Links: Popular posts and new trading insights

Some Presidents' Day reading and insights to guide us into the coming week.

Recently popular posts on Finance Trends:

1. Trading psychologists: Overcoming your fear of pulling the trigger. 

2. Global macro trading: Lessons from Market Wizard, Colm O'Shea.

3. Lessons from Market Wizard, Ray Dalio. - "Markets teach you that you have to be an independent thinker."

4. Lauren Templeton shares investing lessons from Sir John Templeton. Real wisdom on markets, behavioral finance, and life here.

5. Jim Rogers on Street Smarts and outsized investing returns. Rogers says the 4,200 percent returns he and Soros achieved at Quantum Fund are replicable, if you are passionate and work hard enough.

Items of interest (markets, trading, and insights) from around the web:

1. Excellent Q+A with trader, Brian Shannon: Better Trading With Multiple Timeframes.

2. Joe Fahmy on The Greatest Trading Book Ever.

3. Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich (e-book).

4. On the Invariant Nature of Investor Returns: "We were irrational then and we're irrational now.".

5. Q+A with Chris Kacher and Gil Morales: why they trade like William O'Neil.

Thanks for reading. Check back soon (via RSS and/or Twitter), we'll have a new post in our "Lessons from Hedge Fund Market Wizards" series to share with you and more.

Photo credit: George Washington via Newport Buzz.

Lessons from Hedge Fund Market Wizards: Colm O'Shea

In our first installment of "Lessons from Hedge Fund Market Wizards", we examine the lessons offered in Jack Schwager's interview with noted global macro trader and hedge fund manager, Colm O'Shea of COMAC Capital. 

Last week we brought you a brief overview of Hedge Fund Market Wizards, including several interviews with author Jack Schwager on the trading insights found within this new Market Wizards volume. 

We'll expand on those ideas throughout this series by zeroing in on our favorite interviews and highlighting some key lessons and quotes. Of course, our notes are just a sample of what readers will find in these interview chapters - we don't want to give away the store!  

Today, we'll look closely at some key insights offered in the book's opening chapter. Here are our notes on Schwager's interview with Colm O'Shea. 

1). Colm O'Shea began his career as a young economic forecaster. He was kept behind closed doors by his firm, who did not want clients to know their research reports and forecasts were written by a 19-year old who had landed the job before starting at university. 

2). Colm realized he did not want to continue publishing consensus-hugging forecasts, and he landed his first job as a trader at Citigroup after graduating from Cambridge. He went on to work for George Soros' Quantum Fund before founding his own firm, COMAC Capital.

3). O'Shea view his trading ideas as hypotheses. Moves counter to the expected direction are proof that his trade hypothesis is wrong. O'Shea is quick to liquidate these positions when they reach a pre-defined price (a level at which his trade hypothesis is invalidated). He risks a small percentage of his assets on each trade - position sizing. 

4). Received early lessons in trading and macro thinking by reading Edwin Lefevre's classic, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator. Colm points out that the character, Mr. Partridge teaches the protagonist (a thinly-veiled Jesse Livermore) to size up general conditions - "it's a bull market, you know!". 

5). Price movements take place in the context of a larger fundamental landscape. O'Shea believes one must pay attention to both the fundamentals and the technicals (price as seen through technical analysis) to make sense of the picture.
 
6). In his first week as a trader, the British pound was kicked out of the ERM (the famous Soros trade), much to his surprise. Recalls Colm, "I had absolutely no comprehension of the power of markets vs. politics. Policy makers [often] don't understand that they are not in control...it's the fundamentals that actually matter."

7). You can't be short just because you think something is fundamentally overpriced. In the example of the Nasdaq bubble, you should have been selling Nasdaq at 4,000 on the way down, not on the way up. Wait until the market turns over, or until you can see a turning point (a la George Soros shorting the pound).

8). Being short credit in 2006-2007 was the same as being short Nasdaq in 1999. Bubble pricing was evident and the problems were obvious. However, being short was a negative carry trade (in which one must pay a certain cost to maintain a speculative position through instruments such as credit default swaps) and credit spreads went lower (the trade went against you) before a turning point was reached. 

9). All markets look liquid in a bubble. It's liquidity afterwards that matters. Can you get out?

10). There does not have to be an identifiable reason for every trade. O'Shea cites the LTCM blowup in '98 as an example. At the start of the '98 crisis, there was no LTCM story in the press, but T-bond futures were limit up every day. "Once you realize something is happening, you can trade accordingly.". Trade hypothesis = something big is happening. I will participate, but do so in a way that I can get out quickly if wrong.

11). Most great trades are incredibly obvious to everyone after the fact. O'Shea points to his bearish turn at the start of the financial crisis in August 2007, when money markets seized up and LIBOR spiked. To this day, equity people wrongly point to March 2008 (Bear Stearns collapse) as the start of the crisis. The great trades don't require predictions, but you must see what other market participants won't.

12). Big price changes occur when people are forced to reevaluate their prejudices. Crisis (such as the inflationary threat from growing U.S. debt) may hit in the future when people notice and start to care. Bond yields will only signal there's a problem when it's too late. Fundamentals underlying the trade/event exist all along.

Hope you enjoyed the first in our series of "Lessons from Hedge Fund Market Wizards". Look for our next post, featuring hedge fund titan Ray Dalio, later in the week. 

If you're enjoying these posts and would like to see more, please subscribe to our free RSS updates and follow Finance Trends in real-time on Twitter and StockTwits. You can also check out our related posts below for more market wisdom and trading insights. 

Related posts:

1. Jack Schwager on Hedge Fund Market Wizards (interviews). 

2. Lessons from Hedge Fund Market Wizards: Ray Dalio.

Sitting on the sidelines, reading

"The worst thing you can do when you're having a hard time is flail. In trading, when there is nothing to do, the best thing to do is nothing." - Scott Bessent (Bessent Capital). 

Well, the damage is already done for those who were heavily long heading into this week's market decline. 

I look at the S&P 500 component data on freestockcharts.com and see that only 3 stocks in that index were up today. We saw a -4.78% decline in the S&P to go along with that. Here's an updated chart that shows the recent breakdown below the 1312 line we've fluctuated around in recent months.

There's been a lot of whipsaw in this news driven market of late, and it doesn't seem like the recent deficit/debt ceiling deal reached by Congress has quieted things much. Even gold and silver got whacked today. But just look at all that money piling into Treasury bonds.

At a time like this, perhaps it's best to step aside and watch the action from the sidelines. That may not be the proper stance for a short-term trader making hay from all this volatility, or a professional money manager tasked with managing positions on the long and short side, but for now it suits me fine. 

In July, I closed out a couple of losing stock trades and haven't put on any new trades since. I've mostly been pruning watchlists, reviewing my trading journals and trading mistakes, running through charts, and reading. A break from trading was needed, and this was the time to do it.

Today, while reading Steven Drobny's Inside the House of Money, I came across our intro quote in an interview with "stock operator" and hedge fund manager, Scott Bessent. On a day like today, you can really appreciate the time honored truths that: 1) being in cash is a position, and, 2) activity (trading) for the sake of activity can be a real hazard to your trading account and your emotional capital. 

By the way, the interview with Bessent is a great chapter from Drobny's book. Here is a guy who, amazingly, has worked for or trained under George Soros, Stan Druckenmiller, Nick Roditi, Jim Rogers, and Jim Chanos. It's quite something to not only read Bessent's thoughts on trading, but to hear what he's learned from some true all-stars of the hedge fund world. Check out this book if you're taking a late-summer break and keeping your powder dry as well.       

Who are the top macro investors of today?

During last week's MacroTwits discussion on StockTwits TV, Eric Jackson of Ironfire Capital posed a very worthwhile question to the group: who are the top global macro traders & investors of the day and what can we learn from them?

For those who may not know, global macro is a term used to describe a largely "top-down" approach to speculating and investing across multiple asset classes and locales. Macro traders and hedge funds often take a big picture view of emerging trends and geopolitical events and express their positions accordingly by speculating in any number of markets, be they debt, futures, currencies, or international shares.

The names of some now-legendary macro traders are probably familiar to most investors: George Soros, Jim Rogers, Stanley Druckenmiller, Louis Bacon, Paul Tudor Jones. But who are the rising stars and top practitioners of this investing style today?

That's a question we're going to examine a bit further in the weeks ahead. We'll start tomorrow with a look at one (seemingly) unlikely candidate and follow up later in the week with a rare interview from one of the recently established stars of the global macro universe.

In the meantime, check out the items in our related posts section for more on the movers & shakers in global macro trading. Know a great macro trader or hedge fund we should follow up on? Chime in at any time via the comments section.

Related articles and posts:

1. The Invisible Hands: Hedge Funds... (Stephen Drobny) - Marketfolly.

2. Paul Tudor Jones: Trader (documentary) - Finance Trends.

Slate profiles Victor Niederhoffer

Slate's recent profile of writer/speculator, Vic Niederhoffer has been getting some attention from traders and finance types in recent days. I thought we'd take a look at it here too, to offer up some possible educational value from Vic's experiences with trading and loss.

Here's an excerpt from Slate's profile of Victor Niederhoffer:

"I've enjoyed getting your e-mails. It sounds like you've thought a lot about being wrong.

Well, the reason you contacted me, to call a spade a spade, is that I'm sort of infamous for having made a big, notorious, terrible error not once but twice in my market career.

Let's talk about those errors. The first was your investment in the Thai baht, which pretty much wiped you out when the Thai stock market crashed in 1997.

I made so many errors there it's pathetic. I made one of my favorite errors: "The mouse with one hole is quickly cornered." That is key. There are certain decisions you make in life that are irreversible, that lead you into a path you can't get out of, and unless you have more than one escape clause, the adversary can gang up on you and destroy you. What else? I didn't have a proper foundation. I was not sufficiently private in my activities. I was playing poker with men named Doc. I must've made a hundred errors on that one, but those are five or six that come to mind.

And then there's the greatest error of all, which is that I had delusions of grandeur. Unfortunately I was so successful for so many years in that particular field that I began to believe in my own success. I thought that because my method worked in markets that I knew about and had quantified, I could apply the same methods to something I didn't know about. And I had as an example [George] Soros, who would always say, "I made the most money in things I don't know about."..."

So, given that Vic's well-known blowouts as a trader served as a focal point for this interview on error and "being wrong", I still have to wonder if Vic really answered the question about why he failed as a trader. Yes, he offered up some reasons or what some might call alibis (brokers and floor traders circling like sharks, etc.), but did he really get at the root of the problem (that he touched on in comparing his squash game to his investing career), which, in his case, had more to do with leverage and taking on outsized risks?

Note that in addition to the discussion on error and losses, Vic also says some interesting things about his father, his mentor George Soros, taxpayer-funded bailouts, and life. Certainly a worthwhile read overall.

Related articles and posts:

1. Altucher: Things I learned from Vic Niederhoffer - Finance Trends.

2. Writings of Victor Niederhoffer and friends - Daily Speculations.

Altucher: Things I learned from Vic Niederhoffer

When James Altucher mentioned (on Twitter) that he was preparing an article about lessons learned while trading for Victor Niederhoffer, I knew that was one essay I'd be looking forward to.

Here's James on, "Ten Things I Learned While Trading for Victor Niederhoffer":

"I traded for Victor Niederhoffer for about a year starting in 2003. I was up slightly more than 100% for him, primarily trading futures using a quantitative approach. During that period I had one down month: June 2003.

Victor was a top trader for George Soros before starting his own fund in the ’90s and then writing the classic investment text “Education of a Speculator.” He then suffered one of several blowups in his career when his fund crashed to zero while on the wrong side of a couple of bets during the Asian currency crisis in 1997 (most notably, he was short S&P puts when the market crashed that year).

Despite that, Victor has consistently traded his own portfolio quite successfully and is one of the best traders I’ve seen in action. He still posts his daily comments on trading and the markets at his site dailyspeculations.com.

Here are 10 things I learned during my time trading for Victor: ..."

Read on as Altucher talks about the importance of testing your ideas, optimism, fearlessness, and protecting your downside (there's a lot more here too). Enjoy the essay and the lessons.