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How To Take A Loss

Brett N. Steenbarger, Ph.D.

There are quite a few books written on how to make money in the market. Some of them are even written by people who have made money as traders! What you don't see often, however, are books or articles written on how to lose money. �Cut your losers and let your winners run� is commonsensical advice, but how do you determine when a position is a loser? Interestingly, most traders I have seen don't formulate an answer to this question when they put on a position. They focus on the entry, but then don't have a clear sense of exit�especially if that exit is going to put them into the red.

One of the real culprits, I have to believe, is in the difficulty traders have in separating the reality of a losing trade from the psychological sense of feeling like a loser. At some level, many traders equate losing with being a loser. This frustrates them, depresses them, makes them anxious�in short, it interferes with their future decision-making, because their P & L is a blank check written against their self-esteem. Once a trader is self-focused and not market focused, distortions in decision-making are inevitable.

A particularly valuable section of the classic book Reminiscences of a Stock Operator describes Livermore 's approach to buying stock. He would sell a quantity and see how the stock responded. Then he would do that again and again, testing the underlying demand for the issue. When his sales could not push the market down, then he would move aggressively to the buy side and make his money.

What I loved about this methodology is that Livermore's losses were part of a grander plan. He wasn't just losing money; he was paying for information. If my maximum position size is ten contracts in the ES and I buy the highs of a range with a one-lot, expecting a breakout, I am testing the waters. While I am not potentially moving the market in the way that Livermore might have, I still have begun a test of my breakout hypothesis. I then watch carefully. How are the other averages behaving at the top ends of their range? How is the market absorbing the activity of sellers? Like any good scientist, I am gathering data to determine whether or not my hypothesis is supported.

Suppose the breakout does not materialize and the initial move above the range falls back into the range on some increased selling pressure. I take the loss on my one-lot, but then what happens from there?

The unsuccessful trader will respond with frustration: �Why do I always get caught buying the highs? I can't believe �they� ran the market against me! This market is impossible to trade.� Because of that frustration�and the associated self-focus�the unsuccessful trader does not take any information away from that trade.

In the Livermore mode, however, the successful trader will see the losing one-lot as part of a greater plan. Had the market broken nicely to the upside, he would have scaled into the long trade and likely made money. If the one-lot was a loser, he paid for the information that this is, at the very least, a range-bound market, and he might try to find a spot to reverse and go short in order to capitalize on a return to the bottom end of that range.

Look at it this way: If you put on a high probability trade and the trade fails to make you money, you have just paid for an important piece of information: The market is not behaving as it normally, historically does. If a robust piece of economic news that normally sends the dollar screaming higher fails to budge the currency and thwarts your purchase, you have just acquired a useful bit of information: There is an underlying lack of demand for dollars. That information might hold far more profit potential than the money lost in the initial trade.

I recently received a copy of an article from Futures Magazine on the retired trader Everett Klipp, who was dubbed the �Babe Ruth of the CBOT�. Klipp distinguished himself not only by his fifty-year track record of trading success on the floor, but also by his mentorship of over 100 traders. Speaking of his system of short-term trading, Klipp observed, �You have to love to lose money and hate to make money to be successful�It's against human nature what I teach and practice. You have to overcome your humanness.�

Klipp's system was quick to take profits (hence the idea of hating to make money), but even quicker to take losses (loving to lose money). Instead of viewing losses as a threat, Klipp treated them as an essential part of trading. Taking a small loss reinforces a trader's sense of discipline and control, he believed. Losses are not failures.

So here's a question I propose to all those who enter a high-probability trade: �What will tell me that my trade is wrong, and how could I use that information to subsequently profit?� If you're trading well, there are no losing trades: only trades that make money and trades that give you the information to make money later.

www.brettsteenbarger.com

More Thoughts On Forex

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Every trader should find his/her method/system which suits his/her own situation and personality. And that system/method must be the one that has proven to be able to make some money through trials. So, if Tom, the medium-term trader, revealed his money making method of last three decades, it may not have the same effect for Dick and Harry, the day traders, and vice versa. Agree that most fail for lack of system/method and/or lack of discipline to follow through.

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Unquestionably, in Forex trading systems, speed is of the essence in these hectic times. Every nanosecond counts when you are trading using five minute charts. The most basic Forex trading systems rely on moving averages. The more "sophisticated" systems use combinations of moving averages of both price and volume. The most "expensive" systems incorporate stochastics, which are the mathematical techniques for a non-linear science.
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Forex currency trading is a form of trading that offers a much greater potential for profitability at the same time the risks are much greater. Foreign currency trading is trading based on the always fluctuating currencies of other countries and how they interact with each other. Since there is no single dollar value, as fluctuations in one foreign currency affects all others, foreign currency trading is always exciting and always changing directions.

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Saving Société Générale

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 11:12:11 EDT
In the early afternoon of Sunday, Jan. 20, Daniel Bouton, the chairman and chief executive of the huge French bank Société Générale, was in his 35th-floor office preparing for a board meeting that evening when one of his lieutenants, Jean-Pierre Mustier, came to break some calamitous news. Mustier, Société Générale's head of investment banking, had already alerted him about a 31-year-old junior trader in the stock arbitrage department named Jérôme Kerviel who had been caught making big unhedged bets on European stock futures.

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posted by The Forex Broker @ 11:16 AM