover, no single correct way to trade the markets. Those seeking the one true answer to the markets haven’t even gotten as far as asking the right question, let alone getting the right answer.
Jack Schwager
Jason Klatt
Sheer will and determination is no substitute for something that actually works.
Jason Klatt
Jaymin Shah
Don’t blindly follow someone, follow [the] market and try to hear what it is telling you.
Jaymin Shah
You never know what kind of setup [the] market will present to you, your objective should be to find an opportunity where risk-reward ratio is best.
Jaymin Shah
Jeff Cooper
Never confuse your position with your best interest. Many traders take a position in a stock and form an emotional attachment to it. They’ll start losing money, and instead of stopping themselves out, they’ll find brand new reasons to stay in. When in doubt, get out!”
Jeff Cooper
Jesse Livermore‘s most interesting trading quotes
Jesse Livermore best trading quotes
Don’t expect a steady pay check from trading
After spending many years in Wall Street and after making and losing millions of dollars I want to tell you this: it never was my thinking that made the big money for me. It was always my sitting. Got that? My sitting tight! It is no trick at all to be right on the market. I’ve known many [traders] who were right at exactly the right time, and began buying or selling stocks when prices were at the very level that should show the greatest profit. And their experience invariably matched mine; that is, they made no real money out of it. [Traders] who can both be right and sit tight are uncommon. I found it one of the hardest things to learn. But it is only after a stock operator has firmly grasped this that he can make the big money.
Jesse Livermore
All through time, people have basically acted and reacted the same way in the market as a result of greed, fear, ignorance, and hope. That is why the numerical formations and patternsrecur on a constant basis. Over and over, with slight variations. Because markets are driven by humans and human nature never changes.
Jesse Livermore
Let the market be your guide
Do not anticipate and move without market confirmation—being a little late in your trade is your insurance that you are right or wrong.
Jesse Livermore
I don’t buy long stocks on a scale down, I buy on scale-up.
Jesse Livermore
I learned early that there is nothing new in Wall Street. There can’t be because speculation is as old as the hills. Whatever happens in the stock market today has happened before and will happen again. I’ve never forgotten that.
Jesse Livermore
I trade my own information and follow my own methods.
Jesse Livermore
It was never my thinking that made the big money for me, it always was sitting.
Jesse Livermore
Markets are never wrong, but opinions often are.
Jesse Livermore
Money is made by sitting, not trading.
Jesse Livermore
The market is always right
Only the game, can teach you the game.
Jesse Livermore
Remember that stocks are never too high for you to begin buying or too low to begin selling.
Jesse Livermore
The desire for constant action irrespective of underlying conditions is responsible for many losses in Wall Street even among the professionals, who feel that they must take home some money every day, as though they were working for regular wages.
Jesse Livermore
The game of speculation is the most uniformly fascinating game in the world. But it is not a game for the stupid, the mentally lazy, the person of inferior emotional balance, or the get-rich-quick adventurer. They will die poor.
Jesse Livermore
The obvious rarely happens, the unexpected constantly occurs.
Jesse Livermore
The reason for what a certain stock does today may not be known for two or three days, or weeks, or months. But what the dickens does that matter? Your business with the tape is now – not tomorrow! The reason can wait. But you must act instantly or be left.
Jesse Livermore
Good timing is important
There is a time to go long, a time to go short and a time to go fishing.
Jesse Livermore
There is nothing new in Wall Street. There can’t be because speculation is as old as the hills. Whatever happens in the stock market today has happened before and will happen again.
Jesse Livermore
There is the plain fool, who does the wrong thing at all times everywhere, but there is the Wall Street fool, who thinks he must trade all the time.
Jesse Livermore
Trader has to reverse what you might call his natural impulses. Instead of hoping he must fear; instead of fearing he must hope. He must fear that his loss may develop into a much bigger loss, and hope that his profit may become a big profit.
Jesse Livermore
Watch the market leaders.
Jesse Livermore
Jim Cramer’s best trading quotes
Hope is bogus emotion that only costs you money.
Jim Paul
Speculating (and this includes investing and trading) is the only human endeavor in which what feels good is the right thing to do.
Jim Paul
Jim Rogers
I just wait until there is money lying in the corner, and all I have to do is go over there and pick it up. I do nothing in the meantime.
Joe Granville
If it’s obvious, it’s obviously wrong.
Joe Granville
Joe Vidich
Limit your size in any position so that fear does not become the prevailing instinct guiding your judgment.
Joe Vidich
Joel Greenblatt
As much as possible you don’t want to be well paid merely for taking big risks. Anyone can manage that. You want to be well-paid because you did your homework.
Joel Greenblatt
John Bogle
Time is your friend; impulse is your enemy.
John Bogle
Some great quotes from John Maynard Keynes you can apply to your trading
Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
John Maynard Keynes
Successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others.
John Maynard Keynes
John Paulson
Those types of investments don’t come around very often.
Justin Mamis
Stocks are bought not in fear but in hope. They are typically sold out of fear.
Justin Mamis
Kurt Capra
If you want real insights that can make you more money, look at the scars running up and down your account statements. Stop doing what’s harming you, and your results will get better. It’s a mathematical certainty!
Larry Connors
I get real, real concerned when I see trading strategies with too many rules (you should too).
Larry Connors
Larry Hite
By risking 1%, I am indifferent to any individual trade. Keeping your risk small and constant is absolutely critical.
Larry Hite
Frankly, I don’t see markets; I see risks, rewards, and money.
Larry Hite
I have two basic rules about winning in trading as well as in life: 1. If you don’t bet, you can’t win. 2. If you lose all your chips, you can’t bet.
Larry Hite
If you don’t respect risk, eventually they’ll carry you out.
Larry Hite
Throughout my financial career, I have continually witnessed examples of other people that I have known being ruined by a failure to respect risk. If you don’t take a hard look at risk, it will take you.
Larry Hite
Linda Raschke
All you need is one pattern to make a living.
Linda Raschke
Mark Douglas
If you can learn to create a state of mind that is not affected by the market’s behaviour, the struggle will cease to exist.
Mark Douglas
Why do you think unsuccessful traders are obsessed with market analysis? They crave the sense of certainty that analysis appears to give them. Although few would admit it, the truth is that the typical trader wants to be right on every single trade. He is desperately trying to create certainty where it just doesn’t exist.
Mark Douglas
You create your own game in your mind based on your beliefs, intents, perception and rules.
Mark Douglas
Mark Harila
What’s the difference between a pro and an amateur? Professionals look for what’s wrong with a setup. Amateurs only look for what’s right.
Mark Harila
Martin Schwartz’s best trading quotes
Martin Schwartz best trading quotes
A great trader is like a great athlete. You have to have natural skills, but you have to train yourself how to use them.
Martin Schwartz
A lot of people get so enmeshed in the markets that they lose their perspective. Working longer does not necessarily equate with working smarter. In fact, sometimes is the other way around.
Martin Schwartz
By living the philosophy that my winners are always in front of me, it is not so painful to take a loss.
Martin Schwartz
I always laugh at people who say, “I’ve never met a rich technician.” I love that! It’s such an arrogant, nonsensical response. I used fundamentals for nine years and got rich as a technician.
Martin Schwartz
I have learned through the years that after a good run of profits in the markets, it’s very important to take a few days off as a reward. The natural tendency is to keep pushing until the streak ends. But experience has taught me that a rest in the middle of the streak can often extend it.
Martin Schwartz
Learn to take losses. The most important thing in making money is not letting your losses get out of hand.
Martin Schwartz
My attitude is that I always want to be better prepared than someone I’m competing against. The way I prepare myself is by doing my work each night.
Martin Schwartz
When I became a winner, I said, “I figured it out, but if I’m wrong, I’m getting the hell out”, because I want to save my money and go on to the next trade.
Martin Schwartz
Trading is a psychological game. Most people think they are playing against the market, but the market doesn´t care. You’re really playing against yourself.
Martin Zweig
Don’t fight the Fed.
Martin Zweig
It’s OK to be wrong; it’s unforgivable to stay wrong.
Martin Zweig
Michael Carr
Don’t worry about what the markets are going to do, worry about what you are going to do in response to the markets.
Michael Covel
Trading is a waiting game. You sit, you wait, and you make a lot of money all at once. Profits come in bunches. The trick when going sideways between home runs is not to lose too much in between.
Michael Covel
Never, ever argue with your trading system.
Michael Covel
Michael Jordan
I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game’s winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life and that’s why I succeed.
Michael Jordan
Michael M. Lewis
The men on the trading floor may not have been to school, but they have Ph.D.’s in man’s ignorance.
Michael M. Lewis
Michael Marcus
Every trader has strengths and weakness. Some are good holders of winners but may hold their losers a little too long. Others may cut their winners a little short but are quick to take their losses. As long as you stick to your own style, you get the good and bad in your own approach.
Michael Marcus
When in doubt, get out and get a good night’s sleep. I’ve done that lots of times and the next day everything was clear… While you are in [the position], you can’t think. When you get out, then you can think clearly again.
Michael Marcus
Michael Steinhardt
Good investing is a peculiar balance between the conviction to follow your ideas and the flexibility to recognize when you have made a mistake.
Michael Steinhardt
Monroe Trout
Some people make shoes. Some people make houses. We make money, and people are willing to pay us a lot to make money for them.
Some quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb traders can apply to their trading
I was convinced that I was totally incompetent in predicting market prices – but that others were generally incompetent also but did not know it, or did not know they were taking massive risks. Most traders were just “picking pennies in front of a steamroller,” exposing themselves to the high-impact rare event yet sleeping like babies, unaware of it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
There is a saying that bad traders divorce their spouse sooner than abandon their positions. Loyalty to ideas is not a good thing for traders, scientists – or anyone.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Nicolas Darvas
I believe in analysis and not forecasting.
Paul Samuelson
Investing should be more like watching paint dry or watching grass grow. If you want excitement, take $800 and go to Las Vegas.
Paul Samuelson
Paul Tudor Jones
Paul Tudor Jones best trading quotes
5/1 risk/reward ratio allows you to have a hit rate of 20%. I can actually be a complete imbecile. I can be wrong 80% of the time and still not lose.
Paul Tudor Jones
Don’t focus on making money, focus on protecting what you have.
Paul Tudor Jones
Everyday I assume every position I have is wrong.
Paul Tudor Jones
I’m always thinking about losing money as opposed to making money. Don’t focus on making money, focus on protecting what you have.
Paul Tudor Jones
Losers average losers.
Paul Tudor Jones
That cotton trade was almost the deal breaker for me. It was at that point that I said, ‘Mr. Stupid, why risk everything on one trade? Why not make your life a pursuit of happiness rather than pain?
Paul Tudor Jones
The secret to being successful from a trading perspective is to have an indefatigable and an undying and unquenchable thirst for information and knowledge.
Paul Tudor Jones
Trading is very competitive and you have to be able to handle getting your butt kicked.
Paul Tudor Jones
Where you want to be is always in control, never wishing, always trading, and always, first and foremost protecting your butt. After a while size means nothing. It gets back to whether you’re making 100% rate of return on $10,000 or $100 million dollars. It doesn’t make any difference.
Paul Tudor Jones
Peter Bernstein
The fundamental law of investing is the uncertainty of the future.
Peter Bernstein
Peter Borish
We want to perceive ourselves as winners, but successful traders are always focusing on their losses.
Peter Borish
Peter Lynch
All the math you need in the stock market you get in the fourth grade.
Peter Lynch
In this business, if you’re good, you’re right six times out of ten. You’re never going to be right nine times out of ten.
Peter Lynch
Never invest in any idea you can’t illustrate with a crayon.
Peter Lynch
People who succeed in the stock market also accept periodic losses, setbacks, and unexpected occurrences. Calamitous drops do not scare them out of the game.
Peter Lynch
Philip Fisher
The only true test of whether a stock is “cheap” or “high” is not its current price in relation to some former price, no matter how accustomed we may have become to that former price, but whether the company’s fundamentals are significantly more or less favorable than the current financial-community appraisal of that stock.
Philip Fisher
The stock market is filled with individuals who know the price of everything, but the value of nothing.
Randy McKay
I’ll keep reducing my trading size as long as I’m losing… My money management techniques are extremely conservative. I never risk anything approaching the total amount of money in my account, let alone my total funds.
Randy McKay
When I get hurt in the market, I get the hell out. It doesn’t matter at all where the market is trading. I just get out, because I believe that once you’re hurt in the market, your decisions are going to be far less objective than they are when you’re doing well… If you stick around when the market is severely against you, sooner or later they are going to carry you out.
Randy McKay
Ray Dalio
In trading, you have to be defensive and aggressive at the same time. If you are not aggressive, you are not going to make money, and if you are not defensive, you are not going to keep money.
Richard Branson
Do not be embarrassed by your failures, learn from them and start again.
Richard Branson
Richard Dennis
How much of a role does luck play in trading? In the long run, zero. Absolutely zero. I don’t think anybody winds up make money in this business because they started out lucky.
Richard Dennis
In the real world, it is not too wise to have your stop where everyone else has their stop.
Richard Dennis
Trade small because that’s when you are as bad as you are ever going to be. Learn from your mistakes.
Richard Dennis
Whatever method you use to enter trades, the most critical thing is that if there is a major trend, your approach should assure that you get in that trend.
Richard Dennis
You should expect the unexpected in this business; expect the extreme. Don’t think in terms of boundaries that limit what the market might do.
Richard Dennis
Richard Rhodes
Be patient. If a trade is missed, wait for a correction to occur before putting the trade on.
Richard Rhodes
Be patient. Once a trade is put on, allow it time to develop and give it time to create the profits you expect.
Richard Rhodes
Buy that which is showing strength – sell that which is showing weakness. The public continues to buy when prices have fallen. The professional buys because prices have rallied.
Richard Rhodes
In a bull market, one can only be long or on the sidelines. Remember, not having a position is a position.
Richard Rhodes
Market form their lows in quiet conditions.
Richard Rhodes
Markets form their tops in violence; the final 10% of the time of a bull run will usually encompass 50% or more of the price movement.
Richard Rhodes
When comparing various stocks within a group, buy only the strongest and sell the weakest.
Richard Rhodes
Rob Smith
Buy things that are going up. Sell things that are going down. And when they stop, get out!
Rob Smith
Robert Arnott
In investing, what is comfortable is rarely profitable.
Robert Arnott
Robert G. Allen
How many millionaires do you know who have become wealthy by investing in savings accounts? I rest my case.
Robert Rolih
Short-term trading is very time-consuming. That is why even “successful” short-term traders can easily have negative real ROI.
Robert Rolih
Sami Abusaad
Are you willing to lose money on a trade? If not, then don’t take it. You can only win if you’re not afraid to lose. And you can only do that if you truly accept the risks in front of you.
Scott Redler
Trade the market in front of you, not the one you want!
Scott Redler
Traders need a daily routine that they love. If you don’t love it, you’re not gonna do it.
Scott Redler
Seneca
Two elements must be rooted out once and for all. The fear of future suffering, and the recollection of past suffering. Since the latter no longer concerns me, and the former concerns me not yet.
Seneca
Seth Klarman
In reality, no one knows what the market will do; trying to predict it is a waste of time, and investing based upon that prediction is a speculative undertaking.
Seth Klarman
The hard part is discipline, patience and judgement.
Seth Klarman
Sir John Templeton
Bull markets are born on pessimism, grow on skepticism, mature on optimism and die of euphoria.
Sir John Templeton
The four most dangerous words in investing are: This time it’s different.
Sir John Templeton
Steve Burns
There is a huge difference between a good trade and good trading.
Steve Burns
Steve Clark
Do more of what works and less of what doesn’t.
Sun Tzu
He who knows when he can fight and when he cannot, will be victorious.
Sun Tzu
The Buddha
When faced with all the ups and downs of life, still the mind remains unshaken, not lamenting, not generating defilements, always feeling secure; this is the greatest happiness.
Thomas Busby
I have been trading for decades and I am still standing. I have seen a lot of traders come and go. They have a system or a program that works in some specific environments and fails in others. In contrast, my strategy is dynamic and ever-evolving. I constantly learn and change.
Thomas Busby
Tom Baldwin
The best traders have no ego. You have to swallow your pride and get out of the losses.
Tom Baldwin
Tom Basso
I think investment psychology is by far the more important element, followed by risk control, with the least important consideration being the question of where you buy and sell.
Tom Basso
Tom Dante
If you want to be a ledge… Find your edge…
Tom Dante
Tony Saliba
I always define my risk, and I don’t have to worry about it.
Tony Saliba
Some trading quotes have (known) sources
Bulls make money, bears make money, pigs get slaughtered.
Unknown
In trading, everything works sometimes and nothing works always.
Unknown
Markets change their behavior faster than people can change their minds… That is why intraday trading is so difficult.’
Unknown
One day does not make a trend.
Unknown
Sometimes the best trade is no trade.
Unknown
You don’t need to trade often. If you can catch one or two moves to the targets during the day with good size, you can make a good living and keep trading costs down.’
Unknown
If you happen to know where these trading quotes are from, feel free to email us.
Van K. Tharp
A peak performance trader is totally committed to being the best and doing whatever it takes to be the best. He feels totally responsible for whatever happens and thus can learn from mistakes. These people typically have a working business plan for trading because they treat trading as a business.
Van K. Tharp
Victor Sperandeo
The key to trading success is emotional discipline. If intelligence were the key, there would be a lot more people making money trading… I know this will sound like a cliche, but the single most important reason that people lose money in the financial markets is that they don’t cut their losses short.
Warren Buffett has some very important trading quotes
Warren Buffett
Trading is all about patience
Don’t test the depth of the river with both your feet while taking the risk.
Warren Buffett
For investors as a whole, returns decrease as motion increases.
Warren Buffett
I’ll tell you how to become rich: close all doors, beware when others are greedy and be greedy when others are afraid.
Warren Buffett
Invest in yourself as much as you can; you are your own biggest asset by far.
Warren Buffett
And trading is all about managing risk
Investing in yourself is the best thing you can do, and as a part of investing in yourself; you should learn more about money management.
Warren Buffett
It takes 20 years to build a reputation and 5 minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.
Warren Buffett
It’s much better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a suitable company at a wonderful price.
Warren Buffett
Look at market fluctuations as your friend rather than your enemy.
Warren Buffett
Opportunities come infrequently. When it rains gold put out a bucket not a thimble.
Warren Buffett
Profit from folly, rather than participate in it.
Warren Buffett
Successful investing takes time, discipline and patience.
Warren Buffett
The market is a device for transferring money from the impatient to the patient.
Warren Buffett
The most important quality for an investor is temperament, not intellect. You need a temperament that neither derives great pleasure from being with the crowd or against the crowd.
Warren Buffett
We simply attempt to be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy only when others are fearful.
Warren Buffett
When it’s raining gold, reach for a bucket, not a thimble.
Warren Buffett
You don’t need to be a rocket scientist. Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with 130 IQ.
Warren Buffett
You need to know very well when to move away, or give up the loss, and not allow the anxiety to trick you into trying again.
Warren Buffett
William Feather’s best trading quotes
One of the funny things about the stock market is that every time one person buys, another sells, and both think they are astute.
William Feather
William James
The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.
William James
William O’Neil
Letting losses run is the most serious mistake made by most investors.
William O’Neil
The whole secret to winning big in the stock market is not to be right all the time, but to lose the least amount possible when you’re wrong.
William O’Neil
What seems too high and risky to the majority generally goes higher and what seems low and cheap generally goes lower.
William O’Neil
Yvan Byeajee trading quotes
Trading tests you
Confidence is not “I will profit on this trade”. Confidence is “I will be fine if I don’t profit from this trade”.
Yvan Byeajee
Fear, inherently, is not meant to limit you. Fear is the brain’s way of saying that there is something important for you to overcome.
Yvan Byeajee
Focus, patience, wise discernment, non-attachment – the skills you acquire in meditation and the skills you need to thrive in trading are one and the same.
Yvan Byeajee
In order to succeed, you first have to be willing to experience failure.
Yvan Byeajee
Reaching any goal in trading requires specific domain knowledge and technical skills. But then, after that, it’s all mindset management. Yet most people ignore that —they automatically think they have that last part all figured out, and it’s a mistake.
Yvan Byeajee
The expectation that you bring with you in trading is often the greatest obstacle you will encounter.
Yvan Byeajee
The mind is a fascinating instrument that can make or break you.
Yvan Byeajee
The process by which one accumulates money is so simple, yet so hard to implement for most.
Yvan Byeajee
There are no guarantees in trading. The sooner you accept that you sooner you can release your expectations and focus unconditionally on a proven process.
Yvan Byeajee
Trading is a great school
Trading doesn’t just reveal your character, it also builds it if you stay in the game long enough.
Yvan Byeajee
Trading effectively is about assessing probabilities, not certainties.
11. "I'm only rich because I know when I'm wrong. I basically have survived by recognizing my mistakes."
-George Soros.
12. "It was clear to me that other people could trade for a living, and if it was possible for other people to do it, then I could persevere long enough to figure it out."
-Rob Booker.
13. "The biggest risk is not taking a risk. In a world that's changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks."
–Mark Zuckerberg.
14. "I have two basic rules about winning in trading as well as in life: 1. If you don't bet, you can't win. 2. If you lose all your chips, you can't bet."
-Larry Hite.
15. "I just wait until there is money lying in the corner, and all I have to do is go over there and pick it up. I do nothing in the meantime."
-Jim Rogers.
16. "I believe in analysis and not forecasting."
-Nicolas Darvas, 'How I Made $2,000,000 in the Stock Market', 1986.
17. "The purpose of trading is not being right, the purpose is to make money, and I think that's my number-one rule. Don't get hung up on your current positions."
-Dana Allen.
18. "Learn to take losses. The most important thing in making money is not letting your losses get out of hand."
-Marty Schwartz.
19. "Whatever method you use to enter trades, the most critical thing is that if there is a major trend, your approach should assure that you get in that trend."
-Richard Dennis.
20. "The fundamental law of investing is the uncertainty of the future."
-Peter Bernstein.
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Trading quotes #1 — Paul Tudor Jones
“Where you want to be is always in control, never wishing, always trading, and always, first and foremost protecting your butt.”
“If you have a losing position that is making you uncomfortable, the solution is very simple: Get out…”
“Don’t focus on making money; focus on protecting what you have.”
“The most important rule of trading is to play great defense, not great offense.”
The legendary trader, Paul Tudor Jones, made these quotes on separate occasions, but apparently, he’s trying to pass the same message: protecting your trading capital is key to achieving any success in trading.
You may think that trading is all about making money. Yes, the ultimate goal is to make money, but you can’t make a dime if you lose your capital. So, the primary goal is to protect your capital.
And how do you do that? Always be in control: trade a position size that won’t affect your emotions. When in a losing position that’s making you uncomfortable, get out — ideally, you should use a stop-loss order that would get you out before it gets uncomfortable.
Trading quotes #2 — Ray Dalio
“What is most important isn’t knowing the future — it is knowing how to react appropriately to the information available at each point in time.”
“The biggest mistake investors make is to believe that what happened in the recent past is likely to persist. They assume that something that was a good investment in the recent past is still a good investment.”
Many traders think that it’s only when they know what would happen in the future that they can make money. So, they make many assumptions about the future, including the belief that what is happening at the moment would persist forever — the trend would continue or the range market would persist. They trade as if the present condition is the default condition of the market.
Ray Dalio reminds us of one fundamental truth about trading: we can’t predict the future with certainty, and interestingly, we don’t need to. What matters is your ability to use the information available at every moment to make the most appropriate decision.
Trading quotes #3 — Bill Lipschutz
“If most traders would learn to sit on their hands 50 percent of the time, they would make a lot more money. I don’t think you can consistently be a winning trader if you’re banking on being right more than 50 percent of the time. You have to figure out how to make money being right only 20 to 30 percent of the time.”
There are two ways to look at what Bill Lipschutz is saying here. The first one is that depending on the timeframe you are trading, reliable trade setups that are worth the risk don’t form that frequently. If you are a swing trader, for example, you may only get two or three good setups per week, depending on the number of markets you are monitoring. So, for the most part, you won’t be making any trade — until a good setup appears.
Another way to look at the quote is that you don’t need to be right up to 50% of the time to make money if you employ a good reward/risk ratio. If you have a strategy that offers you a 4:1 reward/risk ratio, you can be profitable even if you win only 30% of the time.
Trading quotes #4 — Brett Steenbarger
“We become what we consistently do.” “Routine is necessary for efficiency; breaking routine is necessary for adaptation.”
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”
Truly, to master anything in life, you have to do that thing consistently over a long time. At a time, it becomes a routine, and that consistency helps you to become efficient in it. However, in trading, while the market conditions change from time to time, so to be good at trading, you should learn when to break the routine so you can adapt to the new condition. This is simply what the renowned trading psychologist, is trying to say.
“The core problem, however, is the need to fit markets into a style of trading rather than finding ways to trade that fit with market behavior.”
Brett Steenbarger identified the problem of not adapting to the changing market conditions as trying to fit the markets into our trading styles, instead of trading in a way that fits the market condition at that moment. For example, some crypto traders, in the latter part of the second quarter of 2021, continued buying dips even when it’s obvious that cryptocurrencies have entered a bear market.
Trading quotes #5 — Bruce Kovner
“I know where I’m getting out before I get in. Whenever I enter a position, I have a predetermined stop. That is the only way I can sleep. The position size on a trade is determined by the stop, and the stop is determined on a technical basis.”
First, it helps to have an exit order in place so you can get out without your emotions getting the better of you. It is difficult to make a logical decision in the middle of trade; emotions would always come in.
However, Mr. Bruce Kovner is saying something interesting here regarding stop loss and position size. Many traders approach this the other way around: they choose a position size to trade and then calculate the size of stop loss that would allow them to risk a particular amount of dollars they plan to commit in the trade.
But that is wrong, as it forces you to use far more leverage than is good for your account size and trading experience. Mr. Bruce is telling you to place your stops at a point that, if reached, will reasonably indicate that the trade is wrong — not at a point determined primarily by the maximum dollar amount you are willing to lose.
Trading quotes #6 — Van K. Tharp
“When you understand what’s involved in winning, as do professional gamblers, you’ll tend to bet more during a winning streak and less during a losing streak. However, the average person does exactly the opposite: he or she bets more after a series of losses and less after a series of wins.”
Of course, each trade is different, and wins and losses are randomly distributed. But like any randomly distributed variable, wins and losses can come in streaks. In a winning streak, you may be more likely to win the next trade, while in a losing streak, you may be more likely to lose the next trade.
Van K. Tharp understands this strategy, which is also used by professional gamblers. They bet more in a winning streak since there’s a tendency to win the next bet/trade in that state. On the other hand, during a losing streak, they reduce their bet size because there’s a tendency to lose the next trade. This approach can help you maximize the periods when you win and reduce risk during the losing period.
Trading quotes #7 — Rob Hanna
“No one can upset you unless you give them permission.”
You may be wondering how this simple statement relates to trading the financial markets. But then, the statement becomes clear when you realize that Rob Hanna is a renowned quant trader. In quant trading, mathematical models are used to analyze the market for opportunities and are implemented with the use of computer algorithms and artificial intelligence. So, there’s no room for human emotions in making trading decisions — quant traders don’t give the market permission to upset them.
But this is not just about quant trading or even the general automated trading ecosystem. If you are a discretionary trader, you can also apply this lesson in your trading. The primary way to do this is by having a trading plan that tells you what to do in any market situation. You can also write out the criteria of your trading strategy so you know exactly when to enter and exit a trade without second-guessing the market.
Trading quotes #8 — Ed Seykota
“The markets are the same now as they were five or ten years ago because they keep changing-just as they did then.”
It seems as if Ed Seykota and his quote contradict what we know about the market, but it is basically the truth. The market is still the same and behaves the same — it trends when it wants to and moves sideways when it wants to. If you know that the market is always there and behaving the same way, generating trading setups, you won’t have to chase after a missed trade or make other trading mistakes. Your primary goal would be to protect your capital so you can take the next setup that appears.
“Win or lose, everybody gets what they want from the market. Some people seem to like to lose, so they win by losing money.”
Truly, the market gives you what you deserve. If you risk too much, you lose a lot. But if you trade carefully and minimize your risks, you will be able to play enough hands for your edge to manifest.
Trading quotes #9 — Jack Schwager
“There are a million ways to make money in the markets. The irony is that they are all very difficult to find.”
Jack Schwager states the obvious here: there are arguably as many different trading strategies as there are many traders in the market. And for strategies with an edge in the market, when executed properly over a large number of trades, they will make money. The problem, as he pointed out in the second sentence, is taking time to create a trading strategy with an edge and being disciplined enough to implement it correctly. This brings us to another quote from him:
“Being wrong is acceptable, but staying wrong is totally unacceptable.”
Here, he is talking about being disciplined while trading. It’s normal to make a wrong trading decision. But once you notice that your decision is wrong, you correct it immediately instead of holding on to it.
Trading quotes #10 — Jesse Livermore
“To anticipate the market is to gamble. To be patient and act only when the market gives the signal is to speculate.”
Jesse’s message here is simple: in trading, you don’t try to predict what the market might do in the future; you simply trade the signals you see at the moment. If you are not seeing any signal, you wait until the market shows you one. He emphasizes patients again with this other quote:
“It was never my thinking that made the big money for me; it was my sitting.”
Truly, it is that period of waiting that the money is made. First, sitting it out and waiting for a profitable trade to ride its course till the end of the trend can determine how much you make from a trade. But more importantly, waiting for the right setup to appear saves you from several potentially losing trades.
“Instead of hoping, he must fear; instead of fear, he must hope. He must fear that his loss must develop into a much bigger loss and hope that his profit may become a big profit.”
Here, Jesse Livermore describes the type of emotions a trader must have in different situations. If a trade is going against you, especially if it has crossed the level you marked for your stop loss (hard stop is better), you should be afraid that the loss can get bigger, instead of hoping that the price might turn and go in your favor. On the other hand, when you are in a winning trade, instead of fearing that the trade may turn against you, you should hope that the profit becomes bigger.
Trading quotes #11 — Jim Rogers
“One of the best rules anybody can learn about investing is to do nothing, absolutely nothing unless there is something to do… I just wait until there is money lying in the corner, and all I have to do is go over there and pick it up… I wait for a situation that is like the proverbial ‘Shooting fish in a barrel’…”
The truth is that many traders feel that they always have to be doing something in the market. They would make a big play that turned out huge profits and would say, “Boy, I’m killing it; I just tripled my money.” Then, they hop in the market again to do something else with that money. They just can’t sit there and wait for another signal to developing before going back into the market. Jim Rogers says that this overtrading often leads to a disaster.
Trading quotes #12 — Jim Simons
“Patterns of price movement are not random. However, they’re close enough to random so that getting some excess, some edge out of it, is not easy and not so obvious — thank God. God probably doesn’t care. Thank whoever.”
Often regarded as ‘the man who solved the market’, Jim Simons launched the quant revolution, using mathematical models to analyze and trade the markets. In this quote, he points out that in the apparent randomness of the price action, there are patterns that can be exploited to gain an edge in the market.
“We search through historical data looking for anomalous patterns that we would not expect to occur at random.”
To find a pattern that gives you an edge in the market, you need to search through the historical price action. It’s there you can find what has been working that can still work in the market. He emphasizes this in his other quote:
“Past performance is the best predictor of success.”
Truly, while past performance may not be indicative of future performance, it is the best predictor of success there is. So, it makes no sense to use a strategy without first backtesting it to know how well it performed in the past.
Trading quotes #13 — Larry Connors
“I get real, real concerned when I see trading strategies with too many rules (you should too).”
Of course, there are obvious reasons for Larry Connors‘s concerns. When there are too many rules, the trader can easily get confused and start trading erratically, making a lot of mistakes, such as jumping the guns (placing a trade when the setup has not been completed) and missing trading opportunities.
A trading strategy should be as simple as possible, with a few rules that are easy to execute. That way, you know what you are looking for and what to do at any point. As you know, it is not easy to make decisions in the heat of the moment when trading. So, the criteria for every action — entry, exit, moving stop loss, etc. — must be clear. If the rules are not clear, it becomes difficult to make trading decisions.
Trading quotes #14 — Larry Hite
“I have two basic rules about winning in trading as well as in life:
If you don’t bet, you can’t win
If you lose all your chips, you can’t bet”
Larry Hite‘s rules are simple but all-encompassing. They don’t just tell you what you shouldn’t do but also hints at the emotions that affect traders. If, out of fear of losing, you choose not to trade, you have definitely denied yourself the opportunity to win. Without participating in the game, you cannot win, so you have to conquer that fear that holds you back from pulling the trigger.
On the other hand, if, out of greed, you trade more than you can and end up losing all your capital, you won’t be able to trade again until you raise another capital. So, you have to protect your capital with all your might.
Trading quotes #15 — Larry Williams
“The most common bad habit I have seen in traders — good and bad ones — is the inability to react correctly to market action.”
This observation is very true, especially among new traders who are always trying to do what every other person is doing, without seeking to understand how the market works. Larry Williams captures that mentality in this statement:
“What you will be looking for is a day that closes above the prior day’s high and most likely ‘breaks’ out to the upside to close above a trading range. This is the twitching worm that causes the public to leap before they look.”
Whatever that instruction means is left to the trader’s interpretation — a new trader will definitely get confused. So, it pays to understand the market and your trading personality. With that, you can create a suitable trading strategy, rather than following another person’s instruction.
Trading quotes #16 — Linda Raschke
“Some of the best trades come when everyone gets very panicky. The crowd can often act very stupidly in the markets. You can picture price fluctuations around an equilibrium level as a rubber band being stretched — if it gets pulled too far, eventually it will snap back. As a short-term trader, I try to wait until the rubber band is stretched to its extreme point.”
Surely, there are different ways of trading the market; you don’t have to do what others are doing. For example, when a breakout trader is cheering for a good breakout signal, a contrarian may be taking the opposite direction and still make profits. What matters is understanding the market action relative to your style of trading. Being a short-term trader, Linda Raschke favors the mean-reversion approach.
Trading quotes #17 — Mark Douglas
“Anything can happen.”
After placing a trade, anything can happen — the market can go massively against you, go in your favor, or simply fluctuate around your entry point. You have to have a plan for whatever happens after you place the trade.
“You don’t need to know what is going to happen next in order to make money.”
This truth is quite interesting; you don’t need to predict whether any particular trade will go in your favor to make money with your strategy, provided it has a demonstrable edge in the market. Whether any particular trade is a winner or loser doesn’t matter that much.
“There’s a random distribution between wins and losses for any given set of variables that define an edge.”
No matter the strategy you use, some of your trades would be winners, some would be losers. The distribution of winners and losers is random. So, you won’t know which will end up as a winner or loser, and interestingly, you don’t need to know.
“An edge is nothing more than an indication of a higher probability of one thing happening over another.”
What matters to you is to make sure that your strategy has an edge in the market you are trading. That is, over a large number of trades, either the number of winners is more than the losers or the amount of money made from the winners supersedes the amount lost from losers when there are more losers.
“Every moment in the market is unique.”
The same trading setup that played out as a winner in the previous trade can play out as a loser in the current trade because the present moment is unique and different from that previous one.
“When you genuinely accept risk, you will be at peace with any outcome.”
Realizing the five quotes above, the legendary Mark Douglas expects you to accept to genuinely accept the risks inherent in each trade — knowing that it can be a loser and being fine with that. Once you achieve this, you will be at peace with whatever outcome you get from each trade.
Trading quotes #18 — Marty Schwartz
“The most important thing in making money is not letting your losses get out of hand. When I became a winner, I said, ‘I figured it out, but if I’m wrong, I’m getting the hell out, because I want to save my money and go on to the next trade.”
It seems that almost every successful trader talks about managing risks. Marty Schwartz is basically repeating the same thing others said: protect your trading capital so that you make the next trade.
Trading quotes #19 — Michael Carr
“Don’t worry about what the markets are going to do, worry about what you are going to do in response to the markets.”
The quote looks simple, but it carries a lot of meanings. Michael Carr wants you to focus on the thing you can control and not on what you can’t control. You obviously can’t control what the market is going to do, so there’s little sense in worrying about that. What matters to you is how you respond to whatever the market throws at you. You must have a plan for every market situation.
Trading quotes #20 — Michael Marcus
“Being a successful trader also takes courage: the courage to try, the courage to fail, the courage to succeed, and the courage to keep on going when the going gets tough. Perhaps the most important rule is to hold on to your winners and cut your losers.”
Obviously, you need a lot of courage to succeed in trading because it is highly likely that you will blow up your first trading capital or more. And when that happens, you may lose hope about ever succeeding in trading and may not bother raising another capital to trade again. Michael Marcus means that even if you manage to raise another capital, you may become afraid to pull the trigger when your setup occurs in the market.
Trading quotes #21 — Michael Steinhardt
“Make good decisions even with incomplete information. You will never have all the information you need. What matters is what you do with the information you have.”
As long as trading is concerned, you will always feel like you don’t have enough information to make your trading decision. If care is not taken, you will keep chasing more and more information by applying all sorts of indicators on your chart. At the end of the day, the so-called extra information does not add anything new but you end up with analysis paralysis. Michael Steinhardt advises us to learn how to make a decision with the information we have to avoid falling into the trap of analysis paralysis.
Trading quotes #22 — Nicolas Darvas
“I believe in analysis and not forecasting. All a company report and balance sheet can tell you is the past and the present; they cannot tell future.”
Like other successful traders, Nicolas Darvas emphasizes on focusing what the market tells you at the moment, rather than trying to predict what will happen in the future. Every data you have at any point in time can only tell you about the present and the past; the future remains unknown but shouldn’t matter.
Trading quotes #23 — Alexander Elder
“The goal of a successful trader is to make the best trades. Money is secondary.”
Alexander Elder is one of the legendary traders that created several trading indicators and methods of analyzing the markets. You can imagine how he so much enjoyed the process of identifying trading opportunities that he started creating indicators. For him, it’s all about getting the process right — understanding your strategy and executing your trades the best possible way.
Money is only a by-product of getting the process right. Your focus should be on the process; don’t bother about money. If you have a strategy with an edge and consistently execute your trades well, you will definitely make money in the long run.
Trading quotes #24 — Steve Clark
“Do more of what works and less of what doesn’t.”
Trading is a personal journey. In this journey, you learn by applying yourself and finding out for yourself what works and what does not. Steve Clark tells you that success comes by doing more of what you find out works for you and doing less of what you notice does not work.
Trading quotes #25 — Tom Basso
“I think investment psychology is by far the more important element, followed by risk control, with the least important consideration being the question of where to buy and sell.”
Tom Basso is right about this: mastering your trading psychology and risk control is far more important than knowing where to buy and sell. You can buy a trading strategy that tells you where to buy and sell, but it’s you who have to learn and master risk control and how to manage your trading emotions.
“As long as you learn something from a loss, it’s not really a loss.”
One of the important aspects of trading psychology is knowing how to take a loss. You have to learn something from the loss. That way, it adds value to you as a trader.
Trading quotes #26 — Stanley Druckenmiller
“I believe that good investors are successful not because of their IQ, but because they have an investing discipline.”
Stanley Druckenmiller is an American investor, hedge fund manager, who worked for George Soros’s Quantum Fund as the lead portfolio manager. What he is saying in that quote is that achieving success in trading is not a question of intelligence; instead, it is dependent on the trader’s ability to be disciplined enough to execute his strategy all the time. A profitable trading strategy if not implemented with discipline would never make any profit.
Trading quotes #27 — William Eckhardt
“The desire to maximize the number of winning trades (or minimize the number of losing trades) works against the trader. The success rate of trades is the least important performance statistic and may even be inversely related to performance.”
William Eckhardt is a renowned commodities and futures trader and fund manager who conducted the famous Turtle Trading experiment with his friend, Richard Dennis. In this quote, he indicates that the win rate of any trading system is not the most important factor. You can have a low win rate and still be profitable because the reward for any win is far more than the loss in a losing trade. A good system should have a good reward/risk ratio.
Trading quotes #28 — Steven Cohen
“I always tell my traders that they would’ve loved the 1990s because it was a fairly easy time to make money. It’s hard to find ideas that aren’t picked over and harder to get real returns and differentiate yourself. We are entering a new environment. The days of big returns are gone.”
What Steve Cohen is saying here is that it is difficult to find an edge in the market these days, and he is right, especially for discretionary trading. With the advent of algorithmic trading, the market has become more efficient, which makes it difficult to find inefficiencies to exploit.
Trading quotes #29 — Richard Driehaus
“If there’s a large move on significant news, either favorable or unfavorable, the stock will usually continue to move in that direction.”
Richard Driehaus is often seen as the father of momentum investing. In this quote, he indicates that once the price gains momentum in one direction, it is likely to remain in that direction. For example, during a news release, the market may interpret the news as favorable or unfavorable and move in the corresponding direction, and it is likely to continue moving in that direction until something else changes its direction.
Trading quotes #30 — Gil Blake
“Whenever I take a position, I like to imagine what it would be like under the worst-case scenario. In doing so, I minimize the confusion if that situation actually develops. In my view, losses are a very important part of trading. When a loss happens, I believe in embracing it.”
What Gil Blake is saying here is that by trying to imagine the worst-case scenario after placing a trade, one can get his or her mind prepared for anything the market does. If the trade ends in a loss, it is easier to accept without getting too attached to the outcome.
Trading quotes #31 — Mark Ritchie
“If I find myself praying about a position, I liquidate immediately.”
Mark Ritchie is a veteran of commodity trading, so he knows what it means to be at the mercy of the market. As a trader, you must put the control in your hands. If the market is going against your position, the best thing is to exit from the trade to avoid a catastrophic loss. There is no point hoping and praying that the market turns around in your favor. Hope is a dangerous thing in trading.
Trading quotes #32 — Joe Ritchie
“Successful traders tend to be instinctive rather than overly analytical.”
Joe Ritchie is an options and commodities trader who founded Chicago Research and Trading (CRT) in 1977. He believes that too much analysis is not always good in trading because there will always be new information you may want to factor into your analysis but trying to do that may lead to analysis paralysis. To be a good trader, there must be a balance between analyzing more information and using your guts.
Trading quotes #33 — Michael Lauer
“This business is not about investing in great companies; it’s about profiting from inefficiently priced stocks.”
This Michael’s quote is one of the tenets of technical analysis. As a technical trader, Michael Lauer believes that everything is already reflected in the price and volume data, so if a trader can find a consistent inefficiency in those, he or she can exploit it to make money. Trading based on technical analysis means that you only need to study the charts to find tradable patterns that reflect market inefficiency and have a high probability of success.
Trading quotes #34 — Dana Galante
“One thing I look for is companies with slowing revenue growth who have kept their earnings looking good by cutting expenses. Usually, it’s only a matter of time before their earnings growth slows as well. Another thing I look for is a company that is doing great but has a competitor creeping up that no one is paying attention to.”
Dana Galante is famed for using a short-only strategy. This quote shows how she spots stocks that are good for short positions. Her idea is to short stocks of companies that are not performing well and has a formidable competitor.
Trading quotes #35 — Steve Watson
“You have to be willing to accept a certain level of risk, or else you will never pull the trigger. You can’t be afraid to take a loss. The people who are successful in this business are the people who are willing to lose money.”
Steve Watson says it the way it is. Trading requires taking a certain amount of risk to stand a chance to gain. If you are afraid of taking the risk, you won’t be able to pull the trigger. But you should only risk what you can afford to lose because, on many occasions, you will actually lose, and you must be willing to take that loss if you want to succeed.
Trading quotes #36 — Victor Sperandeo
“The key to building wealth is to preserve capital and wait patiently for the right opportunity to make the extraordinary gains.”
Often called Trader Vic, Victor Sperandeo is renowned for having ‘predicted’ the stock market crash of 1987. In this quote, he admonishes traders to preserve their capital and wait for the right moment. There is no point in trying so hard to make money in an unfavorable market and risk losing your capital. Preserve that capital and wait until the market is favorable and you see a high-probability setup before you make a bet.
Trading quotes #37 — Claudio Guazzoni
“I was particularly attracted to the concept of buying undervalued assets, which I became aware was not something that was confined to just leveraged buyouts. Every period of time has its own opportunities where one can find investments that are extremely discounted and have a very well-protected downside.”
Claudio Guazzoni and his strategy is to buy undervalued stocks because they are trading at a discount and, thus, may be said to have lower downside potential. Many successful investors use this value investing approach. Warren Buffet is a huge fan of value investing. The key to using this approach is knowing when to enter the market because it can be dangerous to try to catch a falling knife — it can cut deeply.
Trading quotes #38 — David Shaw
“I grew up with the idea that, if not impossible, it was certainly extremely difficult to beat the market. And even now, I find it remarkable how efficient the markets actually are. It would be nice if all you had to do in order to earn abnormally large returns was to identify some sort of standard pattern in the historical prices of a given stock.”
In this quote, David Shaw points out how difficult trading can be. Some people tend to think that trading is easy — just hitting the buy or sell button based on a certain pattern in the market. Mastering the act of trading goes beyond finding a pattern and placing a trade order.
Trading quotes #39 — Michael Masters
“There’s a temporal difference between speculative flows and price formation, and supply and demand flows”
Michael Masters is trying to let us understand that price movements from retail speculators are different from those caused by smart money. If you want to catch the major price movements, you have to look for patterns of price movement created by smart money.
Trading quotes #40 — Steve Lescarbeau
“I do not attempt to prognosticate the market. I react to what happens in the market.”
Steve Lescarbeau states the obvious here: you don’t impose your expectations on the market; instead, you should react to what you see in the market at that moment. Trading your expectations, rather than what you see in the market can lead to frequent losses. For example, don’t expect that the market will reverse at a particular support or resistance level just because it did the last time it went to that level. Wait until the market actually reverses before you make your trade.
Trading quotes #41 — Mark Minervini
“During a difficult trading environment, your gains will be smaller and less frequent than during a healthy market. When this occurs, remember three words (with a nod to Nike): “Adjust” Do It! Always think of risk in relation to reward. You must adjust your risk as a function of potential reward.”
What Mark Minervini is saying in this quote is that you should be flexible in executing your trading system. Market volatility changes from time to time. You don’t use the same reward size when volatility is low. Adjust your parameters according to the market condition.
Trading quotes #42 — Mark D. Cook
“Most aspiring traders underestimate the time, work, and money required to become successful. To succeed as a trader, one needs complete commitment. Just as in any entrepreneurial venture, you must have a solid business plan, adequate financing, and a willingness to work long hours. Those seeking shortcuts are doomed to failure.”
Mark Cook lays out what an intending trader needs to do to stand a chance at succeeding in trading.
Trading quotes #43 — Ahmet Okumus
“Simple logic: My top ten ideas will always perform better than my top hundred.”
Ahmet Okumus believes in focusing on a few things at once than spreading your hands to capture as many as you can. Concentrating efforts on a few ideas or a few stocks will yield a better result than spreading out to many.
Trading quotes #44 — Alphonse Fletcher Jr.
“Never make a bet you can’t afford to lose!”
This is a very important point; it will save you both your trading capital and emotional capital. Always bet with an amount you can afford to lose. Experienced traders like Alphonse Fletcher advise beginners to not risk more than 1% of their account balance in each trade.
Trading quotes #45 — Randy McKay
“When you’re trading well, you have a better mental attitude. When you’re trading poorly, you start wishing and hoping. Instead of getting into trades you think will work, you end up getting into trades you hope will work. I basically learned that you must get out of your losses immediately.”
In this quote, Randy McKay explains the psychological process that goes on within us when we are trading. The worst thing we can do when trading is to wish and hope that our trades move in our favor when we’re losing. Always cut short the losses and save your capital.
Trading quotes #46 — Howard Seidler
“You can be following your rules exactly and still lose money. In that situation, you certainly haven’t performed poorly as a trader.”
What Howard Seidler said here is very important. The outcome of each trade is random, and there’s nothing you can do about that; there is no way of knowing which trade will have a positive outcome. So, you simply focus on executing your strategy and ignore the outcome of each trade, knowing that provided your strategy has an edge, you will eventually make money.
Trading quotes #47 — Blair Hull
“It’s not the mathematical skill that’s critical to winning; it’s the discipline of being able to stick to the system.”
Blair Hull emphasizes what most traders have said before: having the discipline to stick to your system is what makes you a good trader. Creating the system is just the beginning; the real work is in training your mind to be disciplined.
Trading quotes #48 — Jeff Yass
“The moral is that in trading it’s important to examine the situation from as many angles as possible because your initial impulses are probably going to be wrong. There is never any money to be made in the obvious conclusions.”
Jeff Yass tells us to have a system that allows us to run a comprehensive analysis of the market situation before placing our trades because our first impulse might be wrong.
Trading quotes #49 — Charles Faulkner
“The people who excel in any field are people who realize that the moment is there to be seized and that there are opportunities at every turn. They are more alive to the moment.”
The market is always there, and trading opportunities will always come. Your work as a trader according to Charles Falkner is to seize any trading opportunity you see in the market, but don’t go about chasing after a missed opportunity, because another opportunity will come — just be present to take it.
Trading quotes #50 — Richard Dennis
“You have to minimize your losses and try to preserve capital for those very few instances where you can make a lot in a very short period of time. What you can’t afford to do is throw away your capital on suboptimal trades.”
Richard Dennis was very famous for performing the Turtle Trading experiment with his business partner, William Eckhardt. What he is saying here is that you must do anything you have to do to protect your trading capital so that you can trade when great opportunities come around.
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Adam Harris
The key is to develop a case where the probabilities of the market going in your favour is greater than it going against you.
Adam Harris
Albert Einstein’s quotes can apply to trading
It’s not that I’m so smart; it’s just that I stay with problems longer.
Albert Einstein
Alexander Elder
Beginners focus on analysis, but professionals operate in a three dimensional space. They are aware of trading psychology their own feelings and the mass psychology of the markets.
Alexander Elder
The goal of a successful trader is to make the best trades. Money is secondary.
Alexander Elder
You can be free. You can live and work anywhere in the world. And you can be independent from routine and not answer to anybody.
Alexander Elder
You have to identify your weaknesses and work to change. Keep a trading diary – write down your reasons for entering and exiting every trade. Look for repetitive patterns of success and failure.
Alexander Elder
Andreas Clenow
Beware of trading quotes.
Andreas Clenow
Anne-Marie Beiynd
It is always the best discretion to let the market show us where it is going and just simply follow (this would be prudent), rather than predict where the market is going and place a position (this would be gambling).
Some quotes from Anthony Hopkins to apply to your trading
We are dying from overthinking. We are slowly killing ourselves by thinking about everything. Think. Think. And think. You can never trust the human mind anyway. It’s a death trap.
Anthony Hopkins
Some quotes from Anthony Robbins to apply to your trading
It’s not what we do once in a while that shapes our lives. It’s what we do consistently.
Arthur Zeikel
Stock price movements actually begin to reflect new developments before it is generally recognized that they have taken place.
Arthur Zeikel
Babe Ruth
It’s hard to beat a person who never gives up.
Babe Ruth
Benjamin Franklin quotes you can apply to your trading
An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.
Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Graham
In the short run, the market is a voting machine, but in the long run it is a weighing machine.
Benjamin Graham
Bernard Baruch
In trading/investing, it’s not about how much you make but rather how much you don’t lose.
Bernard Baruch
Bill Lipschutz
If a trader is motivated by the money, then it is the wrong reason. A truly successful trader has got to be involved and into the trading, the money is the side issue… The principal motivation is not the trappings of success. It’s usually the by-product – simply stated, “the game’s the thing”.
Bill Lipschutz
If most traders would learn to sit on their hands 50 percent of the time, they would make a lot more money.
Brett Steenbarger
The core problem, however, is the need to fit markets into a style of trading rather than finding ways to trade that fit with market behavior.
Brett Steenbarger
Bruce Kovner
I know where I’m getting out before I get in.
Bruce Kovner
If you personalise losses, you can’t trade.
Bruce Kovner
Michael Marcus taught me one other thing that is absolutely critical: You have to be willing to make mistakes regularly; there is nothing wrong with it. Michael taught me about making your best judgment, being wrong, making your next best judgment, being wrong, making your third best judgment, and then doubling your money.
Bruce Kovner
My experience with novice traders is that they trade three to five times too big. They are taking 5 to 10 percent risks on a trade when they should be taking 1 to 2 percent risks.
Best Charlie Munger’s trading quotes
I don’t think you can get to be a really good investor over a broad range without doing a massive amount of reading. I don’t think any one book will do it for you.
Charlie Munger
It’s waiting that helps you as an investor, and a lot of people just can’t stand to wait. If you didn’t get the deferred-gratification gene, you’ve got to work very hard to overcome that.
Charlie Munger
Christopher Isaac Stone
Timing, perseverance, and ten years of trying will eventually make you look like an overnight success.
Christopher Isaac Stone
Chuck D.
Never let a win go to your head, or a loss to your heart.
Chuck D.
Confucius
It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.
Confucius
David Sikhosana
Losses are necessary, as long as they are associated with a technique to help you learn from them.
David Sikhosana
Most people dont understand the process. They get frustrated by it. Dont Be. Focus
David Sikhosana
Doug Gregory
Trade What’s Happening… Not What You Think Is Gonna Happen.
Ed Seykota best trading quotes
Setting your stop properly is most of the job
Before I enter a trade, I set stops at a point which the chart sours.
Ed Seykota
Cut your losses. Cut your losses. And cut your losses. Then maybe you have a chance.
Ed Seykota
I set protective stops at the same time I enter a trade. I normally move these stops to lock in a profit as the trend continues.
Ed Seykota
If you can’t take a small loss, sooner or later you will take the mother of all losses.
Ed Seykota
In order of importance to me are: (1) the long-term trend, (2) the current chart pattern, and (3) picking a good spot to buy or sell.
Ed Seykota
Handling risk is the key for longevity
Pyramiding instructions appear on dollar bills. Add smaller and smaller amounts on the way up.
Ed Seykota
Risk no more that you can afford to lose, and also risk enough so that a win is meaningful.
Ed Seykota
The elements of good trading are (1) cutting losses, (2) cutting losses, and (3) cutting losses. If you can follow these three rules, you may have a chance.
Ed Seykota
The trend is your friend until the end when it bends.
Ed Seykota
There are old traders and there are bold traders, but there are very few old, bold traders.
Ed Seykota
Trading systems don’t eliminate whipsaws. They just include them as part of the process.
Ed Seykota
Win or lose, everybody gets what they want from the market. Some people seem to like to lose, so they win by losing money.
Ed Seykota
Fred McAllen
You don’t make money by trading, you make it by sitting. It takes patience to wait for the trade to develop, for the opportunity to present itself. Let the market come to you, instead of chasing the market. Chart patterns are very accurate. They have proven their accuracy and predictability time and time again, but you have to wait for them to develop.
Gary Vaynerchuk
I hate how many people think, “glass-half-empty” when their glass is really four-fifths full. I’m grateful when I have one drop in the glass because I know exactly what to do with it.
Gary Vaynerchuk
Best trading quotes from George Soros
It’s not whether you’re right or wrong that’s important, it’s how much money you make when you’re right and how much you lose when you’re wrong.
George Soros
Markets are constantly in a state of uncertainty and flux, and money is made by discounting the obvious and betting on the unexpected.
George Soros
Short term volatility is greatest at turning points and diminishes as a trend becomes established.
George Soros
Gerald M. Loeb
Accepting losses is the most important single investment device to ensure the safety of capital.
Gerald M. Loeb
Helen Gurley Brown
Money, if it does not bring you happiness, will at least help you be miserable in comfort.
Helen Gurley Brown
Henrique M. Simões
An average trader loses money, so in this profession, you need to be way above average to make consistent money trading the markets.
Henrique M. Simões
In order to win as a contrarian, you need perfect timing and the perfect size.
Henrique M. Simões
In trading, the impossible happens about twice a year.
Henrique M. Simões
The best traders have trading habits, daily routines they repeat day after day.
Henrique M. Simões
Henry Ford
When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.
Ifan Wei
Patterns don’t work 100% of the time. But they are still critical because they help you define your risk. If you ignore patterns and focus on hunches, feelings, and hot tips, just forget about achieving consistency.
Ifan Wei
J.J. Evans
Take your profits or someone else will take them for you.
Jack Schwager’s best trading quotes
Jack Schwager best trading quotes
Amateurs think about how much money they can make. Professionals think about how much money they could lose.
Jack Schwager
Dangers of watching every tick are twofold: overtrading and increased chances of prematurely liquidating good positions
Jack Schwager
The hard work in trading comes in the preparation. The actual process of trading, however, should be effortless.
Jack Schwager
There are a million ways to make money in the markets. The irony is that they are all very difficult to find.
Jack Schwager
There is no single market secret to discover, no single correct way to trade the markets. Those seeking the one true answer to the markets haven’t even gotten as far as asking the right question, let alone getting the right answer.
Jack Schwager
Jason Klatt
Sheer will and determination is no substitute for something that actually works.
Jason Klatt
Jaymin Shah
Don’t blindly follow someone, follow [the] market and try to hear what it is telling you.
Jaymin Shah
You never know what kind of setup [the] market will present to you, your objective should be to find an opportunity where risk-reward ratio is best.
Jaymin Shah
Jeff Cooper
Never confuse your position with your best interest. Many traders take a position in a stock and form an emotional attachment to it. They’ll start losing money, and instead of stopping themselves out, they’ll find brand new reasons to stay in. When in doubt, get out!”
Jeff Cooper
Jesse Livermore‘s most interesting trading quotes
Jesse Livermore best trading quotes
Don’t expect a steady pay check from trading
After spending many years in Wall Street and after making and losing millions of dollars I want to tell you this: it never was my thinking that made the big money for me. It was always my sitting. Got that? My sitting tight! It is no trick at all to be right on the market. I’ve known many [traders] who were right at exactly the right time, and began buying or selling stocks when prices were at the very level that should show the greatest profit. And their experience invariably matched mine; that is, they made no real money out of it. [Traders] who can both be right and sit tight are uncommon. I found it one of the hardest things to learn. But it is only after a stock operator has firmly grasped this that he can make the big money.
Jesse Livermore
All through time, people have basically acted and reacted the same way in the market as a result of greed, fear, ignorance, and hope. That is why the numerical formations and patternsrecur on a constant basis. Over and over, with slight variations. Because markets are driven by humans and human nature never changes.
Jesse Livermore
Let the market be your guide
Do not anticipate and move without market confirmation—being a little late in your trade is your insurance that you are right or wrong.
Jesse Livermore
I don’t buy long stocks on a scale down, I buy on scale-up.
Jesse Livermore
I learned early that there is nothing new in Wall Street. There can’t be because speculation is as old as the hills. Whatever happens in the stock market today has happened before and will happen again. I’ve never forgotten that.
Jesse Livermore
I trade my own information and follow my own methods.
Jesse Livermore
It was never my thinking that made the big money for me, it always was sitting.
Jesse Livermore
Markets are never wrong, but opinions often are.
Jesse Livermore
Money is made by sitting, not trading.
Jesse Livermore
The market is always right
Only the game, can teach you the game.
Jesse Livermore
Remember that stocks are never too high for you to begin buying or too low to begin selling.
Jesse Livermore
The desire for constant action irrespective of underlying conditions is responsible for many losses in Wall Street even among the professionals, who feel that they must take home some money every day, as though they were working for regular wages.
Jesse Livermore
The game of speculation is the most uniformly fascinating game in the world. But it is not a game for the stupid, the mentally lazy, the person of inferior emotional balance, or the get-rich-quick adventurer. They will die poor.
Jesse Livermore
The obvious rarely happens, the unexpected constantly occurs.
Jesse Livermore
The reason for what a certain stock does today may not be known for two or three days, or weeks, or months. But what the dickens does that matter? Your business with the tape is now – not tomorrow! The reason can wait. But you must act instantly or be left.
Jesse Livermore
Good timing is important
There is a time to go long, a time to go short and a time to go fishing.
Jesse Livermore
There is nothing new in Wall Street. There can’t be because speculation is as old as the hills. Whatever happens in the stock market today has happened before and will happen again.
Jesse Livermore
There is the plain fool, who does the wrong thing at all times everywhere, but there is the Wall Street fool, who thinks he must trade all the time.
Jesse Livermore
Trader has to reverse what you might call his natural impulses. Instead of hoping he must fear; instead of fearing he must hope. He must fear that his loss may develop into a much bigger loss, and hope that his profit may become a big profit.
Jesse Livermore
Watch the market leaders.
Jesse Livermore
Jim Cramer’s best trading quotes
Hope is bogus emotion that only costs you money.
Jim Paul
Speculating (and this includes investing and trading) is the only human endeavor in which what feels good is the right thing to do.
Jim Paul
Jim Rogers
I just wait until there is money lying in the corner, and all I have to do is go over there and pick it up. I do nothing in the meantime.
Joe Granville
If it’s obvious, it’s obviously wrong.
Joe Granville
Joe Vidich
Limit your size in any position so that fear does not become the prevailing instinct guiding your judgment.
Joe Vidich
Joel Greenblatt
As much as possible you don’t want to be well paid merely for taking big risks. Anyone can manage that. You want to be well-paid because you did your homework.
Joel Greenblatt
John Bogle
Time is your friend; impulse is your enemy.
John Bogle
Some great quotes from John Maynard Keynes you can apply to your trading
Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
John Maynard Keynes
Successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others.
John Maynard Keynes
John Paulson
Those types of investments don’t come around very often.
Justin Mamis
Stocks are bought not in fear but in hope. They are typically sold out of fear.
Justin Mamis
Kurt Capra
If you want real insights that can make you more money, look at the scars running up and down your account statements. Stop doing what’s harming you, and your results will get better. It’s a mathematical certainty!
Larry Connors
I get real, real concerned when I see trading strategies with too many rules (you should too).
Larry Connors
Larry Hite
By risking 1%, I am indifferent to any individual trade. Keeping your risk small and constant is absolutely critical.
Larry Hite
Frankly, I don’t see markets; I see risks, rewards, and money.
Larry Hite
I have two basic rules about winning in trading as well as in life: 1. If you don’t bet, you can’t win. 2. If you lose all your chips, you can’t bet.
Larry Hite
If you don’t respect risk, eventually they’ll carry you out.
Larry Hite
Throughout my financial career, I have continually witnessed examples of other people that I have known being ruined by a failure to respect risk. If you don’t take a hard look at risk, it will take you.
Larry Hite
Linda Raschke
All you need is one pattern to make a living.
Linda Raschke
Mark Douglas
If you can learn to create a state of mind that is not affected by the market’s behaviour, the struggle will cease to exist.
Mark Douglas
Why do you think unsuccessful traders are obsessed with market analysis? They crave the sense of certainty that analysis appears to give them. Although few would admit it, the truth is that the typical trader wants to be right on every single trade. He is desperately trying to create certainty where it just doesn’t exist.
Mark Douglas
You create your own game in your mind based on your beliefs, intents, perception and rules.
Mark Douglas
Mark Harila
What’s the difference between a pro and an amateur? Professionals look for what’s wrong with a setup. Amateurs only look for what’s right.
Mark Harila
Martin Schwartz’s best trading quotes
Martin Schwartz best trading quotes
A great trader is like a great athlete. You have to have natural skills, but you have to train yourself how to use them.
Martin Schwartz
A lot of people get so enmeshed in the markets that they lose their perspective. Working longer does not necessarily equate with working smarter. In fact, sometimes is the other way around.
Martin Schwartz
By living the philosophy that my winners are always in front of me, it is not so painful to take a loss.
Martin Schwartz
I always laugh at people who say, “I’ve never met a rich technician.” I love that! It’s such an arrogant, nonsensical response. I used fundamentals for nine years and got rich as a technician.
Martin Schwartz
I have learned through the years that after a good run of profits in the markets, it’s very important to take a few days off as a reward. The natural tendency is to keep pushing until the streak ends. But experience has taught me that a rest in the middle of the streak can often extend it.
Martin Schwartz
Learn to take losses. The most important thing in making money is not letting your losses get out of hand.
Martin Schwartz
My attitude is that I always want to be better prepared than someone I’m competing against. The way I prepare myself is by doing my work each night.
Martin Schwartz
When I became a winner, I said, “I figured it out, but if I’m wrong, I’m getting the hell out”, because I want to save my money and go on to the next trade.
Martin Schwartz
Trading is a psychological game. Most people think they are playing against the market, but the market doesn´t care. You’re really playing against yourself.
Martin Zweig
Don’t fight the Fed.
Martin Zweig
It’s OK to be wrong; it’s unforgivable to stay wrong.
Martin Zweig
Michael Carr
Don’t worry about what the markets are going to do, worry about what you are going to do in response to the markets.
Michael Covel
Trading is a waiting game. You sit, you wait, and you make a lot of money all at once. Profits come in bunches. The trick when going sideways between home runs is not to lose too much in between.
Michael Covel
Never, ever argue with your trading system.
Michael Covel
Michael Jordan
I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game’s winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life and that’s why I succeed.
Michael Jordan
Michael M. Lewis
The men on the trading floor may not have been to school, but they have Ph.D.’s in man’s ignorance.
Michael M. Lewis
Michael Marcus
Every trader has strengths and weakness. Some are good holders of winners but may hold their losers a little too long. Others may cut their winners a little short but are quick to take their losses. As long as you stick to your own style, you get the good and bad in your own approach.
Michael Marcus
When in doubt, get out and get a good night’s sleep. I’ve done that lots of times and the next day everything was clear… While you are in [the position], you can’t think. When you get out, then you can think clearly again.
Michael Marcus
Michael Steinhardt
Good investing is a peculiar balance between the conviction to follow your ideas and the flexibility to recognize when you have made a mistake.
Michael Steinhardt
Monroe Trout
Some people make shoes. Some people make houses. We make money, and people are willing to pay us a lot to make money for them.
Some quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb traders can apply to their trading
I was convinced that I was totally incompetent in predicting market prices – but that others were generally incompetent also but did not know it, or did not know they were taking massive risks. Most traders were just “picking pennies in front of a steamroller,” exposing themselves to the high-impact rare event yet sleeping like babies, unaware of it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
There is a saying that bad traders divorce their spouse sooner than abandon their positions. Loyalty to ideas is not a good thing for traders, scientists – or anyone.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Nicolas Darvas
I believe in analysis and not forecasting.
Paul Samuelson
Investing should be more like watching paint dry or watching grass grow. If you want excitement, take $800 and go to Las Vegas.
Paul Samuelson
Paul Tudor Jones
Paul Tudor Jones best trading quotes
5/1 risk/reward ratio allows you to have a hit rate of 20%. I can actually be a complete imbecile. I can be wrong 80% of the time and still not lose.
Paul Tudor Jones
Don’t focus on making money, focus on protecting what you have.
Paul Tudor Jones
Everyday I assume every position I have is wrong.
Paul Tudor Jones
I’m always thinking about losing money as opposed to making money. Don’t focus on making money, focus on protecting what you have.
Paul Tudor Jones
Losers average losers.
Paul Tudor Jones
That cotton trade was almost the deal breaker for me. It was at that point that I said, ‘Mr. Stupid, why risk everything on one trade? Why not make your life a pursuit of happiness rather than pain?
Paul Tudor Jones
The secret to being successful from a trading perspective is to have an indefatigable and an undying and unquenchable thirst for information and knowledge.
Paul Tudor Jones
Trading is very competitive and you have to be able to handle getting your butt kicked.
Paul Tudor Jones
Where you want to be is always in control, never wishing, always trading, and always, first and foremost protecting your butt. After a while size means nothing. It gets back to whether you’re making 100% rate of return on $10,000 or $100 million dollars. It doesn’t make any difference.
Paul Tudor Jones
Peter Bernstein
The fundamental law of investing is the uncertainty of the future.
Peter Bernstein
Peter Borish
We want to perceive ourselves as winners, but successful traders are always focusing on their losses.
Peter Borish
Peter Lynch
All the math you need in the stock market you get in the fourth grade.
Peter Lynch
In this business, if you’re good, you’re right six times out of ten. You’re never going to be right nine times out of ten.
Peter Lynch
Never invest in any idea you can’t illustrate with a crayon.
Peter Lynch
People who succeed in the stock market also accept periodic losses, setbacks, and unexpected occurrences. Calamitous drops do not scare them out of the game.
Peter Lynch
Philip Fisher
The only true test of whether a stock is “cheap” or “high” is not its current price in relation to some former price, no matter how accustomed we may have become to that former price, but whether the company’s fundamentals are significantly more or less favorable than the current financial-community appraisal of that stock.
Philip Fisher
The stock market is filled with individuals who know the price of everything, but the value of nothing.
Randy McKay
I’ll keep reducing my trading size as long as I’m losing… My money management techniques are extremely conservative. I never risk anything approaching the total amount of money in my account, let alone my total funds.
Randy McKay
When I get hurt in the market, I get the hell out. It doesn’t matter at all where the market is trading. I just get out, because I believe that once you’re hurt in the market, your decisions are going to be far less objective than they are when you’re doing well… If you stick around when the market is severely against you, sooner or later they are going to carry you out.
Randy McKay
Ray Dalio
In trading, you have to be defensive and aggressive at the same time. If you are not aggressive, you are not going to make money, and if you are not defensive, you are not going to keep money.
Richard Branson
Do not be embarrassed by your failures, learn from them and start again.
Richard Branson
Richard Dennis
How much of a role does luck play in trading? In the long run, zero. Absolutely zero. I don’t think anybody winds up make money in this business because they started out lucky.
Richard Dennis
In the real world, it is not too wise to have your stop where everyone else has their stop.
Richard Dennis
Trade small because that’s when you are as bad as you are ever going to be. Learn from your mistakes.
Richard Dennis
Whatever method you use to enter trades, the most critical thing is that if there is a major trend, your approach should assure that you get in that trend.
Richard Dennis
You should expect the unexpected in this business; expect the extreme. Don’t think in terms of boundaries that limit what the market might do.
Richard Dennis
Richard Rhodes
Be patient. If a trade is missed, wait for a correction to occur before putting the trade on.
Richard Rhodes
Be patient. Once a trade is put on, allow it time to develop and give it time to create the profits you expect.
Richard Rhodes
Buy that which is showing strength – sell that which is showing weakness. The public continues to buy when prices have fallen. The professional buys because prices have rallied.
Richard Rhodes
In a bull market, one can only be long or on the sidelines. Remember, not having a position is a position.
Richard Rhodes
Market form their lows in quiet conditions.
Richard Rhodes
Markets form their tops in violence; the final 10% of the time of a bull run will usually encompass 50% or more of the price movement.
Richard Rhodes
When comparing various stocks within a group, buy only the strongest and sell the weakest.
Richard Rhodes
Rob Smith
Buy things that are going up. Sell things that are going down. And when they stop, get out!
Rob Smith
Robert Arnott
In investing, what is comfortable is rarely profitable.
Robert Arnott
Robert G. Allen
How many millionaires do you know who have become wealthy by investing in savings accounts? I rest my case.
Robert Rolih
Short-term trading is very time-consuming. That is why even “successful” short-term traders can easily have negative real ROI.
Robert Rolih
Sami Abusaad
Are you willing to lose money on a trade? If not, then don’t take it. You can only win if you’re not afraid to lose. And you can only do that if you truly accept the risks in front of you.
Scott Redler
Trade the market in front of you, not the one you want!
Scott Redler
Traders need a daily routine that they love. If you don’t love it, you’re not gonna do it.
Scott Redler
Seneca
Two elements must be rooted out once and for all. The fear of future suffering, and the recollection of past suffering. Since the latter no longer concerns me, and the former concerns me not yet.
Seneca
Seth Klarman
In reality, no one knows what the market will do; trying to predict it is a waste of time, and investing based upon that prediction is a speculative undertaking.
Seth Klarman
The hard part is discipline, patience and judgement.
Seth Klarman
Sir John Templeton
Bull markets are born on pessimism, grow on skepticism, mature on optimism and die of euphoria.
Sir John Templeton
The four most dangerous words in investing are: This time it’s different.
Sir John Templeton
Steve Burns
There is a huge difference between a good trade and good trading.
Steve Burns
Steve Clark
Do more of what works and less of what doesn’t.
Sun Tzu
He who knows when he can fight and when he cannot, will be victorious.
Sun Tzu
The Buddha
When faced with all the ups and downs of life, still the mind remains unshaken, not lamenting, not generating defilements, always feeling secure; this is the greatest happiness.
Thomas Busby
I have been trading for decades and I am still standing. I have seen a lot of traders come and go. They have a system or a program that works in some specific environments and fails in others. In contrast, my strategy is dynamic and ever-evolving. I constantly learn and change.
Thomas Busby
Tom Baldwin
The best traders have no ego. You have to swallow your pride and get out of the losses.
Tom Baldwin
Tom Basso
I think investment psychology is by far the more important element, followed by risk control, with the least important consideration being the question of where you buy and sell.
Tom Basso
Tom Dante
If you want to be a ledge… Find your edge…
Tom Dante
Tony Saliba
I always define my risk, and I don’t have to worry about it.
Tony Saliba
Some trading quotes have (known) sources
Bulls make money, bears make money, pigs get slaughtered.
Unknown
In trading, everything works sometimes and nothing works always.
Unknown
Markets change their behavior faster than people can change their minds… That is why intraday trading is so difficult.’
Unknown
One day does not make a trend.
Unknown
Sometimes the best trade is no trade.
Unknown
You don’t need to trade often. If you can catch one or two moves to the targets during the day with good size, you can make a good living and keep trading costs down.’
Unknown
If you happen to know where these trading quotes are from, feel free to email us.
Van K. Tharp
A peak performance trader is totally committed to being the best and doing whatever it takes to be the best. He feels totally responsible for whatever happens and thus can learn from mistakes. These people typically have a working business plan for trading because they treat trading as a business.
Van K. Tharp
Victor Sperandeo
The key to trading success is emotional discipline. If intelligence were the key, there would be a lot more people making money trading… I know this will sound like a cliche, but the single most important reason that people lose money in the financial markets is that they don’t cut their losses short.
Warren Buffett has some very important trading quotes
Warren Buffett
Trading is all about patience
Don’t test the depth of the river with both your feet while taking the risk.
Warren Buffett
For investors as a whole, returns decrease as motion increases.
Warren Buffett
I’ll tell you how to become rich: close all doors, beware when others are greedy and be greedy when others are afraid.
Warren Buffett
Invest in yourself as much as you can; you are your own biggest asset by far.
Warren Buffett
And trading is all about managing risk
Investing in yourself is the best thing you can do, and as a part of investing in yourself; you should learn more about money management.
Warren Buffett
It takes 20 years to build a reputation and 5 minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.
Warren Buffett
It’s much better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a suitable company at a wonderful price.
Warren Buffett
Look at market fluctuations as your friend rather than your enemy.
Warren Buffett
Opportunities come infrequently. When it rains gold put out a bucket not a thimble.
Warren Buffett
Profit from folly, rather than participate in it.
Warren Buffett
Successful investing takes time, discipline and patience.
Warren Buffett
The market is a device for transferring money from the impatient to the patient.
Warren Buffett
The most important quality for an investor is temperament, not intellect. You need a temperament that neither derives great pleasure from being with the crowd or against the crowd.
Warren Buffett
We simply attempt to be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy only when others are fearful.
Warren Buffett
When it’s raining gold, reach for a bucket, not a thimble.
Warren Buffett
You don’t need to be a rocket scientist. Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with 130 IQ.
Warren Buffett
You need to know very well when to move away, or give up the loss, and not allow the anxiety to trick you into trying again.
Warren Buffett
William Feather’s best trading quotes
One of the funny things about the stock market is that every time one person buys, another sells, and both think they are astute.
William Feather
William James
The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.
William James
William O’Neil
Letting losses run is the most serious mistake made by most investors.
William O’Neil
The whole secret to winning big in the stock market is not to be right all the time, but to lose the least amount possible when you’re wrong.
William O’Neil
What seems too high and risky to the majority generally goes higher and what seems low and cheap generally goes lower.
William O’Neil
Yvan Byeajee trading quotes
Trading tests you
Confidence is not “I will profit on this trade”. Confidence is “I will be fine if I don’t profit from this trade”.
Yvan Byeajee
Fear, inherently, is not meant to limit you. Fear is the brain’s way of saying that there is something important for you to overcome.
Yvan Byeajee
Focus, patience, wise discernment, non-attachment – the skills you acquire in meditation and the skills you need to thrive in trading are one and the same.
Yvan Byeajee
In order to succeed, you first have to be willing to experience failure.
Yvan Byeajee
Reaching any goal in trading requires specific domain knowledge and technical skills. But then, after that, it’s all mindset management. Yet most people ignore that —they automatically think they have that last part all figured out, and it’s a mistake.
Yvan Byeajee
The expectation that you bring with you in trading is often the greatest obstacle you will encounter.
Yvan Byeajee
The mind is a fascinating instrument that can make or break you.
Yvan Byeajee
The process by which one accumulates money is so simple, yet so hard to implement for most.
Yvan Byeajee
There are no guarantees in trading. The sooner you accept that you sooner you can release your expectations and focus unconditionally on a proven process.
Yvan Byeajee
Trading is a great school
Trading doesn’t just reveal your character, it also builds it if you stay in the game long enough.
Yvan Byeajee
Trading effectively is about assessing probabilities, not certainties.
