Tag Archives: Position

General Forex

Trading System Position Sizing

Position sizing is determining HOW MANY contracts to trade when a trading system gets a signal. It is one of the most powerful and least understood concepts with many traders. Its purpose is to manage risk, enhance returns and improve robustness through market normalization. Position sizing can end up being more significant than where a trader buys or sells! Most trading systems and testing platforms either ignore position sizing, or use it illogically.

A big problem with many trading systems is that they risk too much of a traders equity on any given trade. Most professionals agree that traders should never risk more than 1% to 3% of their equity on any given trade. This also applies to the risk for each sector. For example, if a trader is risking 2% a trade in highly correlated markets like 2yr bonds, 5yr bonds, 10yr bonds and 30yr bonds, this is essentially like risking 8% in the same trade. Overtrading this way can produce incredible looking results with returns of 100% or more, but this is usually just a case of using too much leverage and taking too large a percentage risk on each trade (or sector) and or “cherry picking” the best starting date (like right before a series of winning trades).

When running a “Worse Case Analysis” at those high-risk levels, it becomes clear that the risk of ruin climbs dangerously high. A series of losing trades or starting on the wrong day could cause an investor to lose it all (or have an enormous drawdown).

The bottom line is that when putting on a trade, traders should know what percentage of their equity they will lose if they are wrong. This should only be a small portion of their available trading capital. This also means they need to know their risk when entering a trade. Some trading systems like moving average systems do not know how much risk they are taking. This is because the trading system does not know how far the market needs to move to trigger an exit. We think it is dangerous to trade this way and do not recommend it.

Another large problem is the lack of market normalization (such as a single contract based result). For example, we do not think it is logical to trade one contract of natural gas with an average daily volatility of around $2,000 for every one Eurodollar contract with an average daily volatility of around $150. Doing this would mean that natural gas is a more significant market than the Eurodollar. If Eurodollars trend, we want to give them just as much weight as natural gas (or any other market). In the previous example, traders could just simply remove the Eurodollar from the equation and get nearly the same performance. In essence, the results are unintentionally biased (curve fit) to natural gas. An average $150 winning trade in the Eurodollar is not going to offset an average $2000 losing trade in natural gas!

We recommend trading a basket of commodities for diversification, however, if traders do not normalize the data and most of the profits and losses arise from a few of the markets in the portfolio then that is not diversification. The problem is that going forward; traders are going to be dependent on those few markets to perform. It is far better knowing that any market has the potential to perform at an equal level rather than being dependent on markets in that portfolio.

It is likely that most trading systems ignore position sizing, or use it illogically because the design of most software packages is to work with a single contract based test. Of the numerous back testing products available for sale, we are only aware of two software packages that can properly do position sizing and money management testing. There are many products that claim to do it, but we have found that almost all these products do not do position sizing & money management correctly (there are many reasons for this, contact us for details). We use Bob Spears state-of-the-art testing software Mechanica (which sells for $25,000 a copy) for most position sizing based research and testing.

Other problems include vendors that only report the smaller drawdown numbers like “closed trade” drawdowns or “average annual” drawdowns. There are also problems with position sizing concepts such as “Optimal F” or “Fixed Ratio”. We feel both of these are just a dangerous form of hindsight biased curve fitting.

Another common fallacy says that traders should find their “best” single contract based trading system FIRST and THEN apply position sizing to it. This is not the correct approach; position sizing can change the risk-to-reward profiles of a single contract based trading system. A trading system that looked terrific, with a smooth equity curve on one contract basis, can look far less attractive when all markets are equally weighted for robustness.

For all the reason cited above, we develop trading systems with proper position sizing logic. We believe this raises the robustness and significance of the testing results. This also helps avoid the inadvertent optimizing that can occur with other types of position sizing / money management based testing software.

General Investing

Position Sizing

When building a futures trading system one of the most crucial aspects is how it will determine its position sizing. Specifically, how it will determine how many contracts to trade once it gets a buy or sell signal.

One of the best ways to do position sizing is through a formula designed to “normalize” the markets for volatility. This way, a market with high volatility trades much more cautiously than a market with low volatility. In other words, the high-volatility market trades with fewer contracts than a low-volatility market.

The next consideration is how much of the account to risk for each trade. As a rule of thumb, it is best to risk no more than about 1% to 3% of the account size for each trade. So, a $100,000 account should never risk more than about $1,000 to $3,000 for each trade.

Once a trader has determined the risk for each trade and the market’s volatility they can then calculate the contracts to trade with this formula: (account size * risk a trade / market volatility).

Another consideration is the risk for each sector. Traders should never risk more than about 5% of the account at one time in a given sector. So, the risk in highly correlated positions like crude oil, heating oil and gasoline should be summed together. It is this combined risk in a correlated sector that should not exceed about 5% of the account size. Violating this rule can cause traders to be too dependent on one sector and voids the benefits of diversification.

Besides risk for each trade and risk for each sector one should consider the total risk at any given time. This is the amount one would lose if every single trade they were in exited simultaneously at a loss. This amount should not exceed about 10%.

By managing risk, and carrying out position sizing this way, one can substantially cut the risk in trading. Finding trading software that can compute all these position sizing rules is extremely difficult. As far as we know there are only two software packages that can do this correctly. One is Mechanica and the other is Trading Blox.

This article directory limits us on the size of the article we can publish. So, traders wanting to learn more should visit DH Trading Systems website.Commodity trading carries risks and is not suitable for all investors. Past performance is not indicative of future performance.Traders wanting to learn more about position sizing from award winning futures trading system developer Dean Hoffman should click on the links above.

Forex Trading Articles

Position Opening at Forex

Most of the time traders are found discussing about the position making at the forex trading platform to have maximum utilization of the trade opportunities. The strategy of flat channel strategy actively work from the upward and downward trends of the resistance and the support levels and the lines of the resistance and support levels represent the borders of the channel.

This strategy is suitable only for plain market condition and ruptured due to unevenness in the trends that is could not withstand in the ascending and descending trending patterns. There are certain things keeping those in mind would lead the traders to make position at the desired currencies at the market with great ease.

The guidelines for opening position at the forex trading platform:

* Clear definition of the support and resistance level at the market along with accurate calculation of the market situation would assist in receiving channel borders as movements in the marketplace are continuing its thunder.

* As soon as the price touches any of the borders and the price line recoil in an opposite direction form the normal flow of the market it is essential to open a buying position at the market as if return is possible form the support level, conversely, the position is build on sale if the prices have touched the resistance level.

* When the price touches the opposite border the open position would be closed and it is essential to note that reversal in prices is appropriate before the price line achieves the borders of the channel and so as the positions can be closed before the attainment of the support or resistance levels of the trending chart patterns.

* The advantages of this strategy lies in the fact that it strengthens the probabilities of profit maximization by opening or closing the positions many times if the flattened trade condition continuous in the market. The fundamental inadequacy is that the breakout of channel lines can lead to substantial and unfounded losses.

Depending upon the market movements the position can be turned out in accordance to the direction of the market flows by utilizing the stop orders at the right timing with correct placement.

Whenever any unprofitable situation started building up pressure at the trading platform the traders should consider the competent stop-loss protective moves ready to be placed at the required place.

The winning or loss of trade is the responsibility of the trader and by acquiring enough skill to depict the changing trend patterns and thereby quickly finding ways to place the stop-loss orders to protect your trade position from loosing is the measure to put the control over forex trade and safeguard the returns of the respective position.

Forex Trading Articles

Position Sizing at Forex

Those who are new to this forex trading platform for them it is very difficult to resist from being engulfed by the attractiveness of the earning maximum profits in the market.

Even though all the traders are aware of the fact that forex is a risky zone where market is full of frequent up and downs thy used to do common mistakes and then pay huge fine as a compensation for that mistake.

Caution and attention are the keys to come over the hovering ship of the forex currency pair exchange deals and to make position at the market intelligently without occurrence of any big issues.

The formula that can be used to determine the position size to imprint your presence in the market is as follows:

X = R x B/ T x (P1- P2)

Where

X = position size in units of base currency
R = percentage of account trader wish to put on risk
B = Account Balance
T = short and long indicator, -1 in case short position and +1 in case of long position
P1 = Entry Price
P2 = Exit price or stop loss price level

This will help the traders or investors to take active participate in the forex trading platform with the accurate calculation of the exact position size.

Any kind of trading set up no matter it is best in acknowledging trade activities with perfection but still thee are possibilities that any thing can go against your trade position and your winning move can turn up into loss.

Certain degree of randomness or risk always exist in the forex trading platform it is not a big issue to panic but of course precautions should be taken avoid huge amount of losses by implementing good trading practice with preciseness in your trade moves.

When something can not be avoided then we should try to manage such inevitable incidences or occurrence. This is just a part of forex and all the traders should learn to bear the losses if they want to succeed.
Determining the position size would be helpful but important is building your trading psychology to cope with any kind of trading troubles.

General Forex

Take A Position On Global Currencies Through FX Trading

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FX trading is foreign exchange currency trading. This type of CFD trading takes into account the fluctuations in foreign currencies and uses this fluctuation to buy or sell into a currency, therefore profiting from these fluctuations. It is considerably easy to trade forex CFDs. They come in forex pairs. There are at least 60 different FX trading pairs.

The first-named currency in the FX trading pair is bought or sold into with respect to the second-named currency in the quoted pair. When you expect the first-named currency to increase in value, you buy into the pair. And when you expect the value of the first-named currency in the quote to decrease in value, you sell the FX trading pair.

FX trading CFDs are available as mini-contracts as well as the regular contracts. FX trading CFDs are much better and advisable as compared to direct investment in currencies because Forex contracts can be bought and sold quickly. Also, CFD trading involves only a fraction of the actual capital outlay required to directly buy a foreign currency.

You can choose any of the several FX trading pairs available. These are spread across several international currencies. Depending on your interest and knowledge about a currency, you can choose the pairs. In order be successful in Fx trading, you need to follow the global news and understand the factors that affect the currency value and Fx trading. You should also have updated information regarding the currency and the global markets. You need to understand how FX trading works and learn to make the best use of the software platform that is used for CFD trading like forex. Technical analysis and technical charts provide lots of information about the performance of a particular forex CFD. You can use them along with their research as a basis to make useful decisions that can prove hugely profitable.