Professional trader Richard Weissman was generous enough to post his trading rules in my facebook trading group and also gave me permission to share them with my blog readers. I have grown in my trading this year interacting with Richard and watching how he trades. He is also very generous in sharing his wisdom with other traders The following are lessons he has learned over many years of hard earned experience and turned into rules that could really help traders at all levels of development:
• Trade the market, not the money
• Always trade value, never trade price
• The answer to the question, “What’s the trend?” is the question, “What’s your timeframe?”
• Never allow a statistically significant unrealized gain to turn into a statistically significant realized loss (ATR)
• Don’t tug at green shoots
• When there’s nothing to do, do nothing
• Stop adjustments can only be used to reduce risk, not increase it.
• There are only two kinds of losses: big losses and small losses, given these choices – always choose small losses.
• Risk no more than 1% of AUM on any single position
• Never risk less than 1% of asset under management on any single position (as long as your models are performing well)
• Don’t Anticipate, Just Participate
• Buy the strongest, sell the weakest (RSI)
• Sideways markets eventually resolve themselves into trending markets and vice versa
• Stagger entries & exits – Regret Minimization techniques
• Look for low risk, high reward, high probability setups
• Correlations are for defense, not offense
• Drawdowns are for underleveraged trading and research
• Develop systems based on the kinds of “pain” (weaknesses) endured when they aren’t working or you’ll abandon them during drawdowns.
• Be disciplined in risk management & flexible in perceiving market behavior
• It’s not about the best RAROR, it’s about the best RAROR for your trading personality
Richard L. Weissman is a trader, trading system developer, and educator on trading and risk management. Weissman is a former member and trader at the New York Futures Exchange. He has written articles on trading and technical analysis for a variety of industry publications and provides independent consulting services to traders and risk managers on technical analysis, derivatives, and trading system development. Weissman is also the author of the Wiley titles Trade like a Casino and Mechanical Trading Systems.