Edition 603 - January 1, 2016
Trading Educators has served our customers since 1988, and still remains committed to our dedication to teaching the truth about trading. We relish the thought that our company promotes and educates independent and self-reliant traders. In the coming year, we will continue our commitment to give you the highest level of service.
2016 Greetings
by Master Trader Joe Ross
Author, Trader, Trading Mentor, and Founder of Trading Educators, Inc.
Hello Traders,
I wish you a very good start in this New Year, and really great trading in 2016. My only advice this year is to "be careful," "use caution," and keep lots of cash on hand due to the economic volatility and threats of war. Pay attention traders, you can make money under these conditions, but you have to be careful. "Keep your powder dry" and be ready to take advantage of very lucrative opportunities. Traders can make the most money when volatility is high.
The commodities are beginning to bottom, and will continue to bottom into March, giving many opportunities. Stay completely away from junk bonds and municipal bonds. Any government bonds should be treated with much care and caution. Look for continued rising in the US dollar, at least in the immediate future. We should own a little physical gold if possible, and "poor mans" gold (silver), if possible. The financial markets will be in great turmoil.
Thank you for your support and loyalty, and we look forward to serving you for many years to come.
Happy Trading,
Joe Ross
© by Joe Ross. Re-transmission or reproduction of any part of this material is strictly prohibited without the prior written consent of Trading Educators, Inc.
2016 Greetings
by Master Trader Andy Jordan
Educator for Spreads, Options, Swing/Day Trading, and Editor of Traders Notebook
2015 was definitely a difficult year for traders. Many hedge funds went broke or are close to being out of business. My seasonal spread trading didn’t work well in 2015, but our options trading was okay. My swing and day trading went surprisingly well this year, and Stealth Trader also brought in some nice profits. With one Stealth Trader account I am up almost 100%, thanks to some lucky exits in August when the US stock indices tanked for a few days.
But what will 2016 bring regarding trading? I think rising interest rates in the US will bring more volatility, not only in the indexes or financial markets, also in other commodity markets. I believe the US stock market will continue to climb higher, along with the US Dollar.
Quite contrary to the US, I believe Europe will head into very difficult times. The refugee problem will be only one part of the puzzle that will bring Europe down.
As you can see from my list above, I think a good trader has to be able to adapt to different market situations. The times when a trader could concentrate only on one specific way of trading are long over. When I started almost 15 years ago, Joe pushed me into spread trading, but over the years I've added many ways of trading to my trading-tool-box. I am recommending that you do the same.
I wish you all a joyful 2016, with good health, love, and many good trades!
Andy Jordan
© by Andy Jordan. Re-transmission or reproduction of any part of this material is strictly prohibited without the prior written consent of Trading Educators, Inc.
2016 Greetings - New Year
by Master Trader Marco Mayer
Educator for Forex and Futures, System Trader, and Creator of Ambush Trading Method
It’s always a good idea to look back at the end of each year to reflect on what happened, and to set fresh goals for the next year. I feel that’s especially true for my trading, since I set my goals on a yearly basis.
In other words, regarding trading results, I don’t have any daily/weekly/monthly goals anymore. All I look at is what I achieved over a year. Why? Simply because I realized it’s almost impossible to reach a monthly goal on a persistent basis. The markets might give you a hard time for months, and then you make it all within a month or two. It’s better to not care for short-term results, which is difficult but possible, if you keep the long-term in perspective.
2015 was a very mixed year for me. I had a really sluggish start that lasted until around April, when everything turned around and I had some very good months. At the end of July everything looked very promising, I had already reached my yearly goals, and was hoping for another super year like the one I had in 2014!
As usual, whenever you get too confident in trading something bad is waiting around the corner. For me that was definitely the month of August. Specifically, the last two weeks, when the stock markets dropped over 10% within three days without any retracements. My guess is that many of you also remember that time. I know from many other traders that they also got hit quite hard. Some of them no longer trade now - that huge drop in the stock markets simply was too much for their accounts being over-leveraged. For the first time I saw the E-Mini S&P 500 stop trading during the day. I’ve seen this in the E-Mini Nasdaq and other markets before, but never in the ES. There’s always a first time, huh? It’s exactly these times that make you a very humble trader, when something happens that hadn’t happened before.
I was protected throughout that period, but it still was a huge hit, and I gave back more than 2/3 of the profits I had accumulated to that point in 2015. Ouch! Like any other human being, I was not looking forward to placing my orders the days after this, but I stuck to my guns and continued doing what I did every day. I have to say that if my trading hadn’t been 100% systematic, I probably would have had to at least take a break at this point. It still wasn’t easy to keep going, but it was at least possible.
This course proved to be the right step to take. In September, I made back about 50% of the losses, and while I’m still not back at that equity peak of August, I did almost reach my goal for 2015! Looking back, it is all a nice story. The difficult and crucial part is to not get lost in those „stories,“ and focus on the long term. But this can be really tough!
In a nutshell, that was my 2015 trading year. In addition to that, I was very happy to help many of you to become better traders. It’s a big joy to hear from some of you that you improved your trading results significantly, or even more importantly, your trading life!
For me, the big change in 2015 was that I completely stopped doing any part-time IT related projects, and focused 100% on trading and on trading system development. This made things possible for me that I couldn’t have achieved otherwise. After years of thinking about it, I finally could develop my own backtesting and trading platforms, based on „python“ that now allows me to try out many of the ideas I had written down over the years, but couldn’t backtest due to limitations of the available retail trading platforms.
Looking back, it’s clear that I could never have done that part-time. It’s a tremendous amount of work if you want to do it right, and even with over 15 years of experience in software development, I did very seriously underestimate the effort and time needed to complete this.
So was it worth the effort? I surely think so! It’s no overstatement to say that this year of deep research and development took my trading to a new level. I got tons of new ideas in the process, and I learned a lot even though I had thought I already knew pretty much everything about trading and system development. There is a reason why the big players all have their own R- or Python- or Matlab-based research and trading systems. For me, this opened up the doors to advanced statistics, machine-learning, and other techniques that are incredibly helpful with developing new trading ideas and systems. It’s still the simple ideas that work best, but having the knowledge and tools available makes a huge difference in the development process.
This puts me in a very nice position for 2016. I now have many of the capabilities that the big players have - while not having the liquidity issues they have. In other words, I can trade edges in markets and timeframes that they can’t trade.
So what’s up for 2016? My next step is to finish the development and start to trade the new systems I’m working on. I’m also planning to come up with new products and services based on what I discovered this year, and I’m sure you’ll be as excited about these as I am.
Overall, the conditions look very good for trading in 2016. We have plenty of volatility right now, and I think it won’t stop too soon - so I’m looking forward to a good, and maybe a bit less exciting trading year in 2016!
That’s also what I wish every one of you - a successful but also a relaxed, and of course a happy and healthy, New Year 2016!
Marco
© by Marco Mayer. Re-transmission or reproduction of any part of this material is strictly prohibited without the prior written consent of Trading Educators, Inc.
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