Trade smaller might be better

Rule 1. Never lose money

I’ve spent half a day at NLB going through some of the trading books especially on Trading Systems, Master of Trading Systems by Joe Krutsinger.

What is really useful is the last page which the strategy has been backtested with relevant statistic. What I realized is most of the strategy has 30-50% profitable trade. Meaning 50% of your trade will fail!

Masters of trading systems

What it is saying is cutting lost is the most important thing of trading! It is to help you preserve your capital.

What’s more interesting is that one of the strategy has a 1000% ROI but 30% profitability!

Now I’m truly enlightened!

Another link I would recommend on how to get out of losing stock. Interesting method. You should give it a try.

HL Asia

Downtrend forming a horizontal base but still within the down channel. Now trading in a tight range of 20 cents. Volume is expanding and hence there might be a good chance that it will break upwards of the horizontal range as well as the downtrending line.

RSI is is moving out of the oversold region. Other indicators like MACD and Stochastic is having a bullish divergence. ADX- is losing momentum but a break below 3 might signal the trend will continue.

Alert: Will 6.90 hold for NYSE:UNG?

Looking at UNG daily candlestick, it look really bearish. If it break, downtrend will resume.

8% lost in a single day accompanied by high volume in 30 min chart. It doesn’t really look good.

Daily Alert

STI halftime:

Ho Bee , Yanlord, Genting rebounding.

Analysis on Ho Bee

PE 3.6 EPS 0.457 NAV 1.63

Fundamentally, this stock is very delicious indeed.

Today has made a pivot point accompanied by good volume these 2 days. The downward pointing trendline might be broken soon. Macd Histogram turning up with Stochastic and RSI all pointing up. Put your cutloss point 4% below 1.63

Analysis on Genting SP

NAV 0.354

High volume breakout. Double bottom established. Volatility is coming back. This is a high risk play. Better to wait for 0.91 for resistance turn support.

Analysis on Yanlord

PE 10 EPS 0.167 NAV 1.22

Pivot point with trendline broken. However volume doesn’t look very convincing. RSI, MACD histogram, CCI and Stochastic all turning up. This looks to be a perfect setup though.

My take:

Property sector seems to be supported. Yanlord, Ho Bee, CityDev and Capitaland downward movement seems to be slowing and turning soon. I’m more interested in UOL since this one fundamentally will be one targeted by value investor. This helps to lower my downside risk!

May is coming. After that is world cup. And then government is pressing the property pricing down. It its a tough call whether to continue to stay in this sector.

First sign of weakness

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — The Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research met last Thursday and decided it would be “premature” to declare the end of the recession, according to an NBER statement released on Monday. “Many indicators are quite preliminary at this time and will be revised in coming months,” the statement said. The NBER is the non-profit arbiter of recession dating. The recent recession began in December 2007. Many Wall Street economists informally believe that it ended in the middle of 2009, making it the longest recession since the Great Depression.

Many stock form doji ahead of quarter 2 report. Other than Yangzijiang and Cosco and a few other special stock, broad market movement is seeing signs of profit taking. Can it be people is trying to pre-empt something?

Ezra had good news yet still dropped by 10 cents. When you have good news and yet the stock can drop so much, it is a sign of danger ahead. Ezra is trading in a channel, if it breaks, shortist will come in for a run. Keep a tight stop as lots of divergence is already showing is many sector.

Alert: Tat Hong breakout

Tat Hong breakout to 90.5 cents at noon. If it closes above 90 cents by today, it will be a good confirmation that resistance is broken. Recently newspaper stated that the target price is $1.06. Hope it’s true.

Vested.

- The Trader -

Psychology in trading

To cut things short, he is saying that psychology is the most important factor for a trader. Meaning you know who you are and why you are suitable for this trading style. Some people are more for breakout play while some like pull back style. Nothing is wrong but about finding the style you’re most comfortable and why.

I was recently approached by a top hedge fund about profiling the best traders in the world. Profiling really refers to finding those psychological characteristics that will best predict success. And I believe that I’m one of the world’s experts in that area since we have a huge database of psychological profiles of traders. I’ve been testing traders since 1982 to help them discover their strengths and weaknesses. The instrument that I’ve developed, The Investment Psychology Inventory, does an excellent job of that.

However, if you were to numerically rank the best traders in the world, they are probably people who can take $100 million dollars or more and make 20% per year on that money consistently. There are probably only about 20-30 such traders in the world, so how do you profile those traders? And even if you could get a thorough profile of all such traders, their numbers are so small that your data might not be that meaningful. Such are the issues of profiling.

After spending some time thinking about the whole issue, I now believe that my company has developed everything possible to do the task. However, it involves a lot more than just a psychological profile. In fact, it involves a number of assessments.

First, you need their psychological profile. I would expect traders who can make 20% per year or more on large amounts of money to generally fall in the top 10% of our database on all the skills we measure.

Second, I would look for their trader type. We now believe that there are approximately 15 trader types, but that most top traders would fall into only five or six specific categories. As a result, I’d want to look at their trader type.

Third, I’d want to look at accountability. All top traders must believe that they are personally responsible for the results that they get. This leads to certainly qualities. Either 1) they have tremendous discipline to do what needs to be done to be a top trader or 2) they have a strong desire to constantly work on themselves to improve. They are constantly working to maintain an optimal mental state for top performance and they are constantly looking at their beliefs to see if they are useful.

Fourth, we can now quantitatively measure systems and determine how good they are, regardless of the type of trading that people do. I call this the System Quality Number or SQN ™ for short. For example, someone who has a system with an SQN of 5 definitely has a much better trading system than someone who has a SQN of 3. I would expect most of the world’s top traders to have systems with SQNs of 5 or better. And the exciting thing about the SQN, is that we can measure it for various market types.

Fifth, one of the big secrets (that most people don’t understand) is that position sizing (the variable that controls how much throughout the course of a trade) is the key to meeting your objectives. I expect that most top traders understand this concept at some level. However, this can be taught and can be used to improve performance dramatically. And the higher the SQN, the easier it will be to use position sizing to meet your objectives. Thus, if your SQN was only 3.5, you still could be one of the best traders in the world if 1) you had thorough control over your personal psychology; 2) totally understood how to use position sizing to meet your objectives; and 3) have mastered the sixth quality which is the ability to minimize the impact of mistakes upon your trading.

Sixth, the next secret of the top traders is that they know how to minimize the impact of mistakes. I’ve talked about this in prior tips, but let’s say that the expectancy of your system is 1.2R. You make 100 trades per year, so you should be able to make about 120R per year. However, let’s say that every month you make one mistake. That mistake costs you 5R. So in one year, you’ll make about 60R worth of mistakes, and your total return is now only 60R. Your mistakes will have cost you half of your potential returns. Top performing traders know how to negate the impact of mistakes.

Lastly, there are certain fundamental skills that all top traders will have such as 1) how to get the information you need; 2) how to execute orders; 3) how to organize yourself; etc. I’d expect all top traders to have these specific qualities.

Dr. Van K Tharp

Stocks pull back from recent peaks

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Stocks slipped Tuesday as investors stepped away from the recent rally that left the Dow industrials just shy of the 11,000 mark.

The Dow Jones industrial average (INDU) lost 28 points, or 0.3%, after ending the previous session at 10,973.55, the highest point since Sept. 26, 2008, when it closed at 11,143.13.

The S&P 500 index (SPX) slipped 3 points, or 0.3% after closing the previous session at its highest point since Sept. 26, 2008, when it topped 1200. The Nasdaq composite (COMP) fell 9 points, or 0.4% after closing at its highest point since Aug. 15, 2008.

Can it be true that my previous post on bond stock divergence is in effect?

Inverse correlation between HYG and SPY!

There is a diverging correlation between bond and s&p500 now. Looking at this post, we can see it very clearly. Larry Williams has mentioned this as one of the trading strategy.

Why? Because once the stock gets too expensive and bond gets to cheap, people will shift their money from stock to bond. And this is usually true. We shall see something will happen in a month or less.

This has also been mentioned in investment moat.