Energy Futures

Hello Traders,

For 2014 I would like to wish all of you discipline and patience in your trading!

BIG moves in energy and metals sector along with improved range and volume in stock indices.

I suspect this will continue the rest of this week with more reports ahead including Friday’s monthly employment levels.

Something my colleague mentioned to me today reminded me how “unnatural” trading can be for the human mind….As we are executing some trading systems on behalf of clients here at Cannon, one of the trading systems is a breakout system which caught the big sell off today in Crude, heating oil and gold ….( this is by no means to say that this system does this every day or anything of the sort but simply to provide an example of the following….): As the markets were moving in the direction the system wanted , my colleague mentioned, ” wish we could take profits now…” and it reminded me of one of the basic mistakes we all do. Taking profits too early and letting losses ride too long…The system which we execute under a letter of direction, ended up making quite a bit more by riding the trend rather than “taking profits now”  and while this is not to imply that this happens all the time, my opinion is that many traders , day traders and long term traders take out profits too quickly and stay in losers too long. The reason? Our human mind wants to see the profits as “ours”, i.e closed profits so we can know for sure this was a win….vise versa on the losing side…we refuse to close losses  because as long as the trade is open we have a chance for it to reverse, once we close it, it is a done deal, it is a closed losing trade….

So the point of the story is, that many times while trading we need to fight the urge to do what feels comfortable and rather do what we researched and believed produce results over time (assuming you do have a method/concept you researched and believed in…..)

Wishing you a great trading month ahead!