There are no golden tips, and tricks of the trade or holy grail
Don’t eve try to find or use tricks in the trade, here is why.
By Guy Avtalyon
There are no tricks of the trade. You will find no hacks or cheat-sheets. All you can find are countless strategies to choose from depending on your trading style and many wise practices to follow.
In short: Learn before earn. Whenever it seems something is very obvious, first see how the market is behaving before making up your mind to go long or short. Start with paper trading. Learn Technical and Fundamental analysis. Access your risk ability and only take positions in which you are comfortable with possible loss.
After many hours and a lot of coffee, we had one conclusion: There are 3 types of trade. You have to choose your strategy. If you make the right pick and learn a lot you have a chance to become a master in it.
At first, you should get theoretical knowledge about the market.
Educate yourself and read special books. Read blogs. You can find a good piece of advice there. Make out a trading strategy or taking an already working one (find it on the Internet), test it, and see how it works. Try to master it. But don’t go away from its rules (you can change the rules, of course).
Practice. You need practice. Start with a demo account. All of them are free and you can get even several accounts from different brokers to compare them and find the best one for you. Then continue with trading real money, decide what strategy is yours, and start making money!
Remember, that you should keep in mind all the tips or tricks of the trade which you will learn from literature. You will have to make all your decisions logic and automatic. After some time, when you’ll be experienced enough, you should feel the ground. Meet your losses and wins as a lesson.
Define your goals and choose a trading style
It is important to have some idea about where are you going. You have to have clear goals. Then check your trading method is capable to achieve these goals. Each trading style has a different risk profile. That requires a certain attitude and approach to trade successfully.
You have to be sure your character fits the style of trading you deal with. The mismatch will lead to stress and definite losses. Learn and practice.
It is better than trying to find tricks of the trade.
Take this small tip regarding calculating expectancy:
Expectancy is the formula you use to determine how reliable your system is. You should go back in time and measure all your trades that were winners versus losers. Then determine how profitable your winning trades were versus how much your losing trades lost.
Take a look at your last 10 trades. If you haven’t made actual trades yet, go back on your chart to where your system would have indicated that you should enter and exit a trade. Determine if you would have made a profit or a loss. Write these results down. Total all your winning trades and divide the answer by the number of winning trades you made.
Choose an appropriate trading platform
Choosing an online broker seems like a simple process. But in reality, it can be a nightmare because finding the right broker is not easy. In the very beginning, you want to be sure that the broker has the right credentials, understands the market, has similar wealth-building beliefs as you do. The most important question is about what type of trader you want to be. Are you an active trader or buy-and-hold investor? Whatever you are, it will affect your choice of broker. If you are a buy-and-hold investor and invest in index funds, making a few trades per year, fund selection may be more important to you than low transaction fees. If you like to trade off of Fibonacci numbers, be sure the broker’s platform can draw Fibonacci lines. These are the best tricks of the trade.
Choosing a respected broker is of main importance. Researching the differences between brokers will be very helpful. You must know each broker’s policies.
Have a plan before executing a trade
You don’t need a million bells and whistles to make money, just one simple tactic that works. One of the biggest problems a trader faces is bridging the gap between trade planning and execution. Getting from a strategy looking good on paper to real-world trading performance is what it’s really all about. Without question, all the planning in the world will not do you any good if you can’t execute and reap the benefits of your work. Wins and losses come in a random distribution. It is not unreasonable to sit through a series of losing trades even if you did everything according to plan. One issue to consider is that people aren’t particularly confident in what they’re doing and this can be rectified with a little guidance.
Understanding what it is that you are trying to achieve and what constitutes reasonable results can go a long way towards settling nerves and allowing a trader to execute how they have planned to do so. Clarity of mind and consistency of approach will help you to start to realize the potential of your strategy.
OK, there is one trick of the trade: “one punch, one kick.”
The idea is to accomplish the job as quickly as possible with very minimal effort. Find your edge in the market, a technique that works and sticks to your plan. If you don’t have a strategy then you shouldn’t be on the battlefield. Traders who execute random orders without a plan usually lose their money. Who needs a flying roundhouse kick, when a straight stomp to the knee will incapacitate your opponent with one simple move.
Trade quality over quantity
One general mistake is the need to always be in a trade. Some traders get whiplash by chasing the market during choppy conditions. Advanced traders are very picky about when to pull the trigger.
Most of the time the markets produce a 50/50 possibility for success. You want to be patient and wait for trades that have a higher probability than a coin toss. The trick of the trade is to find good trade setups not treat the markets as a roulette table.
That said, even quality trades have an element of chance, therefore you always need to have an exit strategy to manage risk.
Traders tend to make money when the markets are inefficient unless you’re running an algorithm that scalps a flat market, stay away from choppy or stable price action. Only trade in market conditions that are conducive to your particular trading strategy.
As we said before, there are no tricks of the trade. Trading is an art. The only way to become skilled is through consistent and disciplined practice. That’s the trick of the trade.
