The title is a quote I heard from Tom Basso, a semi-retired trader featured in “The New Market Wizards” book that was published in 1992. According to his idea, risk is something you can’t get away from if you want to earn excess returns. No matter how much you try to optimize the entry / […]
Tag: lessons
Categories
Comparison makes market participants unhappy
Happy New Year! Absolute performance measures the annual returns of a portfolio, while relative performance compares it to a benchmark or some index. Part of our human nature is to compare what we have or achieve to someone else be it a friend, neighbor, co-worker etc. We may be satisfied with our new car until […]
Categories
Be bold with your profits
People enjoy taking profits so much. It just feels so good to lock in that gain. You feel like a genius and you can tell everyone that you made money in the stock market. This can be a bad, bad behavior. Realizing winners too early is one of the main reasons traders don’t become profitable […]
Categories
I don’t pick stocks, the stocks pick me
First off, I do not choose stocks based on fundamentals or narratives. It doesn’t matter which company is making money in my portfolio. Nor do I care about the reason why it’s happening. The only reasons for my portfolio to make money are the share price going either up or down, and wins being larger […]
Categories
Every trading strategy has drawdowns
Not that I hadn’t learned about it before, but getting more practice day by day, living through the ups and downs makes me realize even better why trading is hard. Professionals don’t just rake in profits, they also need to take risks that often result in expected losses along the way. In fact, one’s trading […]