To: kha vu who wrote (44884 ) 6/17/1999 1:36:00 AM From: TimbaBear Respond to
Some old proverb says that it is better to teach a hungry person how to fish rather than just give them a meal....Rather than try to figure out how to get the individual out of a jam, maybe it would be better to address the issues of risk management and position sizing and trading the plan....the last one "trading the plan" has proven most difficult for me on this thread because I am strongly into long term holding and fundamental analysis, which is a good trading plan.... however, these picks are primarily momentum plays designed to capture only a part of the whole potential....Friends who know me well insist that I only have three brain cells left....one's lost they say and the other two are out hunting for it....I share this because I tend to confuse myself easily and trade long term on a short term pick and then forget about risk management (always using stops that limit my risk to a pre-determined maximum) when those trades start to go against me....so I end up losing more money than I wanted to and not wanting to get out with such a big loss....that's a no win situation and I hate it....so now I determine ahead of time what plan I'm trading, what my risk level is for the issue, where my stop is for the issue and what I expect to make on the trade....if I'm lucky and the trade is moving profitably, I start moving my stops upward so that a sudden change won't make me a loser....I will not hold a trade through earnings anymore in my momentum portfolio....DELL ate my lunch and bloodied my nose and sent me home crying, and I don't like that very much....I have a friend who says:" If you don't like what you're getting, quit doing what your doing!"....but, like most lessons in life, I need to get hit with a big stick before I listen.
