I remember you were posting about trading during the big drops last year. You do very well trading.
Do you have any advice on trading? Are there any good courses? Books?
I agree with you. This is the way to go in this day and age.
Not as well as I want to be. What I made in the drops, I gave back huge chunks during the rises, but the most important thing is that nett nett, I made more than I lost, though for now the rate of return is not commensurate with the efforts put in and it's my fault for being a one trick pony. Also, learned how to be humble. Not so garang now. I looked at it as a form of training, paid to train (even if little compared to my grand expectations at the beginning) is considered good already. Most beginners start by blowing up their account.
Need to re-wire my brain and think of it as a long term game ahem business. As long as I have a positive month, the losses on my bad days are fine. In the past, when I made a loss, I would be depressed for days, completely losing my confidence and become full of doubt, missing out on perfectly good shorting opportunities in subsequent days which I could see but couldn't pull the trigger because I had gone from bravo to chicken because of one losing day.
Still need to upgrade my mindset from:
- “always short bias” to “long bias or short bias as the market condition dictates”. The challenge is to objectively (not let my inherent bias get in the way) determine the market condition from what I see on the chart as it unfolds in real time.
- aim (and hope) for the big one aka the “greedy pig” approach to a “swing trading” or “opportunistic wave surfer” approach of take half off the table with reasonable profits at the area on chart where my experience tells me that opposing force (i.e. selling force if I am long and buying force if I am short) will likely be coming in and hold the other half for a possible “big one” with stops on the reduced position moved to break even (not logical – the market don’t give a flying fuck where I opened my position) or some logical area on the chart (support/resistance, moving average, trendline, etc). If lucky on the remaining half – good, if not – no big deal, I am still profitable. Basically, after closing half of my position, for the remaining half, I am playing with the market's money (realised profit on half and paper profits on the other half) and not my original principal. Wow, a free lottery ticket, who don't want? So the pressure is off, shiok. Still needs more work on this front, I am inherently a greedy pig.
- if got out too early and as the chart develops it becomes clear that the trend is more likely than not to continue, never be afraid to admit that you were wrong and go right back in again, just wait [again] for the market to show you signs in the form of an entry trigger signal. A lot of waiting is involved.
This Sinkie youngster called Rayner Teo is not bad. The basic approach can be summarized as M (market structure – higher highs and higher lows aka bull or lower highs and lower lows aka bear or just trade ranging – tells you what sort of bias you should be taking – long or short bias or mean reversion); A (area of value – be patient, wait for a pullback to support/resistance, moving average, trendline); E (wait [again] for the market to give you an entry trigger – hammer or engulfing candle pattern, etc and only then do you pull the trigger and express your bias with a position in the market); E (when to exit if wrong – how to determine the level at which you will be proven wrong by the market and stopped out); E (when to exit if right – area when the opposing force is likely to come in). Just google it.
For HSI futures, with which I am quite familiar, the most trending time is from 9.15 am to 10.45 am. In fact, on most days, the high and low of the day is set between this one and half hour period and after it breaks out of the high/low of this one and half hour period, it is not likely to go to the other end of the range. Also, the HSI is now more and more correlated with the China A50 index, futures of which are traded in Singapore. Can cross reference CA50 futures if in doubt – not tick for tick or candle for candle, but basically if the CA50 is up by a large margin, you should be wary of going short the HSI. This morning, CA50 kept making new lows in early trading but HSI did not respond immediately - so basically don't go long and wait for opportunity to go short after a pullback. This simple strategy paid off... heaps! Can capture half or even one third of that one and half hour range is already very lucrative already. So, basically one needs only play video game or ahem work during this one and a half hour, make whatever is offered by the market and fuck off to enjoy the rest of the day. Mind you, most of that one and a half hour is actually spent watching and waiting, the smaller part of that time is spent executing the trades (a few seconds each time) and trade management (fancy term for watching how the market moves when you actually have a position and deciding whether to stay put or add or reduce your position until it becomes flat i.e. completely out of the market).
