Friday, May 7, 2010

No charts, no play

I did not even see the markets today dear readers. Not even for a second. My reasoning for that is pretty simple. No charts, no play. For making consistent profits in trading, one needs an edge. No edge, no play. Yes, risk management is extremely important and without proper risk management you can simply blow up your trading account in a few trades. Yet, risk management is necessary but not sufficient for being a successful trader. First, you need an edge i.e. something to tilt the odds in your favor. How do we get an edge? Well, we all have our own ways but I bet the majority of the people visiting this blog get it from their technical analysis abilities. And when price is moving all over the place, with no regards for support or resistance or moving averages etc., we basically lose our edge. One can still trade with proper stop losses etc but now you are basically just gambling that the market might move in your favor. As short term traders, we love volatility. But there is volatility and then there is madness. And what we have seen in the last couple of days dear readers, is madness. Enoug' said.

Have a great weekend!

2 comments:

LEGALGAMBLING said...

Thank you position_trader. Once again you get down to the nitty gritty. Madness is the best word I've heard to date to describe this market. There can't be a risk management plan in the world that could protect you from market madness. I'm happy to be sitting in cash for as long as it takes.

positiontrader said...

Glad you liked the post Legal. Obviously I had what we were chatting about on Twitter the other night at the back of my mind when I wrote this post :).

Have a great weekend.