Trading Rules - Keep to yourself

Drawing from the teachings of Turtle Traders, I must keep my trades to myself and increase confidence and faith in myself. The Golden Agri case is a classic example. I bought at 0.315 on 15th July and it went up to 0.335 the next day. I happen to call a friend (who is a full time trader, sort of) for some sharing. He warned me to sell away stocks that are in-the-money to cash out quickly because overall market seems to be soften. That prompted me to sell off my Golden Agri at 0.315 for a quick profit (5.5%). Sounds good for a one-day job. After selling, I realized that I had made 2 mistakes. One, I was succumbing to fear of losing because I didn't justify the selling by the chart and the counter did not hit my stop loss. Two, I was not sticking to my rules and consult my charts before making any moves.

Important Rule: Trading is a lone game (Jesse Livermore, Turtle Traders). Do not discuss your trade with other people.

This important rule was both mentioned by Jesse Livermore and Turtle Traders.

Comments

Spanish Debt Issues

There is a lot of talk about Spanish sovereign debts recently. I came across a research paper which I think is very useful for me and wish to share it here. This is taken from www.fundsupermart.com, an online fund broker where you can purchase funds form various fund managers. This portal provides some research and comparisons and it is essentially a self service portal. From the chart provided, we can see that there is a problem for Spain to service their debts for the next 4-5 years if the debts are not re-structured. With this kind of risk, no sane investors would want to risk their money to buy Spanish bonds. They can only turn to European central bank for bail out. The blue arrow is a fictitious line I draw assuming re-structuring is going to happen. Essentially, they have to move the payment of capitals into next 5-20 years to be affordable. In addition to that, they can't make additional loans. This is just taking a very simplistic view of the situation. To have that hap...

Always Do Your Own Analysis

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Professional Investor's advice, market hype etc.

This is an article that I read on 26th September 2012. It has been over a year now and I suddenly remembered. I'd posted this last year with some other predictions from CNBC etc. During then, I was very fascinated listening to these experts. They are so confident and so logical. I always admire their ability to "read" the market and manage hundreds of millions of dollars of other people's money. So of them managed billions of dollars. Then I thought what if they ever go wrong? Won't they lose a lot of money? So, I think it would have been interesting to remember what they said and then we verify later. On 26th September, the S&P 500 index closed at 1433.32. One year went on and it went up another 19% from there. Below is S&P 500 over last one and a half year. As we can see, the market has still been a bull. Over the one year period, the S&P 500 index did correct itself. However, it was a

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