This week I’d like to hold my hands up to something I got completely wrong.
But before I do that, I’d like to talk quickly about someone who’s getting it very right – this is something I think you should take a closer look at (if you haven’t already) …
There’s been amazing feedback already from traders who’ve taken up a place on the Beat the Binaries trial. I’m delighted that so many of you have really hit the ground running with this one. Here are just a couple of examples of feedback from this week …
“I recently purchased your Beat the Binaries package. Having purchased a course from you previously, I was confident that this one was worth the money.
Actually I was wrong.
You could have charged far more for it! I have never had so much fun making so much money in such a short space of time. Having slogged away in the forex markets for what must be a couple of years now, I was looking for a simpler way to produce the results that I wanted. So when I saw the course advertised, and then saw that it was you, I snapped it up.
Within a week I had made more money than I have done for months trading my usual methods! I think the weirdest thing is that you just have to trust the system and the signals, and your brain is telling you that it surely can’t be this easy….
To anyone who is even thinking of trying to make money without having to sit and watch the candles all day (I only pop onto the platform for the hourly trades) you simply have to do this.
Thanks Neil!
Kind regards
Trevor Blake”
“I bought Beat the binaries on 23rd November 2012, and by 5th of December had done enough to realise my £200 bonus, and make over a hundred pounds in profit using relatively modest stakes.” Steve Lloyd
If you’d like to find out what all the fuss is about, and see how much this simple, low-risk trading style can make for you, .
Now, onto that thing that I wasn’t so right …
In the middle of last month, I wrote in Market Maven that equities were clicking into a full bear market mode.
And since then …
Equities haven’t stopped rising.
Turns out that I should keep my big mouth shut!
Trying to second-guess market direction is a fool’s game. I should know better.
Which is why pundits and experts giving long-term forecasts are generally about as reliable as the long-range weather forecast. No one knows what’s going to happen – and for every prediction one way, there’ll be a dozen other opinions.
There’s a tendency for traders (and people in general) to want to know what’s going to happen. We like to discuss it … we like to think about it … and we tend to get caught up in the process of predicting.
When, in reality, as a trader, you want to react, not predict.
How often have you found yourself saying: “I knew the market would shoot up, I should have held that position.”
Or: “This share price has just got to go up!”
We’ve all done it. It’s human nature.
But the truth is that it doesn’t really matter a damn what you thought … what you knew … what Steve Markman says … or what some bloke down the pub reckons …
It’s the old adage of “trade what you see” not “what you think”.
All that matters in trading is the set-up.
And how you react to it.
And, even then, with perfect technical analysis, we’ll get it wrong a fair bit of the time.
Being “wrong” is an important part of trading. If you genuinely believe that you can win them all, then, I hope you don’t mind me saying, you’re probably not quite in your right mind. And yet, most traders (me included) struggle to make peace with the fact that we’ll be wrong 40% … 50% … 60% of the time (depending on your strategy).
If you have a trading strategy with a 50% success rate, you’re going to be wrong half the time. There aren’t many jobs or situations in life where we get it wrong that percentage of the time, so it can be tough to deal with.
You’re going to get a lot of losing trades – and you’ll sometimes get nasty runs of losers. It’s a fact that you can’t escape from.
So, either we try to make peace with these loses, or this kind of trading is not going to be sustainable, and we have to look for something with a higher success rate.
Basketball legend Michael Jordan put it like this: “I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
It’s a powerful sentiment from a man who’s not afraid of taking risks. And it’s a philosophy that I aspire to as a trader.
If you don’t know much about the man – a quick Google search on Michael Jordan should give you enough inspirational quotes to keep you going for a year (and to answer any tough questions in a job interview) – the guy is seriously focused, hard-working and motivated. (Admittedly, some of his stuff is probably penned by a copywriter at Nike!)
But if anyone knows better than a trader about coping with losing streaks – it’s a professional sportsperson. At least my losers aren’t plastered across the back pages, with pundits predicting the end of my career every time I slip up.
In the next seven days …
Next week’s data will paint a picture of the Eurozone economic health. We’ve industrial production figures on Monday and Wednesday, the German ZEW survey on Tuesday, and Eurozone flash PMIs on Friday.
While industrial production may have bounced a little from the lows of last month, the data surrounding these figures is likely to be fairly bleak, showing us that the Eurozone is still in recession.
In the UK, we have employment figures on Wednesday, which are expected to show another fall in unemployment. However, production data and wage inflation show that these figures are simply masking the widespread on-the-job under-employment, for all those people who just can’t get enough hours.
In the US, we’ll see tentative signs of growth, although data is complicated by the effects of Hurricane Sandy. The Fed statement on Wednesday should confirm that rates will stay low and QE will continue. Of course, the fiscal cliff still looms large …
