Trading Educators Blog

​Seasoned traders observed long ago that after a series of wins, a trader is vulnerable to over-confidence and trading errors. It's quite understandable. Trading is a competitive business, and when you win, someone else loses. Market participants trade because they are greedy for profits, but often sell out of a fear of losing. How do many traders deal with the inevitable feelings of uncertainty a...

Master Traders develop a style that is a reflection of their education and character. Most individual trading styles are either positional or combinational and, rarely, a synthesis of both. However, there are other styles.  Positional traders take x amount of positions within a specific price area where the market is thought to be favorable to their trading strategy. This may occur on short t...

“You can get ahead of yourself in this game, and it’s dangerous to get cocky. But I’ve had times where for an hour I could do no wrong. I’m trading and 99 percent of the trades are good, they’re all for 30 or 50 contracts, and I’ll make 10 grand. Then I’ll overextend myself and maybe buy 10 or 15 contracts, fighting the trend just because I know prices have hit a support level. Then prices blow th...

There are two important components of federal market activity which affect long- term economic activity and stock and commodity values; these are interest rates and money supply. A contracting money supply was one of the factors that caused the Great Depression of the 1930's. In the early 1980's most traders focused almost totally on the money supply figures, which would cause cash bonds and T-Bil...

Question from a subscriber: "Once I’ve achieved success as a trader, then what? I’ve heard that after a while trading can become boring." I know you would all like to have that problem, but I can vouch for its being true. I always have to find new ways to trade or I do become bored. However, I have never run out of ways to trade that remain exciting, at least for a fairly long time. After the obje...

Dear Friends, Whenever this time of year rolls around, I find myself with an attitude of gratitude. This week we celebrated Thanksgiving Day. Although "Thanksgiving" is not celebrated here in Uruguay, many living here celebrated at various places around the country. There were at least fifty people at the gathering my wife and I went to. Trading and markets have been a major part of my life for al...

As a trader, it's essential that you set specific goals. Trading is chaotic enough without trying to achieve unstructured goals that are difficult to manage and reach. Making profitable investments requires you to prepare carefully. You have to develop hypotheses regarding current market conditions. You have to devise ways of identifying setups and determine how and when to enter and exit the trad...

A popular concept in the world of trading, especially among technical traders and chartists is to wait for confirmation before entering a trade. This means you have a Signal, for example a price action pattern and now you wait for the markets to confirm that pattern before you enter. The idea of course is to filter out bad trades this way and to gain confidence before entering the trade. But that ...

When I started out trading I had the illusion that being a successful trader meant to no longer have drawdowns or at least on very rare occasions. And I think most traders start out with that idea in their mind even though they don’t understand what it actually means. In Trading, you are in a Drawdown anytime you don’t make new equity highs on your account, or if you have multiple accounts across ...

As I’m about to go on vacation I thought it’s a good idea to write down my thoughts about trading on vacation. Is it a good idea to do so, or just crazy? I believe it depends. If you’re longer-term position trader and have a couple of positions open that are doing great and you don’t want to close them out now for example, I think there’s nothing wrong managing your position once a day while you’r...

After writing about why good trading usually is quite boring last week, I’ll continue down that road today and write about another similar topic.  And again it’s more of a rant that many of you maybe don’t want to read about. But I believe it really can be an eye-opener to those of you who’re really serious about trading and these are the traders that I care for the most. Actually I wish I ha...

When you start out trading, it’s pretty much all about the excitement. You watch every trade tick by tick, gazing at a chart ticking up and down together your P&L. You’re long. When it goes up, you feel excited because you’re making money, if it goes down you’re excited because you’re losing money. But boy you’re making sure you don’t miss any of this. You sit there and gaze at that chart as i...

I just posted another video on our YouTube channel about another very common trading mistake, and that's trading your P&L instead of the actual market. While there are many variations of this, I guess I covered some of the most common ones that I've done myself again and again when I started trading. Go check it out and let me know if you have any questions or comments!

I just wanted to let you know about a new video that I uploaded to YouTube about one of the most common trading mistakes out there: To Stop Trading/Following your method/system/yourself at the worst time possible. This is something I see over and over again especially among beginning traders. You won't believe how often I've trapped into this myself during my first years of trading! Happy Trading!...

One of the questions every trader has to think about at some point is, how much of my account should I risk per trade? A percentage? If so, what percentage? I’d love to have the right answer in my pocket for you, like "exactly 1.25% per trade/market and no more than 5% at the same time," but unfortunately, I don’t. Again I know you don’t want to waste too much time with this bo...

I just uploaded Episode 3 of my Questions & Answers Series to YouTube. It covers questions on the usefulness of demo-trading and on trading 123 formations. In the last part I talk about why I developed my own python-based backtesting platform which is probably only interesting for those of you who're hardcore into system-development. So if you're not, just stop there ;)

The last I did a post about what's going on in EUR/USD and that it's unlikely we'll see a significant move unless the pair breaks out of it's established range. Now that finally happened and the Euro is on a strong run for a few days now already. Now what to do? If you're already long, should you keep on holding the position? If you're not in the trade already, should you still buy at the market? ...

The second Episode of my Q&A Series is uploaded to YouTube. I only managed to answer two questions this time, so I probably should be a bit briefer in the future... Topics are disciplined trading and the lifetime of trading methods, and how to decide when to stop trading them. Enjoy!

This is one of the quotes about trading that stuck with me. I googled it and it's from Ed Seykota, I probably read it in one of the Market Wizards books, which I can highly recommend. The exact quote is “Win or lose, everybody gets what they want out of the market. Some people seem to like to lose, so they win by losing money.” Now this applies especially well to the retail world o...

Hi Trader, now this has been a quite volatile week so far in many markets and I hope you've also been able to capture some nice profits out of these wild moves! Thanks to my trading being almost completely systematic right now I still had a few minutes to record a new video for YouTube and actually start of a new Series. In the first one I explain what a BID/ASK spread is for those of you who're c...