Article

What are the main objectives of the stock market?

Topic: InvestingPublished October 18, 2019

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When you start to trade the markets, you should enter trades as if you expect to win on everyone. It's important TRADING RULES want to have confidence in the success of your trades. If you don't, you will never trade risky positions, and those are the ones that have the greatest potential for profits. Nonetheless, you can't realistically expect that each trade will turn into a winner. The markets have many ways to make you lose money. The only real winner in the market in the long term is the market itself. But individual traders are finite and must view the markets in shorter terms. It is in the shorter term that individual traders can profit. The problem with random walk theorists is they have no clear definition of time perspectives. They claim that there is no need to analyze the markets because all market movements are random. The purchase of any stock will give an average return over the life of the holdings. The saying, "Take time out from trading. You can always go back to it:' implies that the markets will always be there. An undisciplined trader who trades even in bad times offers the market the opportunity to outlive his or her trading equity. As an individual trader, you are finite and you have finite trading equity. The market, on the other hand, is a conglomeration of many traders and has infinite resources. It can match you dollar for dollar. If you lost a dollar and the market lost a dollar, it would still have the superior position. If you think of the trading game as one in which you are trading against the market, you will see what I mean. If you make a dollar, somebody in the market lost a dollar. If the markets are now worth a trillion dollars, you cannot accumulate all the profits of the market valuation in your lifetime. Not so with what you can lose. You can lose a dollar and the market will suck it up and demand more. You can lose all your trading equity and the market will meander about looking for more equity from traders like yourself. In short, you can probably win a finite amount of money from the market, but you can define 2Rule 1 / Divide Your Trading Capitalitely lose all that you have. It makes sense to limit your exposure to market losses.The problem rests with how much exposure of trading equity you should risk. How much money are you willing to let the market take away from you before you take your money and put it elsewhere? From my experience in the futures market, the maximum amount that I feel comfortable risking is no more than 2.5 percent of my total trading capital on any one position. Some of you may laugh at this extremely conservative number. The maximum to risk on any one trade is the recommended 10 percent. Anything more than that will mathematically affect your ability to survive even a modest string of losses. If you risk a flat rate of 10 percent of your initial trading capital, you will have a 1/64 chance of losing all ten trades. One chance in 64 of ten straight losing trades is low. With this probability, you should be able to get a winner somewhere in the string of ten trades. Then the question gets down to whether the amount won on the winners is enough to offset the losses on the losers.

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