Novice commodity futures and option traders make the same mistakes year after year. There's a tremendous amount of money that changes hands as a result. Make it HARD for the market to get your money, not easy! These principles apply to stock trading as well.
I’m sure by now we are all aware of how much money to risk on each commodity futures contract or options trade. The common commodity trading rules say the same thing. They are correct. To survive a series of losers, risk no more than 5%- 7.5% of your futures account on each trade. Better yet, 5% or less, is what the pros do. This is absolutely critical to your long-term success. The smaller the account, the more difficult it is to risk small amounts. This is the MAIN advantage to trading a large account.
A common novice mistake is forcing the market to conform to OUR idea of how much should be risked for a given trade. Let's say a commodity futures trader decides to buy four contracts. He figures to risk no more than $1,000. He then decides how far away the stop needs to be placed. That’s backwards. The futures market doesn’t care how much money we care to risk or how many contracts we want to buy. All it cares about is how far it can move before it runs into a brick wall and can then reverse itself. The market wants to generate the most trading it can. That's its job.
So thinking like the futures market, you need to FIRST decide if it goes against your position, at what point will it go no farther? Where is the brick wall? If it can break through this wall, then you are wrong and don’t want to hold on. At that point its officially a loser. Once you figure this point, then take your $1,000 risk (or 5% of the account) and figure out how many contracts you can buy. That’s the correct way. Make it hard for them to get your money, not easy. Make the market work hard to make you wrong, but still permit you to survive. You want at least fifteen more tries before it beats you.
I will cover this next area in my articles about E-mini trading, but it’s worth repeating. We need to know what percentage win/loss our method produces. Then we will know how far the profits and losses should run to have a chance of being profitable. For example, a method that trades with 50% accuracy must have losses that are smaller than the gains. This is obvious, but it is not so when we are trading at 33% accuracy and so forth. Most long-term commodity futures position systems will hover around 33% accuracy, but when commissions and errors are added in, this figure becomes less.
Bottom line is many futures traders take small profits and large losses using low percentage systems. They think they will do it just THIS time. But, good habits are an “every” time thing. Probability for failure will catch up in the long run unless you make sure your projected percentage win/loss agrees with your real world average profit/loss. Think about this the next time you want to grab a quick profit.
Part Three of Three, Next!
There is substantial risk of loss trading futures and options and may not be suitable for all types of investors. Only risk capital should be used.
