Règles de trading

De nombreux traders partagent leurs règles les plus importantes.

William D. Gann - 45 years in Wall Street

Afin d’être gagnant sur les marchés le trader doit avoir des règles strictes et doit les suivre.

1. Divisez votre capital. Ne risquez jamais plus d’un dixième de votre capital sur une action.
2. Utilisez des ordres de "stop-loss" (stop vente). Tenez compte du "bruit" et de la volatilité du marché.
3. Ne pas faire d’"overtrading". Le nombre de positions doit tenir compte d’un gros décalage du marché.
4. Ne laissez pas un gain devenir une perte.
5. Ne pas aller contre la tendance.
6. En cas de doute sortez du marché.
7. Traitez les actions actives.
8. Ne mettez pas tout votre capital sur une seule valeur, un seul secteur, un seul marché. Portefeuille entre 5 et 10 lignes.
9. Ne limitez pas vos ordres, payez le prix du marché.
10. Ne clôturez pas une position sans raison.
11. Mettez de l’argent de côté pour les cas d’urgence.
12. N’achetez pas uniquement pour encaisser un dividende.
13. Ne faites pas de moyenne à la baisse.
14. Sachez être patient pour rentrer ou pour sortir.
15. Evitez les petits gains et les fortes pertes. Couper rapidement les pertes et laisser courir les profits.
16. Ne jamais annuler un "stop loss".
17. Allez en direction de la tendance. Le marché a toujours raison.
18. Evitez de rentrer et de sortir du marché trop souvent. Les frais ont vite fait de manger les bénéfices.
19. N’achetez pas uniquement parce que le prix est bas.
20. Avant d’acheter plus, attendez la cassure d’une résistance. Considérez qu’il s’agit d’une nouvelle opération.
21. Bien choisir ses valeurs avant de construire des pyramides. Eviter de faire des pyramides inversées.
22. Traitez chaque valeur séparément : les pertes d’une valeur ne doivent pas être compensées par les gains sur une autre.
23. Ne pas changer d’avis sans une bonne raison. Suivez avec confiance le plan que vous avez établi.
24. Evitez d’augmenter vos mises après une période de gains : le marché cherchera à reprendre ce qu’il vous à donné.

Dan Zanger - Chart Pattern

1. A stock must have a proper base of 6 weeks or more before you buy, unless you feel you are a qualified active day trader.
2. Buy the stock as it leaves its base and makes a new high.
3. Be quick to sell your stock should it fail after a break out from its base. Always sell your stock at 2 points below any trendline that has been broken. Cut your loss at no more than 5 to 7% of original purchase price.
4. Sell 20-30% of your position as the stock moves up 20% from the buy point.
5. Hold your strongest stocks the longest. Sell your slower moving or weaker stocks early.
6. Identify and follow strong groups of stocks. Try to keep your stock selections in these groups.
7. After the market has moved for a substantial period of time, the more vulnerable your stock(s) will become to a market sell off. Obey your trend lines at all times. Sell your stock quickly if it runs up in price.
8. You don't need to trade all the time and you don't need to be in the market all the time. Generally, the market corrects twice a year. We are out of the market during the corrections, which is generally twice a year.
9. Many stocks are mentioned in my newsletter. Do not buy a stock until it crosses a trend line and never pay up by more than 5% past the trend line break.
10. Never go on margin until you have mastered the market and your emotions. For the average person this normally takes anywhere from five to ten years. Margin can wipe you out!

Follow these ten rules and you will make money in the Stock Market.

Nick Scott - Surefirething

1. Know your market
2. Prepare for the day
3. Sitck to your plan
4. Don't be greedy
5. Take a loss when necessary
6. Don't chase the market
7. Don't overtrade
8. Trade with the trend
9. Care more about protecting your capital than increasing profits
10. Be wary around news announcements

William Zimmer - The prudent trader

1. Trade with a plan and stick to it.
2. Trade with the trend of individual issues; "The trend is your friend"
3. Let your profits run; cut your losses short.
4. Never let a good profit run into a loss.
5. Never add to a losing position.
6. Be Patient
7. Never Over-trade
8. When in doubt, get out!
9. Use Stop Loss orders whenever practical
10. Be just as willing to sell as you are to buy.
11. Never buy just because the price is low; Never sell just because the price is high.
12. Never trade on a tip.
13. Always analyze your mistakes
14. Never trade if your success depends on your execution.

George Parker - Parker bros

1. Know your goal and reach for it
2. Find winning moves
3. Play by the rules but capitalize on them
4. Learn from failure, build upon success
5. When faced with a choice, make the move with the most potential benefit versus risk
6. When luck runs against you, hold emotion in check and set up for your next advance
7. Never hesitate long enough to give your opponents an advantage (paraphrased)
8. Seek help if the game threatens to overwhelm you
9. Bet heavily when the odds are long in your favor
10. If opportunity narrows, focus on your strengths
11. Be a gracious winner or loser. Don't be petty. Share what you learn.
12. Ignore principles 1 to 11 at your peril !

Alan Farley - HardRightEdge

1. Forget the news, remember the chart. You're not smart enough to know how news will affect price. The chart already knows the news is coming.
2. Buy the first pullback from a new high. Sell the first pullback from a new low. There's always a crowd that missed the first boat.
3. Buy at support, sell at resistance. Everyone sees the same thing and they're all just waiting to jump in the pool.
4. Short rallies not selloffs. When markets drop, shorts finally turn a profit and get ready to cover.
5. Don't buy up into a major moving average or sell down into one. See #3.
6. Don't chase momentum if you can't find the exit. Assume the market will reverse the minute you get in. If it's a long way to the door, you're in big trouble.
7. Exhaustion gaps get filled. Breakaway and continuation gaps don't. The old traders' wisdom is a lie. Trade in the direction of gap support whenever you can.
8. Trends test the point of last support/resistance. Enter here even if it hurts.
9. Trade with the TICK not against it. Don't be a hero. Go with the money flow.
10. If you have to look, it isn't there. Forget your college degree and trust your instincts.
11. Sell the second high, buy the second low. After sharp pullbacks, the first test of any high or low always runs into resistance. Look for the break on the third or fourth try.
12. The trend is your friend in the last hour. As volume cranks up at 3:00pm don't expect anyone to change the channel.
13. Avoid the open. They see YOU coming sucker
14. 1-2-3-Drop-Up. Look for downtrends to reverse after a top, two lower highs and a double bottom.
15. Bulls live above the 200 day, bears live below. Sellers eat up rallies below this key moving average line and buyers to come to the rescue above it.
16. Price has memory. What did price do the last time it hit a certain level? Chances are it will do it again.
17. Big volume kills moves. Climax blow-offs take both buyers and sellers out of the market and lead to sideways action.
18. Trends never turn on a dime. Reversals build slowly. The first sharp dip always finds buyers and the first sharp rise always finds sellers.
19. Bottoms take longer to form than tops. Fear acts more quickly than greed and causes stocks to drop from their own weight.
20. Beat the crowd in and out the door. You have to take their money before they take yours, period.

Bernhard Seiberl - Sniper.at

1. Determine why you want to trade and which trading style/approach fits your personality and time commitments. Your psychological makeup will have the greatest impact on your trading. So evaluate precisely your psychological makeup and limitations. Set up a solid system of self control. ("One who knows his enemy is strong - one who knows himself is unbeatable" - Sun Tzu)
2. Be always skeptical about your own ideas, creations and results.
3. Be disciplined and remove your emotions during system design and the trading process, because the most difficult task in speculation is not prediction but self-control (especially when a trade moves against you).
4. Sometimes you lose even when you have followed your system perfectly. If you have followed your system 100%, agonizing over a loss will reduce your discipline for that system. Your discipline will also be compromised if you get too excited about a profit when you did not follow your system. Therefore, celebrate every time when you follow your proven system - win or lose!
5. Assess your current mental and physical condition before you begin each trading session, because one key to successful trading is knowing yourself and your stress point. Be aware of your areas of emotional weakness.
6. At the end of each trading day do a mental debriefing.
7. Your worst enemy is fear and greed. But also know your competition, because trading is a zero-sum game (exclusive trading costs).
8. Beware of large positions that can control your emotions. Don't be overly aggressive with the market. Treat it gently by allowing your equity to grow steadily rather than in bursts.
9. Keep your trading expenses (=commissions + slippage) low. Your trading expenses are a function of order size, order type, trading frequency, time of day, the traded market, broker and liquidity. Use a trading plan. It will keep you focused on your goals and objectives. It should also include a measure of your discipline and consistency in applying your trading approach.
10. Understand why the system works and grasp the components of your system in order to develop the required confidence.
11. Always review your system and see if you can poke holes in your strategy.
12. Describe the system edge in simple and logical terms.
13. Use only parameters ("predictors") with a positive expectation / statistical edge.
14. Use trend following systems in order to take advantage of the "fat tails" of the price distribution. You do not know where the market is going - so you follow it.
15. Use simple trading ideas in order to yield robust, consistent and stable results. ("It does not matter whether the cat is white or black. As long as it can catch mice, it is a good cat." - Dang Sui Ping) - ("Try the simple things first; simple things tend to do better than the complicated ones. That's not surprising in a world that is extremely noisy and complex." - J. Doyne Farmer)
16. Use only 2-3 parameters: one parameter for trend identification, one or two variables for entries and exits in order to reduce the risk of model over training and to increase generalization. These systems will not perform exceptionally in back testing, but they are much more likely to continue to profit into the future.
17. Use proper "out of sample"-testing: Consistency and proportionality between out-of-sample and in-sample results are valid indicators that "generalization" is working well.
18. Test your system over large data samples and various market types in order to get an "all weather trading system".
19. Graph your trade distribution and measure the skewness and the tail-behavior of the trade distribution.
20. Always use sensitivity analysis on system parameters.
21. Be careful about "hidden" random entry/exits methods. Create random trading sequences and compare them to the out of sample-performance of your trading systems. Seek for trading results that are unlikely to occur just by random coin flipping.
22. Performance and risk measures should be evenly distributed through time and in relation to one another.
23. Do not use higher order polynomials, because they are notoriously bad for extrapolation.
24. Use non-correlated indicators / "predictors".
25. Use clean data, because system performance is largely a function of noise in time series. Only use parameters that are settled in the center of the flattest parameter space. Seek for ROBUST trading system parameter values where a broad range of the surrounding values have similar profitability to withstand the shifts of market statistics and to handle unforeseen situations. It is very easy to design a trading system on any historical dataset that makes money. BUT the future has the nasty habit of not perfectly mirroring the past and therefore the best-performing parameter in the past will not necessarily be the most profitable in the future. So it is almost impossible to know what the optimal parameter value for the future will be.
26. Utilize a portfolio of non-correlated sub-systems. Look at their signals and compute their correlation.
27. Look for uniform trade results and avoid equity spikes.
28. Apply the same rules and guidelines no matter whether it is a bull market or a bear market, because the psychology is the same, just the reverse. Hope is what drives the market on the upside and fear drives it on the downside.

Trend Dynamics - trend-dynamics.com

1. Time conditions and affects the potency of all price movement.
2. Trends that run counter to the next larger timeframe tend to be abortive.
3. Positive trade expectation occurs when the perception of the probability of a price event diverges from the actual probability of such an event.
4. Trading ranges usually terminate coincident with tests of their extremes.
5. Old demand levels become new supply levels, and old supply levels become new demand levels.
6. A change effort is often followed by a test of the point of change.
7. Dramatic price movements tend to unfold from price structures that minimize profitable participation.
8. The absolute value of a given price pattern is the product of the intrinsic value of that pattern modified by the context in which it occurs.
9. Trading ranges that follow new trend changes are likely to terminate in the direction of that new trend.
10. A dominating trend will generally run until the next larger timeframe can provide offsetting support or resistance.
11. Under most circumstances, the markets will be either readable or reliable.
12. Small risk attracts large size.
13. Play tight in a loose market, and loose in a tight market..
14. Markets move violently to their place, and calmly in place.

Richard Donchian - seykota.com