“In conducting the interviews for this book and its predecessor, Market Wizards, I became absolutely convinced that winning in the markets is a matter of skill and discipline, not luck. The magnitude and consistency of the winning track records compiled by many of those I interviewed simply defy chance.”

Tips From The Market Wizards

Michael Marcus:

“If trading is your life, it is a torturous kind of excitement. But if you are keeping your life in balance, then it is fun. All the successful traders I’ve seen that lasted in the business sooner or later got to that point. They have a balanced life; they have fun outside of trading. You can’t sustain it if you don’t have some other focus. Eventually, you wind up over-trading or getting excessively disturbed about temporary failures”

Bruce Kovner

Position size. He traded much too big. For every one contract I traded, he traded ten. He would double his money on two different occasions each year, but still end up flat.

Whenever I enter a position, I have a predetermined stop. That is the only way I can sleep. I know where I’m getting out before I get in. The position size on a trade is determined by the stop, and the stop is determined on a technical basis.

The problem with developing expert systems for trading is that the “rules” of the trading and investment game keep changing. I have spent some time working with expert system developers, and we concluded that trading was a poor candidate for this approach, because trading decisions encompass too many types of knowledge, and the rules for interpreting the information keep changing.

First, I would say that risk management is the most important thing to be well understood. Undertrade, undertrade, undertrade is my second piece of advice.

They personalize the market. A common mistake is to think of the market as a personal nemesis. The market, of course, is totally impersonal; it doesn’t care whether you make money or not. Whenever a trader says, “I wish,” or “I hope,” he is engaging in a destructive way of thinking because it takes attention away from the diagnostic process.

Paul Tudor Jones

That was when I first decided I had to learn discipline and money management. It was a cathartic experience for me, in the sense that I went to the edge, questioned my very ability as a trader, and decided that I was not going to quit. I was determined to come back and fight. I decided that I was going to become very disciplined and businesslike about my trading.

The most important rule of trading is to play great defense, not great offense. Every day I assume every position I have is wrong. I know where my stop risk points are going to be. I do that so I can define my maximum possible drawdown. Hopefully, I spend the rest of the day enjoying positions that are going my direction. If they are going against me, then I have a game plan for getting out.

Don’t be a hero. Don’t have an ego. Always question yourself and your ability. Don’t ever feel that you are very good. The second you do, you are dead. My biggest hits have always come after I have had a great period and I started to think that I knew something.

My major problem was not the number of points I lost on the trade, but that I was trading far too many contracts relative to the equity in the accounts that I handled. My accounts lost something like 60 to 70 percent of their equity in that single trade.

Richard Dennis

It was an intellectual experiment. We trained them as well as we could. That was the way to do the experiment right, I thought. I tried to codify all the things I knew about the markets. We taught them a little bit about probability, money management, and trading. It turned out I was right. I don’t say that to pat myself on the back, but even I am surprised how well it worked. It’s frightening how well it worked.

The key is consistency and discipline. Almost anybody can make up a list of rules that are 80 percent as good as what we taught our people. What they couldn’t do is give them the confidence to stick to those rules even when things are going bad.

On any individual trade it is almost all luck. It is just a matter of statistics. If you take something that has a 53 percent chance of working each time, over the long run there is a 100 percent chance of it working. If I review the results of two different traders, looking at anything less than one year doesn’t make any sense. It might be a couple of years before you can determine if one is better than the other.

I’ve certainly done it – that is, made counter-trend initiations. However, as a rule of thumb, I don’t think you should do it.

Ed Seykota

The key to long-term survival and prosperity has a lot to do with the money management techniques incorporated into the technical system. There are old traders and there are bold traders, but there are very few old, bold traders.

Fundamentals that you read about are typically useless as the market has already discounted the price, and I call them “funny-mentals”.

I am primarily a trend trader with touches of hunches based on about twenty years of experience. In order of importance to me are: (1) the long-term trend, (2) the current chart pattern, and (3) picking a good spot to buy or sell. Those are the three primary component of my trading. Way down in a very distant fourth place are my fundamental ideas and, quite likely, on balance, they have cost me money.

I prefer not to dwell on past situations. I tend to cut bad trades as soon as possible, forget them, and then move on to new opportunities.

I feel my success comes from my love of the markets. I am not a casual trader. It is my life. I have a passion for trading. It is not merely a hobby or even a career choice for me. There is no question that this is what I am supposed to do with my life.

Having a quote machine is like having a slot machine on your desk – you end up feeding it all day long. I get my price data after the close each day.

Win or lose, everybody gets what they want out of the market. Some people seem to like to lose, so they win by losing money.

Larry Hite

While the speculator doesn’t have the product knowledge or speed, he does have the advantage of not having to play. The speculator can choose to only bet when the odds are in his favor. That is an important positional advantage.

Frankly, I don’t see markets; I see risks, rewards, and money.

Marty Schwartz

 I always laugh at people who say, “I’ve never met a rich technician.” I love that! It’s such an arrogant, nonsensical response. I used fundamentals for nine years and got rich as a technician.

Learn to take losses. The most important thing in making money is not letting your losses get out of hand. Also, don’t increase your position size until you have doubled or tripled your capital. Most people make the mistake of increasing their bets as soon as they start making money. That is a quick way to get wiped out.

James B. Rogers, Jr. (Jim  Rogers)  ‘The man in the bow tie’

One of the best rules anybody can learn about investing is to do nothing, absolutely nothing, unless there is something to do. Most people – not that I’m better than most people – always have to be playing; they always have to be doing something. They make a big play and say, “Boy, am I smart, I just tripled my money.” Then they rush out and have to do something else with that money. They can’t just sit there and wait for something new to develop.

I just wait until there is money lying in the corner, and all I have to do is go over there and pick it up. I do nothing in the meantime. Even people who lose money in the market say, “I just lost my money, now I have to do something to make it back.” No, you don’t. You should sit there until you find something.

Mark Weinstein

It is experience and gut feel. I use all forms of technical analysis, but interpret them through gut feel. I do not believe in mathematical systems that always approach the markets in the same way. Using myself as the “system,” I constantly change the input to achieve the same output – profit!

Dr. Van K. Tharp

The top traders that I’ve worked with began their careers with an extensive study of the markets. They developed and refined models of how to trade. They mentally rehearsed what they wanted to do extensively until they had the belief that they would win. At this point, they had both the confidence and the commitment necessary to produce success.

Tips from The New Market Wizards

Bill Lipschutz

I don’t think you can consistently be a winning trader if you’re banking on being right more than 50 percent of the time. You have to figure out how to make money being right only 20 to 30 percent of the time.

Randy McKay

I never try to buy a bottom or sell a top. Even if you manage to pick the bottom, the market can end up sitting there for years and tying up your capital. You don’t want to have a position before a move has started. You want to wait until the move is already under way before you get into the market.

William Eckhardt

Either a trade is good enough to take, in which case it should be implemented at full size, or it’s not worth bothering with at all.

I haven’t seen much correlation between good trading and intelligence. Some outstanding traders are quite intelligent, but a few aren’t. Many outstandingly intelligent people are horrible traders. Average intelligence is enough. Beyond that, emotional makeup is more important.

The desire to maximize the number of winning trades (or minimize the number of losing trades) works against the trader. The success rate of trades is the least important performance statistic and may even be inversely related to performance.

Monroe Trout

I don’t pull out any money. I rent my condo and I drive a cheap car.

First, many people get involved in the markets without any edge. They get in the market because their broker told them that the market is bullish. That is not an edge. However, to tell the truth, most small speculators will never be around long enough to find out whether their system could have worked, because they bet too much on their trades, or their account is too small to start.

Stanley Druckenmiller

I’ve learned many things from him [George Soros], but perhaps the most significant is that it’s not whether you’re right or wrong that’s important, but how much money you make when you’re right and how much you lose when you’re wrong.

Victor Sperandeo

When he finally got out, he felt a sense of relief – which is somewhat ironic since he had just lost 70 percent of his money. There’s nothing logical about this process. It’s all an emotional pitfall. Planning where to get out before putting on the trade is a means of enforcing emotional discipline.

Tom Basso

My reinforcement came when my losses gradually became smaller and smaller. I was getting very close to the breakeven point. I also kept my losses at a manageable level. I always traded a very small account – an amount that I could afford to lose without affecting my life-style.

I would tell that trader to think of each trade as one of the next one thousand he’s going to make. If you start thinking in terms of the next one thousand trades, all of a sudden you’ve made any single trade seem very inconsequential. Who cares if a particular trade is a winner or a loser? It’s just another trade.

Linda Bradford Raschke

It never bothered me to lose, because I always knew that I would make it right back. I always knew that no matter what happened, I could go into any marketplace, with any amount of money, and make a living.

Al Weiss

The essential element is that the markets are ultimately based on human psychology, and by charting the markets you’re merely converting human psychology into graphic representations. I believe that the human mind is more powerful than any computer in analyzing the implications of these price graphs.

In Closing