It takes smart trading to make money.
The worst thing a trader can have is an "attitude."
The best thing a trader can have is discipline.
It's economic warfare, but it's good warfare. It's damn good warfare.
My life is trading and trading is my life. It brings you closer to your psyche than anything else I know. Nowhere else is winning so close to losing and losing so close to winning.
I have never, ever been in the futures market myself; I don't have the skill for it.
There are many more fools among buyers than among sellers.
Make 10 points on a million trades - not a million points on 10 trades.
...knowing when to do nothing ... is the hardest thing to do as a trader.
Wonder what she thinks of coffee prices.
Hillary's foray into the spiritual world would certainly explain how she managed to make all that money in cattle futures.
I am older now. I have more than I had hoped for but I wish that I had started long before I did.
The trend is your friend.
The trend is your enemy.
You can get as fancy as you want with your option strategies, but in this business, there's no substitute for being right. There's never been a guarantee for incremental returns.
After all, one of the premises of trading is that there are driving fundamental factors in the marketplace. Life really isn't a draw from a random distribution with or without drift. When circumstances change, stable correlations disappear. When the Fed tightens, and my positions are long duration, it's not the volatility of the position that will worry me. A slow steady increase in rates will destroy me as well if I sit and wait for the conclusion. The speed of my demise is of less consequence than its certainty.
It goes to show that when you are confused, it is best to do nothing.
Any day that you're not belly-up is a good day in this business.
A career where success would never be determined politically, but only by the results produced on the bottom line of the account balance sheet.
It seemed strange to me that a member of the prestigious Chicago Board of Trade could be a smashing success one year and begging for work the next.
The stock market is like sex. It feels the best just before it ends.
I'm not a seat-of-the-pants person, and options trading is a seat-of-the-pants business.
Read every book by traders to study where they lost money. You will learn nothing relevant from their profits (the markets adjust). You will learn from their losses.
People always get excited when they hear about this strategy called ‘covered call writing.' They like the idea of picking up income - who doesn't - but rarely grasp the significance of the fact when the train leaves the station heading north, they won't be on it.
It might sound like a whole new ballgame, but once you cut through the language, you were generally back to basics. Buy and sell, sell and buy, differences of opinion as to the worth and prospects of pieces of paper, that's what it came down to.
In your grandfather's day, it was all buy and sell, sell and buy. No god but the tape, and speculators and traders were its prophets.
To some extent -but only some - Wall Street resembled a dogfight. The business demanded open eyes, wits about you, and the assumption that even the silkiest cloud contained enemy fighters waiting to pounce. But there any real similarity ended. People on the street liked to employ the language of combat, but money was one thing; bullets quite another. The amount of coolness and nerve required to stand firm in a market panic was a pale fraction of what it took to get through a minute of combat in the trenches or in the air.
Trading is like sex. You don't have to be good at it to enjoy it.
When I put my PC out on the trading floor in 1985, a senior manager asked "What are you doing? This is a trading floor. You're not allowed to have a PC.
There are few things more frightening in the financial markets than senior executives suffering from the Tinkerbelle disease ('I believe, I believe') - the main symptom of which is an uqualified acceptance of the high profits reported by traders using 'superior' proprietary models.
Trading is like no other profession I can think of other than dragon slaying. Facing that hot breath and those toothy jaws fearlessly, armed only with belief in oneself, on a daily basis.
Like ancient mariners, traders wait for some bit of news to billow their financial sails and send them breezily on to a pleasing destination.
The traders spend their day in that eerie, perfect state the rest of us achieve only sometimes when we're playing sports, having sex, gambling, or driving fast. Think of traders as doing all those things at once, minus perhaps the sex.
When I first came down here, I was Mr. Big Ego. I had a law degree and here were all these ex-cops and truck drivers and people with 200-word vocabularies trading in the pits. I figured I'd make a killing, right? With this competition, how could you lose? Then I got the shit kicked out of me. Then I got the shit kicked out of me again. You know what I've learned down here? Humility. Discipline. You come into this business with any sense of superiority, and you're dead.
You hear a lot of rationalization such as 'This trade didn't work out, but if I keep doing it, it will work out.'
You still see situations in which traders commit risk violations and the manager overlooks them because the position made money. Those managers have a lot of nerve cashing their paychecks.
"It takes two things to make a good trader," Struve advises Norman. "You have to understand the mathematics, and you need street smarts. You don't want to be the guy with thick glasses who is reading the sheet just when the freight train is about to roll over you. The street-smart guy will pick up a couple of quarters and get out of the way."
The Predictors
Thomas A. Bass, 1999, pp. 126-127.
Even if we didn't believe it for a second, there's an undeniable adrenaline jab that comes from someone telling you that you're going to make five hundred million dollars.
Doyne Farmer
Quoted in The Predictors
Thomas A. Bass, 1999, p. 119
There weren't many traders at the sharp end over thirty. Eyes flitting
between flickering lines of information on four differenct screens, one ear
on the phone, the other on the cries of colleagues, twelve hours of split-second
calculation, judging yourself and being judged on the score at the end of
every day. These men and women lived and breathed the market.
Linda Davies
Into the Fire
1999, p. 34
"It is like watching your favorite soap opera," Ozdek says. "You know
all the characters. You know the basic plot. But you never really
know how the day is going to end."
Turk Ozdek
Quoted in Futures, July, 2001
p. 86
Futures traders tend to be superstitious - when on a good run they are reluctant to change their mojo, this includes washing their jackets. Traders will wear their lucky jackets until they fall apart or their luck runs out. Some traders have even been buried in their lucky jackets, reflecting a hope that the good luck their jackets provided in the trading pits on Earth could be retained for eternity in that Great Trading Pit in the sky."
Jim Overdahl
Futures
Fall Special Issue 2005, p. 14
Stenger's decision to sell at the top reveals
one of his trading strengths - a lack of greed. "It sure wasn't any great
analysis on my part," he says.
Steve Zwick
"Bruno Stenger: Brewing Up Profits"
Futures
September 2005, p. 90
Last updated: January 9, 2011