TheRiskBlog

Very often a customer wants to learn all there is about the futures markets. He is not interested in the opportunity to make money in equities, all he wants is to trade futures. Now, there are a few things to know about these markets and how to deal with risk when trading futures. Here are things you really need to know…

Today’s post deals with media phenomenons, that for us as traders can be very important.
As we know markets are made by people who sell and buy. And most of these people read newspapers or news related websites. So if we are able to discover what interests them the most, it helps us creating a better opinion about the markets.

A While ago Brett Steenbarger posted a quite interesting questionaire at his Blog that helps you to define your curent attitude.

There is quite a bit math involved with risk management. To be on the safe side we have to cope with ratios, P&L equations, risk engines, no trade zones, beta, volatility and so on. Most of this stuff is straight forward though and can be done with only a little knowledge of the formulas behind it. But here is an article about something that has not yet found its way into risk management.

When people start out as traders they always have one goal. And that is to make money - preferably lots of it. People have different ideas but most often we hear something along the line: “..i want to be able to make a living trading…”, and “…i have this amount x right now but at the end of the year i would like to have doubled it…”.

Now this is all fine but how do you reach such a lofty goal? Let´s have a look at a few ways:

Maybe you know those days, when you start with positive expectations and a big portion of optimism into the trading day. The news are good, the futures pre-market are in the green and some of your favourite stocks gained some points overnight. And you can’t wait to hear the opening bell.

Blogger and Author Stanley Bing said in his recent video at Fortune, that a crisis like this teaches us many lesssons, but the problem with it is that “everyone of these lessons will be forgotten the minute this crisis is over”
Is that really so?

Suppose you would know a stock price is heading up. In that case it would be easy to allocate  the bigger portion of your portfolio to that stock alone and ride the wave. Unfortunately knowing where a stock is heading is everybody´s guess. Nobody really knows but there is

Today we start a series about risk management procedures for the active trader. We will work our way through a normal trading day and for the first step in our series we look at position size and how to come up with the correct one.

Very often traders look at a chart, find a pattern that they like and put in all they have. This is fine if the stock does what it is supposed to do but

If there is one crucial factor for an economy to grow, it is consumer spending. And with Christmas sales not far away we need to ask whether the consumer is back and wants to spend as much as he did last year or more.