When one starts out on the trading platform for the first time,  do you think that anyone knows they are going to have one of the most stressful, fun, happy & exhilerating times of their lives.  I would suspect not.  However this is exactly what it is going to be like and I have probably missed some.  Please let me know in the comments.  There are a number of articles that touch on trading mindset and here is one such article, read it and enjoy it.

TRADING FOREX WITHOUT A STOP-LOSS ORDER

Why do you think they are called stop-loss orders?

Because that is the point you want to stop losing.  There is no way to adequately communicate how important it is to pre-select, in advance, exactly where you will liquidate a losing trade if the market goes against you.  There is nothing you could say or do, no argument you could ever make, that would justify, even remotely, trading FOREX without a safety-net on your equity.

I have heard all the opinions, rationalisations, justifications from traders who say that they don’t need to use stops, they have “mental” stops, they will “just get out” etc.  I have heard all the sob-stories from these same traders when they have to clean out their desk and find another career; “if only I had placed a stop at least I would still be in the game” I’m as serious as a heart-attack.

If you place a trade without a stop-loss order to protect yourself you WILL be in that group of traders sooner or later.  It is important to constantly remind yourself that trading is a risky environment.  Because it is simply not realistic to think that you will have 100% winning trades it is equally important to limit the risk exposure on any one trade.  You have to let the laws of probabilities work for you and you have to control your risk to do that.

When you place a trade, it is completely possible that something in the market might change and that change might take the price against you to places you personally just never expected.  If you are still in a trade at that point, your loss is probably a significant amount of your balance.  If you were trading too large to begin with you might be close to getting wiped out.  All of that is prevented by placing a stop-loss order. Additionally, getting stopped out of a losing trade frees up both capital and mental resources to look for the next potential trade.

You are going to have both winning and losing trades.  Get out of your losers quickly and confidently.  Don’t let the markets take more from you than is reasonable to find out if you are in a position to profit.  It only takes ONE trade that runs hard against you to wipe you out if you continue holding it.  Use stop-loss orders and never break this rule, always use stop-loss orders on every trade.  There is nothing more to say on the subject.  Make this mistake and you’re out.

HOW TO MAKE THIS MISTAKE WORSE: There is no way to make it worse. This is as bad as it gets in this business.

SOLUTION: Simply place a stop-loss order on each and every trade. When you click the mouse to get in; follow that order IMMEADIATLY with a stop-loss order.

NOT KEEPING RECORDS OF YOUR TRADING

Suppose you told me that you owned your own business but had absolutely no records of what your inventory was, what your average ticket sale was, how long your customer stays in your store, what the average wholesale price of your best selling items were, etc.?  People, me included, would think you were Looney-tunes.  You can’t run a business without good records. Trading is a business.  You need to keep trading records. You need to keep accurate records of your trading because over time you are going to learn that certain things work and other things don’t.

Sooner or later you will come to the conclusion that your trading system or computer analysis is only a small part of what it means to be a successful trader.  The rest is how you personally participate and if you don’t have a record of how you participate; you can’t learn what behaviour will work for you and what behaviour doesn’t help you.  The purpose of keeping good trading records is to help document what your personal winning behaviour is and what your losing behaviour is.  Your goal with these records is to discover your trading strengths and weaknesses.

Once you have a handle on what your trading strengths and weaknesses are you can now put guidelines and/or rules in place to maximize your trading strengths and minimize the effect of your trading weaknesses.  You don’t have to do it by much in order to tip the odds squarely in your favour and put you on the high side of the Probability of Ruin Matrix.

Let me tell you a story of how keeping records helped me turn the corner in my personal trading.  As a young trader, I would often “shoot from the hip” I would make a snap judgment based on my point of view and make a trade instantly.  Because I had no real rules for getting in or out, I had my share of “jumping the gun” on trades that eventually would have worked from that side.  Once I learned to keep good records and review them I discovered that I often was correct on my initial observation about net price action, but I was usually a day or two early.  I was often stopped-out for a loss just before the market would turn.  After this happened several times, I would simply execute again immediately to get back in; resulting in another small loss. This would happen six or seven times (making mistake # 6 “Overtrading”).

Usually the market went a significant distance; then the market would turn.  I would hold the winner but I would need to overcome a major loss to my equity before the trade had a net gain. On a 200 point move in Japanese Yen (for example) I would net maybe 30-40 points because I had a 150 point deficit to overcome first.

After reviewing my notes, my observations, and my trading history, I decided that my skill at finding a trade was not the issue.  My system worked fairly well.  My timing was usually a day or two early.  I made a new rule for myself: “If I have three losses in a row, I cannot trade for 24 hours”.  If my first three attempts to buy what I felt was a sell-off were losers, usually I would get another chance right in the same area or better within a day or so.  By disciplining my trading in this manner, I would save myself three or four more losers.  Nothing really changed in my trade selection or my analysis but changing my behaviour allowed me to get into the market better and stay there better.  I might have never made that connection if I hadn’t reviewed my records and changed how I operated my business. That one little change made a huge difference in my results.

HOW TO MAKE THIS MISTAKE WORSE: Don’t keep any records of any kind, never review your trades, check your account balance only rarely instead of after every trade, do trades without thinking them through, ignore advice from professionals, trade without a stop-loss order and don’t write anything down.

SOLUTION: Get a three-ring binder and fill it with lined paper. Write everything you do down. Calculate your results daily and make time every week to review your notes on your trades. Join a support group of other traders and have them hold you accountable for record keeping. Now, I want to give you the number one mistake FOREX traders make. This is without a doubt the single biggest mistake you can make and you only need to make it once to end up broke. If you made every other mistake in this book but never made this one, you would still have a fighting chance for ultimate success. But if you make this mistake, you might as well take a $10,000 stack of $100 bills out to the backyard, tear them into tiny little shreds and start a bonfire with them. There is no faster way to losing all your money than making this mistake.

TRADING THE NEWS

Traders who have made a lot of money and kept it will be the first to encourage you to not make this mistake; starting on your first trading day. Trading the news is one of the quickest ways to the poorhouse.  There are no professional traders working in any trading arena that will make trades when the news comes out or change their strategy when the news comes out.

It’s important to understand a few things about the news.  There is nothing special about the news, ever. In fact, I would almost go so far to say that the news doesn’t even matter but the markets do need to process changes to the fundamental picture to some extent.  But for successful traders the news, for the most part, is not any more or less significant than anything else.  The market’s reaction to the news is what is significant, not the news itself.

Stop and think about this: Everyone reads the news.  The news about the FOREX market is available to everyone.  There is no secret news that is so special that if you knew it ahead of time it would somehow help you find the right place to do a trade.  All the wire services, reporters, television shows or financial periodicals all have access to the same government reports and people in authority that might move the market. There is nothing they can say or report that is any different, unique, or somehow “more important”.  For every potential news item that will be released, it has already been discussed, analyzed, debated and re-hashed from both sides for weeks or months before it is released.  Even the unexpected news will have a two-sided debate that rages sometimes for years.  All the news is the same for everybody all the time.  And the markets don’t move because of the news.  The markets move because of what people do.  Sometimes people focus on the news and trade that is the only important thing about the news.

Because the nature of the markets are such that we as traders are trying to anticipate a change in price, and often a change in price happens during a news event, most traders consider the news already “factored” into the market.  In other words, if I was expecting the news to be bullish for a particular currency I would buy the currency ahead of time and wait for the news to be released.  This tendency for traders to “anticipate” the news or “predict” the results of the news is where the trading maxim “Buy the rumour/Sell the fact” came from.

It is natural for a market to rally expecting bullish news or fall when expecting bearish news; but that market will do something else when the news is released.  This is why you should never trade BECAUSE of the news.  All of the traders’ actions BEFORE the news created a price change and now when the news is released, the traders’ will do a DIFFERENT action.  This is why a market often drops hard after a bullish piece of news was released.  Basically, everybody was already in; they just liquidated when the news came out.  Therefore, the people who rallied the market BEFORE the news were the SAME people selling the market when the news came out.  The individual trader who just got in that market at the moment the news came out was left holding the bag.  The market now drops when he liquidates.  All of this can take place very quickly as some of us can attest.

When you wait for the market news to be released before you attempt to do anything you are taking a huge risk that you will misinterpret what the results of that news will ultimately be by the end of the trading day.  In most cases, the market will react violently in both directions enough to either scare you out with a loss or force you out with a loss before settling down to a reasonable sort of trading.  Trading the news is a very dangerous thing to do and most professionals often are out of the market around a news event or have only a small base position on.  In reality, there are really only three things that can happen when a news item is released.  The news item can be:

1.  Better-than-expected

2.  Worse-than-expected

3.  About as expected

How the market reacts to the news when the news is in one of these three categories will give you much more information about what might be coming next. For example, if a piece of bullish news is expected, and the market rallies ahead of the news, then the news comes out vastly more bullish than expected, but the market actually drops on that day; THAT price action tells you a lot more about the health of that market than anything else could.

For a bullish market to rally on anticipated news and then drop on much better news says quite clearly that no one is left to buy that market anymore. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least to see that market much lower after only a few days; leaving all the people who bought because of the news scratching their heads and asking “Why did the market go down, the news was bullish?”  The market dropped because the news was already “factored in” and the buyers already made their move.  Don’t be the trader that gets into the market when the news is released, make your choice and enter the market when the system says to; don’t expect the market to respect the news.  Don’t expect that your interpretation of the news will be in the direction the market is going to trade today.

HOW TO MAKE THIS PROBLEM WORSE: Try to guess the news, go long or short just before the news comes out, buy as the market rallies or sell as it breaks hoping to catch the wave, don’t place a stop-loss order, and try to trade both sides of the volatility.

SOLUTION: If you don’t have a trade active in the market, wait at least 45-60 minutes after the news comes out to do anything.  If you have a trade active, turn the screen off for 45-60 minutes when the news comes out and just let it work.  Don’t let the volatility scare you out.  Give the market time to settle down after the news comes out.

FAILING TO DO YOUR HOMEWORK

Of all the mistakes that FOREX traders make this one is one of the most common.

If you want to lose money quickly, make sure you ignore doing your homework.  When I say homework I mean get market knowledge.  People often make the mistake of thinking that all they have to do is buy a trading system or a piece of software and start trading.  If it was really that easy then everyone would be rich and there would be no horror stories of people losing all their money.  It is true that a trading system or software can be a very valuable asset.  Those tools make finding winning trades somewhat easier.  They do not take the place of true market knowledge.

True market knowledge can only be acquired by regular study and education.  Market knowledge is highly needed because a trading system or a computer cannot take into consideration general conditions.  Computer software and trading systems don’t take into account people’s behaviour.  As a serious trader looking to make real money trading you can’t just plug in a black box, hit “go”, and sit back and watch the money roll in.  That might work for a period of time but once conditions change or people’s behaviour changes the quality of the market changes; once that happens your computerized approach will start losing money faster than you made it in all likelihood.

For example, most electronic systems or trading approaches use the laws of probabilities and averages to create trade signals.  Many systems you might buy are Trend Followers.  That means they use various algorithms, pivots, formulas, and ratios to determine that a market has traded to a price that is favourable as a place to go WITH the trend. In other words, the market has rallied to a sell point in a down trending market or fallen to a buy point in an up trending market. See example “A” and “B” below:

Example A: USD/JPY Daily Price Chart, courtesy of Genesis Financial Technologies. The market is in a very obvious down trend and the red arrows are where my proprietary computerized SELL signals would have told you when to short this market for a potential profit in a down trend.

Example B: EURO/USD Daily Price Chart, courtesy of Genesis Financial Technologies The market is in an obvious uptrend and the green arrows are where my proprietary computerized BUY signals would have told you to BUY this market for a potential profit in an uptrend.  The problem comes in when the market itself is no longer trending.  At a time like this, a trend following software will get chopped to pieces as the market rallies and falls chaotically; whipsawing you as you try taking each trading signal. See example “C”

Example C: USD/CAD Hourly Price Chart, courtesy of Genesis Financial Technologies The market is trading sideways with enough distance to fool the computer into thinking it is developing a trend. Notice how the red and green arrows suggest getting in to the market just at the time the market would reverse. By understanding how to tell when a market is truly trending and when it is not you can save yourself the headache of continuing to trade every signal a computerized approach might give you.  This type of market knowledge is never going to be “inside” the software or “inside” the black box.  You as a trader must not make the mistake of thinking that you don’t have to do any homework about the markets you are going to trade.  Trading systems and software only will go so far; you need to be vigilant on making up the difference through quality on-going market education.  It is important to understand the basic fundamentals of the FOREX markets as well as how to apply a trading system properly.

HOW TO MAKE THIS MISTAKE WORSE: ignore new developments in the news, don’t take refresher courses, don’t take advanced courses, don’t read any trading books, don’t attend seminars, ignore changes in your system, and don’t take feedback when offered.

SOLUTION: Make regular time daily to read books on solid trading principles, attend seminars or online webinars offered by seasoned professional traders, update your software and hardware regularly, and invest some of your trading profits into continuing education regularly.