Three things Mark Douglas taught me. (Pt2)
Risk & Money Management
Risk management, in my opinion, is equal in importance to psychology because it allows your trading strategy/edge to play out by keeping you in the market equity wise. There really isn’t much to risk management other than its number one rule, never risk more than 1% per trade. Risking one percent per trade allows your trading system to take losses and have drawdowns but not enough to the point that you won’t be able to get out of it. I’m actually not a big fan of risk so I place trades using less than 1% of my capital. A lot of traders would think risking .75% per trade based off of my trading strategy is ludicrous but to me, it makes a lot of sense. As a trend follower, I take multiple small losses and few big winners that make double, triple, or quadruple, the loss. Trend following is very difficult because of the multiple small losses but definitely pays off because it lets your winners run. Big winners and small losses are definitely a trader’s best friend because it allows you to have a high risk reward ratio. If you risk $1 per trade, your goal is to make at least $4 back. If you constantly trade looking for 4x your risk all you need to do is win more than 20% of the time to be profitable. (Ex: Win 1 trade=$4 Lose 4=$4=0) .To be profitable you have to win more than 1/5 trades or 20%. With that being said, risk management gets even better when you use money management. As you can tell from the title, money management and risk management are two different things in my opinion. This wasn’t always true though. The old me would've said risk management and money management are the same exact thing but now that I know what I know now, I completely disagree. Money management to me is where you spread your risk to give yourself an even bigger edge. To illustrate, let’s look at the example shown here. According to my trading strategy my risk would be .75% of my equity on this trade but I would "spread the .75%" by taking it and dividing it into six trades instead of placing it on one. Let’s say I have $1000 in my trading account with .75% of
1K being $7.5. I would take the $7.5 and divide it into six or $1.25 per trade. My trading system would've told me to take buy limit trades at 1.66308 and 1.66815 at .005 lots (possible through Oanda) at 25 pips stop loss. Unfortunately the trades would’ve been a loss of $2.50 total or -.25% but because I'm spreading the risk I would still be able to enter four more trades. The remaining four would be a buy stop at 1.6654, 1.67068, and two at 1.67980 in anticipation of price closing at 1.68300 for us to take profit. If we were to follow our trading plan and disregarded negative psychological energy, our end profit would be as follows: -$1.25, -$1.25, +8.73, $5.90= Total profit $12.13 or 1.2% gain.
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