皮蛋\'s topic on trading techniques (ZT) by QQQ

皮蛋's topic on trading techniques

Discuss Trading techniques   I have been reading posts in HT9 over a month. There are many good posts with high quality and also many joke posts and mis-leading ones that filled with wishful thinking. Many posts just simply tell when they enter positions (long or short) or simply say they are bull or bear without much reason on why. Also I can hardly find any posts that talk about trading techniques and exit strategy. From my view, those 2 are most important to think deeply before you enter the mkt.   So what I want to do here is open up a field to discuss trading techniques and exit strategy, hope more experiences masters here exchange their trading experience to help others improving.     (1)     Market View: stand on the right side of the game First, I do not need to point out now we are in down trend (everyone knows) unless we see significant signals for a trend change. The safe trades are the ones that follow the trend. Counter trend trades do profitable sometimes, but the increasing risks and required skills that make this not suitable for everyone. Use 秋之皓月 for example (sorry), he is a master of doing counter trend trades and even with those trades, he uses to quick in and out, plus he always has other trend trades/options to hedge. He uses stops, trailing stops, conditional stops, etc to protect his trades. Unfortunately I have never saw him to care about spend sometime to discuss these rather than joking around here.  My advices to people here who do not think they have秋之皓月’s trading skills, do not try to enter a counter trend trade without protection (I will discuss that in (3)).   Second: I think I also do not have to point out (since everyone knows) this is trader’s mkt not an investors’ mkt. But why so many people think about long/short and hold?   (2)     Find a trading system that fits you personality and style of thinking (if you can not change your brain after 7 years old, from old Chinese myth) you need find a way that you can trade to fit your brain First: Figure out who you are and how you can trade is important. If you can not take such pressure on trading, if you can not watch mkt tick by tick, if you can not bear the loss, or if you are just lazy and think trade mkt is a easy way to make money, if you are just a long term investor that is long for buy and hold for next 5 years. You have to take different strategies before you think about to start a trade.   Second: Trading systems, there are many trading systems and trends, triggers that traders use for the trade. For these days, as it is just a traders mkt, I only use weekly, daily, and 60min every night to view the trend and do day trades use short term charts (1, 5, 15 mins charts). I have 2 simple trading systems, (1) use BB and 50ema (5min chart) (2) use ema (or sma) 7 and 21 crossing to decide enter and exit points during the day. If the signals do not trigger a trade, I will just wait. That means if I do not see an edge to enter and do not see where I can exit, I do not do a trade.   (3)     Figure out your exit point before enter a position. This is most important, I saw almost ALL posts here talk about how to enter positions (enter the mkt) and never saw a post that tells how to exit the position. Actually a good trader spends more time to figure out where and how to exit before they enter a position. The exit strategy includes how much loss you can bear on this trade. Where to take the profit and where to exit if the position starts to against you. Set those are a must before enter a trade and if you do see profit that reaches your target (congrats you are right) you should use trailing stops to protect your trades and never loss money on a winning trade. If the trade starts to against you, do execute your planed exit plan to exit your position, no questions, no exceptions. A very simple logic: you have to have less or smaller losses than your winners and profitable trades  to make money.   (4)     Control emotion and greedy kills: I noticed many people loss money is not because they do not have an exit plan, they do, but they (1) excuses themselves again and again to against their original plan and think the thing will go what they think it should go (2) Do NOT want to admit their mistakes. Their emotional an greedy part of brain KILL the trades and money.   Let's me stop here today now, I will try write more later or if you have questions. Other masters, if you’d add your trading experiences and techniques, that would be great to help fellow HTers.