Category: philosophy
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Bad Information Leads To Bad Trades
Most of the trading content you read on social media is garbage. Sure some blogs are good, but most are bad. Yes some tweets are mind-bending, but most are worthless. You know this and have an inkling of what is good and what is garbage. The problem is it all…
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The Shocking Way That Winning Trades Blow Up Trading Accounts
You may have just crushed it with your biggest winning trade of the year, but you still do not know how to trade. That rush your feeling means it was a bad trade. Good trades are not exciting. If this trade was your biggest win of the year, you probably…
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How to trade the news with this top secret foolproof plan
Looking back, Brexit was a big deal. Definitely the biggest deal since the banks collapsed in 2008. Think about it. The 5th largest economy in the world left the European Union. What the heck is Google, Amazon and Netflix going to do now? The stock market guru’s over on CNBC…
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The 7 Words You Must Tell Yourself Every Morning
I was once a gambler, but now a trader. I once blew up a 200k account within a matter of weeks. Up until that point, I thought I was a trader. I opened up a trading account during the last stages of the roaring 90s internet boom. For a while…
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How most traders trade without an edge and don’t even know it
There are two mistakes most traders make when building a basket of trading setups. 1. They trade setups without and edge.2. They trade the setup in the wrong market. Your trading “edge” gives you a reliable idea of how much you can expect to win with your setup over time.…
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Smart traders profit from the wisdom and delusions of the crowd
Crowds can be wise, but also manic and delusional. An astute trader learns to differentiate between these two extremes. When there is diversity of opinion, the crowd is a force. The parts think independently, but private judgements combine to join as one powerfully wise collective. Unfortunately this intellectual juggernaught will…
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It’s the small wins that hurt
This is what holds many traders back. The small wins. Yet we love to take those small wins, and avoid small meaningless losses like the plague. We are afraid of losses. It doesn’t matter it it is big or small, that L is scary. It’s all about the fear of…
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Don’t choose unhappiness over uncertainty
It’s a flaw in our brilliant minds and one that afflicts most traders. It’s a big reason why 90 percent of traders fail. I’m watching one of my students trade a few weeks ago and he keeps taking these ridiculously small wins. Over and over again, he takes these small…
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Subtract Your Way To Trading Success
Swing Trading Master So you know about swing trading breakouts . . . fantastic. You can make a lot of money trading those. So you know about stochastics . . . that’s great. Extreme conditions lead to extreme profits. So you trading using Fibonacci retracements . . . awesome. I…
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Define yourself as a trader
We can choose to define ourselves as traders by the trades we take. This is not about the money we make. Rather it’s the place within the setup that we enter. Do you require more confirmation, content to give up some gain in exchange for safety? Or do you jump…
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Prepare for the worst and the worst Martin Shkeli joke you ever heard
Martin: I have a horrible migraine. Prison guard: A bottle of Advil is $750,000 It’s easy to lose sight of the dangers of trading when things are going well. A few good trades and you are invincible. But it only takes one bad trade to wipe all the profit away.…
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It starts with one: habits, excellence and 112 push-ups
Aristotle said excellence is not an act, but a habit. What he was telling us is that excellence does not begin fully formed, but builds over time through habit. Excellence does not start excellent. Dream big, but start small. With one. At the beginning of the year I told a…
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The Fallacy of Backtesting and Adapting to Current Market Conditions
I recently engaged in an interesting chat with a novice trader this weekend. It got me thinking about the fallacy of backtesting and why I don’t rely on past statistics. You heard me correctly. My take on backtesting is controversial and puts me in the minority. Some have called me…
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Trading Meditation: Uncertainty Is The Way
Certainty is a problem for traders. They want the answer to the question, “What will the market do”. I do not know. Does that make me an idiot? No, it makes me smart. I know that I do not know, and I accept it. I know that I am not…
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Trading Meditation: Taking Small Losses Is Not So Bad
It hurt bad, yet it wasn’t so bad. Once when I was 9 years old my dad hit me with 10 straight pitches in a row. This was after I kept jumping out of the batters box while Pablo fired off 3 strikes right down the middle of the plate.…
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Trading Meditation: The Early Bird Gets The Profits
Hesitation gets you nowhere. It is linked to fear and fear guides traders to the poor house. But Paul, I want confirmation. No, you are just afraid. So you wait. For the safety of the move. Seeing the stock move feels safe. So you act. And now you lose. That…
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Trading Meditation: Be The Wolf, Not A Sheep
If every trader is doing the same thing, how does anybody make money? Trading is a zero sum game. Somebody wins, somebody loses. And the split is not 50/50. It is more like 10/90. For those who are making significant percentage gains, it’s more like 5/95. To the few victors…
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Trading Meditation: How to tell if it’s intuition or guessing
Intuition is a swing trader’s best friend. When we intuit it seems as though there is no conscious reasoning. To the outsider it seems like guessing. In reality it is a function of the mind that glimpses greater knowledge through experience and pattern recognition. Traders often confuse intuition with guessing.…
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Trading secret for those unwilling to understand that they can not predict the future
Traders know less about the future than they think they do. And if the trader knows she does not know, she thinks someone else does. It’s why you hang onto every word of woefully inaccurate CNBC pundits. It’s why you love and hate Cramer. It’s why you follow 3654 members…
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Why Would I Be Interested in What I Can Already Do?
Over the years I have learned to appreciate those who do things counter to my own “way” or style. A few years ago I was visiting with an successful artist friend who draws heroes in a dark, gothic style (think Batman Begins versus the old campy Batman TV shows of…
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Winners Trade to Win
As you already know, I am not a slave to conventional wisdom. It is my belief that most popular beliefs held by the masses are not wise at all. This applies to all walks of life, not just the stock market. The latest bit of unwise conventional wisdom is the…
Paul J Singh 