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Riskmangement

Risk management in tradingWhen trading on the stock exchange, you need to know at least the basics of risk management, but it is better to understand it professionally, because the main attribute of any transactions made in the financial markets is risk. Without competent, professional management, without risk management, it is impossible to stay in such markets for a long time. To be a successful trader, you must learn to assess risks, balance and reduce them. Only in this case, the capital will not only be saved, but also increased. Fundamentals of risk management To properly manage capital, you need to know about the following principles: 1. You should not invest even in the most tempting project more than half of the total capital. Among financial experts, this principle is also called "don't put your eggs in one basket" or "diversification." That is, in order to successfully continue your activities in the financial market, it is best not to invest all your funds in only one undertaking. More than half of the money must be left for other projects and for the continuation of their work 2. Invest in one position no more than 10-15% of the total amount of funds you have. Another advice from the category of diversification, which insures against ruin. He warns that one cannot invest a lot of one's funds at once, it is better to distribute them correctly and limit one's risks, and make the profit more stable. 3. The rate of risk in the transaction must not exceed 5% of the total amount of funds you have. If you follow this principle, then the loss ratio of any trader will be less than 5% of the total capital. Depending on which market and which strategy is used to trade, the percentage of risk can be reduced to 1%. 4. There must be a balance between diversification and concentration. While diversification is one of the most reliable risk management techniques for reducing risk, even its application must be measured. It is necessary to balance the diversification and concentration of funds. There is no need to turn your portfolio into a "stuffing" of investment instruments, you will only need to open positions in 5-7 groups of instruments. Before compiling a portfolio, it is necessary to determine the correlation between trading instruments. It may be zero, but it is preferred that it be negative. In this case, the future fall of one group of instruments will be compensated by the growth of other groups. 5. Place stop orders. In order to avoid large losses if the price change is not in your favor, it is best to take care in advance and set Stop Loss. It makes the price fixed, which will allow the trader to close the position at this price. The way the Stop Loss will be set is influenced by market analysis, as well as the personal readiness and ability of the trader to make dangerous, risky, but profitable transactions. When placing a Stop Loss, you need to correctly assess not only the totality of technical factors, but also the characteristics of personal qualities, in particular, your ability to take risks. 6. Determine the rate of return. For any operation in the market, it is necessary to determine what the ratio of profit and loss will be. Such a forecast is necessary so that, in the event of undesirable phenomena on the market, the risks are balanced. In the financial world, a good ratio is 3:1. The simplest example: if a trader risks $100, then his profit from the transaction must be at least $300 (300:100 is the same as 3:1). If for some reason such a ratio cannot be achieved, then it is better to refuse the deal.
BITSTAMP:BTCUSDEducation
by Crypto4light
2
FOMO - Analysis from a Trading PsychologistFOMO. Fear of Missing Out. I can feel FOMO’s omnipresence in the trading world right now. We have seen some large career changing moves in Commodities & Futures as of late. Extend the lookback time a few years and the Cryptocurrency universe is surely included. I decided to turn to my favorite trading psychologists, Brett Steenbarger,PhD. Brett has been in the trading game since the late 1970’s and his Nov 21’ speech on Trading FOMO piqued my interest. Below is a summary of what I took away from it, and some preventative ailments attributed to Brett’s psychological evidence-based outcomes. FOMO is a P&L Killer! At its core FOMO is a fear. The problem is not that we missed the trade, it’s that our brains perceive that missed trade as a threat to our future, our success, our reputation. When humans are afraid of something, or see a threat, it produces anxiety. This fear takes blood away from the part of the brain where higher level thinking takes place and sends it to the part that impulsive thinking lives. There WILL be poor decision making under the influence of anxiety. The key to solving this issue is to take the threat out of the situation. Solutions: Taking a break from the screen is healthy but it is not a long-term fix. Brett explains how to train in exposure therapy (His presentation explains this in greater depth.) Slow breathing and visualization are more adept at battling FOMO. If you can visualize a calming place or situation and pair it with that fear, daily practice and dedication will prevent blood flow to the impulse zone. Gradually, when FOMO comes around, you will experience feelings of safety. Combined with expanding your time of reference, understanding, and acknowledging FOMO will make those events look like potholes on a long highway. Missing a trade is unfortunate, but will it end my career? No. Will buying at the top, and then being so irate that I add to a losing trade and forgo stop orders end my career? It might. Will I be thinking clearly on my next trade with a fresh mistake permeating my thoughts? No. The best motivation to avoid FOMO is to develop emotional hate towards the negative consequences of it. In the fullness of time, the desire to avoid negative outcomes becomes self-reinforcing with repetition and therefore cements as an internal priority. This works across the board in other life scenarios as well. Tapping into other motivations besides P&L is one that really hit home with me as well. Brett dives into the desire to learn and grow as a greater motivator than just P&L alone. This addition will create a dual purpose to each trade. You are diversifying your outcome! If you come away from a trade with a negative P&L, but with a positive learning experience, you are building your Learning Capital. With time under this premise, your Learning Capital will be indistinguishable from your monetary statement. Instead of tying your value as a trader strictly to your P&L, tie your value to your consistency and risk management. The magnitude of your P&L is nothing without consistency. Risk management begets larger positions, lower drawdowns, and an overall better quality of work life. A Day comes with myriad experiences. Create a diversified life with people and activities that fulfill you outside of trading and your trading will improve. Reminding yourself daily of this is important. Tying all of this together is the practice of keeping a daily ABCD Journal. A - Activating Event – What got you upset? - Missing the trade in this case. B - Beliefs about the event – Little voice in your head – Why is this upsetting to you? “Other people are getting ahead of me, I’m not as good as they are” C - Consequences from the event – How does negative thinking affect your subsequent trading? I’m so upset about missing the opportunity I go ahead and miss the next one! Becoming proficient in ABC will allow you to recognize the triggering event in real time. You begin to identify the negative beliefs and become a pro at understanding the magnitude of the consequences. You can change the pattern of your behavior because the consequences are so front and center. D - Disputation- You are talking back at that negative thinking. How would you talk to someone you care about who is in that situation? Mentoring a teammate that missed a big play involves constructively lifting them up and helping them learn from it with a comforting tone. You aren’t going to beat them up. I welcome all feedback and am also here if you want to chat about a particular experience. Happy Trading! -Paul Wankmueller, CMT Blue Line Futures Director of Content & Education
Editors' picks
NYMEX:NG1!Education
by CMT_Association
60
Your strategy will inevitably go through a Drawdown!Your strategy will inevitably go through a Drawdown. And there's nothing you can do about it to stop that. However, you can learn how to survive it! Today I will give you actionable steps, that you can use for the next time the market hit your strategy and you feel that everything is going wrong. Let's start with an idea of what a drawdown is, and why drawdowns happen. There are an infinite amount of trading strategies and tools that people use to trade and take advantage of specific market conditions. Some traders are better in trending markets, they trade breakouts. Other traders feel more comfortable in ranging markets, where they trade quick reversals on key levels. The Math is simple here. Trending strategies will have a poor performance on ranging markets, while reversal strategies will have a poor performance on trending markets. Detecting the beginning and end of trending cycles or ranging cycles, is blurry. So, if you agree with that, as I do, you can expect your strategy to start failing at some point. And that's the beginning of the drawdown. (This is true for the best traders in the world, as for the worst traders in the world. Nobody scape drawdowns, the quickest you accept this, the faster you can learn how to handle them properly) So let's start by saying that drawdowns are situations where your strategy experiences a lasting decline in performance, even if you are doing everything perfectly. Drawdowns, happen because strategies are made to take advantage of specific anomalies that can be found in one part of the market cycle, and when that market cycle finishes, or changes, your strategies become less accurate. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- It's important that you become aware of the Psychological consequences of Draw Downs , so you can have a countermeasure for this. Let's take a look at the most common ones: 1) Decrease in confidence (constant negative thoughts about your system) 2) Fear of entering the next trade. 3) Thinking about changing things in your strategy (deviations from the original plan) 4) Thinking about modifying the risk you are using to cover losses quicker. 5) Ceasing your trading execution, and looking for a new strategy. ALL THESE ITEMS, are the main situations you may start feeling when going through a drawdown. IF you are going through that, it's important that you understand that you are under a delicate emotional state, where your confidence is low, and you are prone to make more emotional decisions that 99% of the time, tend to increase the drawdown. So the way we handle drawdowns is by having logical and systematic processes in place instead of emotional ones. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Here you have actionable steps to handle drawdowns: STEP 1 : You handle drawdowns by getting ready before they happen, not when they are happening. This is true for almost all disciplines, not only for trading. Airplanes have clear plans in case things start going wrong, instead of figuring out the problem at the moment, pilots go to the manual book, and use the template for this situation, plus the fact that they trained those situations several times in simulations. So, if you want to understand what a drawdown situation looks like in your strategy, you MUST go into the past, and when I say this, I'm not saying making a 3 week backtest. You need to go as far as you can in the past, to find that exact moment where your strategy is not working as expected. How many consecutive stop losses do I have? 3? 5? 15? 20? How long does this period last until everything goes on track again? 1 month? 3 months? or a year? These are the kind of answers you are trying to solve. When doing a backtest you are trying to understand two things. The first one is if your strategy has an edge. The second one is how hard you get hit when things go wrong! STEP 2: Work your risk management around the stats of your system. Imagine we reach the following conclusion "I have a system, that executes 10 setups per month" and the worst-case scenario I have found is 20 consecutive stop losses during 2 months. What I would personally assume is that 20 consecutive stop losses can be 30. So how much capital percentage should I risk on this system so I don't get knocked out if this TERRIBLE scenario happens. The answer for me would be 1% per setup. Under the assumption of this unique scenario, I would be 30% down, which is something acceptable, compared to the drawdown of conventional investment vehicles like S&P500 where we observed those kinds of declines, in the last years. The main point here is that you need to adapt the risk you are using on the strategy, to the stats of it, and your risk tolerance. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Let's recap the key aspects of this post. 1) Drawdowns are inevitable, your strategy will be hit by this scenario eventually. 2) Drawdowns cause an emotional disturbance and are the main reason why people make really bad decisions. 3) We handle drawdowns by getting ready in advance. Through backtest, we can understand the edge of our strategy and the worst-case scenarios. 4) We adapt the risk of our strategy, by considering a terrible scenario, like 30 consecutive losses. This will not eliminate the feeling during this period, but it will bring you a work frame to make logical decisions based on data, instead of emotions. Implementing this type of thinking will make your strategy more robust, it will help you go through these situations, and most importantly it will protect you from making stupid things with a strategy that has an edge, and actually works! Thanks for reading!
Editors' picks
BITSTAMP:BTCUSDEducation
by ThinkingAntsOk
129
Right on the DOT/USDTDOT/USDT 🟢entry: $18.060- $17.295 ❌stoploss: $17.730 🎯tp1: $28.420- $27.360 🔼potential %profit: +56.57% 🔽potential %loss: -10.66% r/r: 5.31 Hi Everyone, 🥀this trade idea is fairly self-explanatory. i see an inverse head-and-shoulder pattern developing. in addition to the chart pattern, there is significant volume and the left shoulder, the head, and (to a lesser extent) the right shoulder. this price/volume combination strengthens my confidence in the pattern. 🥀i am setting up the entry in a fairly tight range at the right shoulder, between $18.060 and $17.295. 🥀stop-loss is placed at an appropriate distance below entry, although there is not much in the way of price structure to give further guidance in placement. 🥀target exit is at the last point before price dropped off with volume and began to form the left shoulder of the pattern. check back for updates as the position progresses. feedback and constructive criticism is always appreciated. ✌️all good luck and always practice strict risk management!
Long
by TylerPhilip
How I'm setting stop losses on USDJPY using IchimokuIn my recent post I indicated that I am long USDJPY due to the higher timeframe bullish trend: A question that traders often ask is "how do I set a stop-loss when the market is moving up?". This applies if you are looking to enter your first trade in the trend, or if you want to trail a stop-loss on an existing order. The answer is simple when you use Ichimoku. Briefly, Ichimoku lines indicate the "market equilibrium" over various timeframes. There are three equilibrium lines (or "Han-ne" lines in Japanese). These are: 1. Tenkan-Sen - 9 periods / Short-term equilibrium (yellow on my chart) 2. Kijun-Sen - 26 periods / Medium-term equilibrium (red on my chart) 3. Senko Span B - 52 periods / Long-term equilibrium (red kumo cloud line on my chart) A Han-ne line is created by finding the midpoint of the highest high and lowest low within the set number of periods. If price is above a Han-ne line, it is said to be bullish in that timeframe, and the opposite for bearish. There is a lot more to learn about Han-ne lines and the meaning of the equilibrium, but for our purposes here, understand that these lines tell you the point where buyers and sellers meet. One of the reasons we know that USDJPY is bullish is because the Han-ne lines are angled up on the higher timeframes (4H and 1D). This means that the point at which buyers and sellers meet is increasing. In other words: we are trending up! Now: the secret for setting your stop-loss. If the Han-ne line tells us where the equilibrium is over the short/medium/long term, periods where the line remains flat are significant. If a Han-ne line, especially Kijun-Sen or Senko Span B, remains flat for multiple periods, it means that midprice has been established by many buyers and sellers. We can use these flat Han-ne lines as: 1. Support/resistance 2. Zones to place stop-loss orders As I look at a pair like USDJPY trending up, I am zooming into the lower timeframes (think: 15m or 30m) and looking for flat Han-ne lines. If I see several "zones" forming I can place my stop-loss just near the other side of that zone. This means I can receive adequate protection, but also know that if the price does clear that zone and hit my order, a reversal or pullback is likely happening and it will be a good time to exit anyway. We've already seen a flat Kijun-Sen line act as support on the 15m chart: You can use this concept for any pair, currency, stock, crypto, etc. The secret is to look for flat lines and use these as your support/resistance levels and stop-loss zones. Happy trading!
Education
by ichimokucorner