Subscribe now and watch my free trend following VIDEO.

Old Pro Wisdom

An quotation from an old pro trend follower:

“Why do people think they’re smarter than the market long-term? What gives them that confidence? I guess people feel dumb if they can’t predict what the market is going to do in the short term. They’re too proud to admit they don’t know what to do when they’re wrong. They don’t have the capacity to understand the digits that are scrolling by on the bottom of the television. I don’t. It’s too much noise. That’s why we rely on our system.”

Who is being quoted? Hint: he did not start trading until his late thirties.


How can you move forward immediately to Trend Following profits? My books and my Flagship Course and Systems are trusted options by clients in 70+ countries.

Also jump in:

Trend Following Podcast Guests
Frequently Asked Questions
Performance
Research
Markets to Trade
Crisis Times
Trading Technology
About Us

Trend Following is for beginners, students and pros in all countries. This is not day trading 5-minute bars, prediction or analyzing fundamentals–it’s Trend Following.

Jim Rohrbach: Why Investors Buy High and Sell Low

My friend Jim Rohrbach sent me an article he recently authored:

I talk to a lot of people about investing. Many of them are afraid to invest. I don’t think they recognize their fears, but the longer they talk the more I recognize the fears that are not obvious to them. I had a few of those conversations this week. One was from an existing subscriber and one was from  a potential subscriber who has called me on several occasions. At the end on each of the calls from the potential subscriber he tells me that he understands the importance of my service, and that he is going to subscribe. But, he never does. The other conversation is with a current subscriber who did not get in the market even though he knows that the RIX has been on Buy Signals for almost all of the time since the March 9 lows.

What are the common threads in these  conversations? Well the same ideas apply to most investors who can’t pull the trigger on up trends and down trends. When the markets hit their lows in early March, all we heard was that the markets were going much lower and we were going into a depression like the one that happened in the 1930’s. So that creates the fear that “if I get in now the market will go down, so I will wait so I don’t lose money”. It doesn’t matter to these people that the trend of the market turns up. They are afraid of losing money, so they stay on the sidelines.

Another fear happens when the trend of the market starts down. Many investor want to keep their recent profits. They are sure that the markets will go back to their recent highs so they stay too long because they are convinced that “if I sell now the market will turn around and go back up”. So they stay and stay until their losses get so big that they make the decision to ride it out. In bear markets, fortunes are lost waiting for the market to go back up.

Another fear occurs when the market continues up. Those who did not get in are afraid to get in because they are sure that if they get in, the market will turn down and they will lose money. So they wait for a pullback, that may not come. If the big pullback does come, these same people will become afraid again and will not get in even though they are given a second chance. Fear controls their decisions, so they can’t make a move. They eventually join the “Buy and Hold Crowd” and ride out all market up and down moves. They become “Sitting Bulls”.

If investors base their investment decisions on emotions and fears, they will probably be unsuccessful. When investors decide in advance where they think the market, or their investment vehicle, is going to go they will tend to look for indicators to support that decision. They have a strong need to be correct even while their financial world is collapsing.


How can you move forward immediately to Trend Following profits? My books and my Flagship Course and Systems are trusted options by clients in 70+ countries.

Also jump in:

Trend Following Podcast Guests
Frequently Asked Questions
Performance
Research
Markets to Trade
Crisis Times
Trading Technology
About Us

Trend Following is for beginners, students and pros in all countries. This is not day trading 5-minute bars, prediction or analyzing fundamentals–it’s Trend Following.

Donchian: Forbes Circa 1982

An excerpt from Forbes circa 1982:

The fundamentalists — a decided majority among successful investors — look on chartism somewhat the way physicists look on parapsychology. They are probably correct to regard them so, but there is no rule that does not have an exception. Dick Donchian seems to be that exception. Donchian differs from many a chart watcher: He doesn’t predict price movements, he just follows them. His explanation for his success is simple and as old as the Dow Theory itself: “Trends persist.” He will buy a hog or Treasury bond future after an upswing is under way, and sell it only after the price has begun to tumble. He misses some of the profit, but that’s part of the discipline of his style of investing. “A lot of people say things like: ‘Gold has got to come down. It went up too fast.’ That’s why 85% of commodities investors lose money,” he says. Donchian gained that wisdom the hard way. His Futures Inc., the first publicly offered commodities fund, came out in 1948 at $10 a share. It was before its time — or Donchian’s. “When I started trading I was bearish,” he recalls. “Cocoa seemed too high. So we took a short position at 30 cents, and it went down to 19. We made a lot of money at first; that was the worst thing that could happen. I looked around for another commodity that was overvalued. Coffee was making a new high of 20 cents, so we took a short position, and it went up to $1. I made a rule never to be a price trader. There’s no such thing as too high a price or too low a price.” Futures Inc. went as low as 4 cents a share before finally being dissolved…The essence of trend-following, however, is always this: Buy on a rising price and sell on a falling price. That sounds like buying dear and selling cheap, but it works, if prices move not in random walks but in long strides.


How can you move forward immediately to Trend Following profits? My books and my Flagship Course and Systems are trusted options by clients in 70+ countries.

Also jump in:

Trend Following Podcast Guests
Frequently Asked Questions
Performance
Research
Markets to Trade
Crisis Times
Trading Technology
About Us

Trend Following is for beginners, students and pros in all countries. This is not day trading 5-minute bars, prediction or analyzing fundamentals–it’s Trend Following.

Money Management Advice

Trading mentor Van Tharp once stated:

Perhaps the greatest secret to top trading and investing success is appropriate money management. I call it a ‘secret’ because few people seem to understand it, including many people who•ve written books on the topic. Some people call it risk control, others call it I diversification, and still others call it how to ‘wisely’ invest your money. However, the money management that is the key to top trading and investing simply refers to the algorithm that tells you ‘how much’ with respect to any particular position in the market.

He added:

John was a little shell-shocked over what had happened in the market over the last three days — he’d lost 70% of his account value. He was shaken, but still convinced that he could make the money back! After all, he had been up almost 200% before the market withered him down, He still had $4,500 left in his account. What advice would you give John? Your advice should be, “get out of the market immediately. You don’t have enough money to trade speculatively.” However, the average person is usually trying to make a big killing in the market, thinking that he or she can turn a $5,000 to $10,000 account into a million dollars in less than a year. While this sort of feat is possible, the chances of ruin for anyone who attempts it is almost certain.

I have been helping clients with these very issues in my trading courses for over a decade.


How can you move forward immediately to Trend Following profits? My books and my Flagship Course and Systems are trusted options by clients in 70+ countries.

Also jump in:

Trend Following Podcast Guests
Frequently Asked Questions
Performance
Research
Markets to Trade
Crisis Times
Trading Technology
About Us

Trend Following is for beginners, students and pros in all countries. This is not day trading 5-minute bars, prediction or analyzing fundamentals–it’s Trend Following.

William Eckhardt: Limit Portfolio Risk!

willaim eckhardt

Bill Eckhardt, the systems trading pro and former partner of Rich Dennis, once offered:

“…many prospective clients have asked me what’s the most I’ll lose on one trade. I can look up these statistics, but this is not something I would ordinarily pay any attention to. It doesn’t matter how little you lose on an individual trade, but how much you might lose on your whole portfolio. You’re not going to keep a ship afloat just by making sure the leaks are small. The important thing is to limit portfolio risk, the trades will take care of themselves.”

Eckhardt may have lost the bet with Dennis over the Turtles, but it was his hands on instruction that was critical to the Turtles’ development. How do I know? Almost all of the Turtles I talked to were quick to credit Eckhardt. It should also be noted that Eckhardt, not Dennis, has the 15+ year continuous perfomance record going back to the early nineties!

Much more on Eckhardt is in my book. Find out more about Eckhardt in the turtle trading system pdf.


How can you move forward immediately to Trend Following profits? My books and my Flagship Course and Systems are trusted options by clients in 70+ countries.

Also jump in:

Trend Following Podcast Guests
Frequently Asked Questions
Performance
Research
Markets to Trade
Crisis Times
Trading Technology
About Us

Trend Following is for beginners, students and pros in all countries. This is not day trading 5-minute bars, prediction or analyzing fundamentals–it’s Trend Following.

Harvard Poker Pro Says Texas Hold ‘Em Can Teach Traders to Fold

From Bloomberg:

“Someone who has made a successful living as a poker player for a few years would more likely be a good trader than someone who hasn’t,” said Aaron Brown, a 53-year-old former poker pro who is now a risk manager at AQR Capital Management LLC in Greenwich, Connecticut, which oversees $23 billion. “They know to push when they have the edge and they know how not to bust, and that’s a tough combination to find.”

Thinking in odds is a crucial point of my film.


How can you move forward immediately to Trend Following profits? My books and my Flagship Course and Systems are trusted options by clients in 70+ countries.

Also jump in:

Trend Following Podcast Guests
Frequently Asked Questions
Performance
Research
Markets to Trade
Crisis Times
Trading Technology
About Us

Trend Following is for beginners, students and pros in all countries. This is not day trading 5-minute bars, prediction or analyzing fundamentals–it’s Trend Following.

Larry Hite on Risk

Some wise views from Larry Hite:

“We don’t really trade silver…we don’t trade the S&P…we trade the differences. We really are risk managers. We take on risks, try to exploit them and we leave when they turn against us. That is what we get paid for. Basically we are in the risk transfer business. We take on what people want to sell, sell what people want to buy and hope to make a profit. The reason why one goes to a portfolio is because there are real limits to perfect knowledge. I’ll give you an example. Say you knew which commodity, stock or currency would appreciate the most in the following year, and you knew exactly what its price would be. We did this experiment looking backwards in fact in our database. The question of when you take a position is how are you going to trade the line…how much of a position are you going to leverage. Now, if you have perfect knowledge, would you leverage 5 to 1, would you leverage 10 to 1, 2 to 1? Well it turns out that if you leverage more than 3 to 1 that you are a loser. Because we found that if you did 3 to 1 you would have, even with perfect knowledge, you could go down a third. So that, the only perfect knowledge you could have, would be if you knew every wiggle on the line. Then you would know exactly how much to leverage. But you don’t.”

More.


How can you move forward immediately to Trend Following profits? My books and my Flagship Course and Systems are trusted options by clients in 70+ countries.

Also jump in:

Trend Following Podcast Guests
Frequently Asked Questions
Performance
Research
Markets to Trade
Crisis Times
Trading Technology
About Us

Trend Following is for beginners, students and pros in all countries. This is not day trading 5-minute bars, prediction or analyzing fundamentals–it’s Trend Following.