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Online Trading for Financial Freedom "From a part time online investor with $4,078 in a trading account to a merciless stock market predator making over $100,000 in less than a year - using our proven short term trading approach." Novice traders have a 95% failure rate. If they fail who is to blame? Bad luck? I don't think so. Trading success has nothing to do with luck. It has everything to do with you. Your discipline. Your hard work. Your courage. This course is your complete step-by-step guide to trading success. Learn More... Once again we have been fortunate to get Zoran Kolundzic to put together two articles for us. If you already know Zoran then you will know that he is one of the top professional traders in the industry. What are the differences between trading and gambling? Many people think that trading is similar to gambling. Is this really the case? For example, lets take a look at Black Jack. If you start with $10,000 gambling capital, placing bets of $100 per hand and play 100 hands per day, how long will you last? In the game of Black Jack, with Las Vegas Strip rules, a casino has a built-in advantage of 1.5% over the player in the long run. That means that on average, a player will lose $1.5 per any $100 he bets with. After 100 hands, on average hell be down $150. Starting with a capital of $10,000 a player would last about 67 gambling days. That is very similar to the previously described trading scenario. In such case I would choose gambling because at least I would be losing my money in a more pleasant environment.
Understanding Trailing Stops Once you are in the trade and the price has started moving in your direction, you need to extract as much profit as possible. Not being able to do so will make you a losing trader in the long run. How can a trader lose if he only takes small profits at a time? Profit is profit, isnt it? Not exactly Profit of $550 is not the same as a profit of $850. If such profits are followed by three losses of $200 each, profit of $550 will become $50 loss, while profit of $850 will become $250 win. Do you get my point? Profits are always followed by losses and if the profits are small they will not make up for the losses that will eventually and surely follow. However, becoming too greedy can turn a small profit into a loss. This will make you lose money in the long run. The best solution to resolving these conflicts is to use trailing stops. As the name says, trailing stop follows the stock price that is moving in your direction. For example, lets say that we have bought two S&P 500 contracts at 875. We will automatically put our stop loss at 1 point below the support line or if that is over our 4% limit we will put our stop loss at 871. The price starts to move upwards and reaches 876. We will now move our stop loss at $871.75. For every one point move in our direction we will move our stop loss 0.75 points up (or down if we were in a shortsell trade). However if we were trading two contracts and the price has in our example hit 879 (4 points profit for ES or 10 points for NQ) we would sell one contract to protect our profit and for the remaining contract we would use trailing stop. To read more about Zoran Kolundzic course click here...
Good Trading Mark McRae
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