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That’s a question that has dogged professional investors for years.

Picking investments or trades to buy is one thing but when it comes to selling and in particular timing a sale its a whole different ball game.

In retail trading circles, this can cause us to snatch at profits and to run losing positions beyond the point where our money management rules tell us we should have closed the trade, with predictable results. It's a clear form of loss aversion (a cognitive bias that we should all be aware of) that stops us from making the rational call to close the trade.

Success in trading comes from running profits and cutting losses to grow our capital base and the ability to do this repeatedly, over as long a period as we can manage.

Having trouble selling isn’t confined to private investors, however. It’s a real issue among professional traders and money managers, unlike the science of buying or investing, which has been scrutinised to death by academics, analysts, traders and other financial markets participants. The science (or should that be the art of selling or divesting) has had precious little coverage in comparison.

The widely respected Barons magazine recently highlighted the asymmetry in professional money managers' selling ability and why professional can vastly underperform the market benchmark.

A research paper written by a mixture of US academics and specialists who measure investment performance or “skill “ as they like to call it, looked at 4 million trades made by money managers between 2000 and 2016 across 800 portfolios that on average contained more than USD 570 million of assets (aka "smart money").

The researchers found clear evidence of skill when entering trades or positions on the money managers' part, but it was a completely different story when it came to exiting trades.

In fact, the research found that the money managers were frankly shockingly poor when it came to timing sales, selecting what to sell and when to sell it. The researchers estimated that this lack of selling ability cost the managers returns of 2% per annum. Whilst that might not sound like much in insolation, if we consider the effects of compounding over decades that underperformance becomes hugely significant.]

That point is further reinforced by research by asset managers at JP Morgan Chase in 2014.

The fund managers looked at the lifecycle of 3000 US stocks dating back to 1980 what they found was striking as the quotes below show.

Risk of permanent impairment

“Using a universe of Russell 3000 companies since 1980, roughly 40% of all stocks have suffered a permanent 70%+ decline from their peak value.”

Negative lifetime returns vs the broad market.

“The return on the median stock since its inception vs an investment in the Russell 3000 Index was -54%. Two-thirds of all stocks underperformed the Russell 3000 Index, and for 40% of all stocks, their absolute returns were negative.”

Trades have a finite life cycle, and for the vast majority of stocks (or choose your asset class), they will often have their moment in the sun, get too close to it, and then fall away, never to return to those levels again. Identifying trades at their peak or going past their “sell-by dates" couldn’t be more important to an investment portfolio's performance.

In light of this knowledge, what can we do?

As with all the biases and psychological blackspots in trading that we discuss in our articles knowing and acknowledging that they exist half of the battle because we can modify behaviour accordingly once we have done that.

As traders in cash-settled margin products, we have an advantage over the money managers and asset owners described above. Simply because we are used to going both directions, e.g. shorting, on asset classes such as currencies and metals.

We take a 360 degree or holistic approach to the markets and the skills we use to decide to short USDJPY or the US 500 index can also be used to determine when a long position has run its course. Conversely, the skill set we use to identify a trading opportunity on the long side should also tell us when a short position is running out of steam.

Most traders we know of at Fusion do not hold their trades for more than a couple of days. Due to the power of leverage, they often don't need to since the gains can be enormous (but so can the losses we leave to run far longer than any positive P&L).

At the same time, why not make use of take profits or trailing stops to make sure you can squeeze that little bit extra out of the profit on the trade or set your levels and stick to them, without checking your phone or platform every minute of the day as we all do.

By adapting our mindset and the trading skills that we developed around opening trades, we can become better sellers or closers of positions and that will help us get the most out of the trades we make and the positions we take.

Or why we tend to rely heavily upon the first piece of information we receive.

Our minds can have an enormous impact on our trading and the returns that we generate from it. The way we think, act and behave when we trade or invest is at least as necessary if not more so than our trade selection, particularly in the kind of one-way markets that we have seen post the covid crash.  

A rising tide lifts all ships they say, and, in this case, the rising tide of the markets was provided by the printing presses of the major central banks along with the stimulus packages from national governments.

However, Central banks won't always be there to rescue us and we need to be aware of the kind of tricks that our brains can play on us if we are to avoid making the wrong trading decisions.

One of these tricks has a nautical moniker, anchoring, in which our brain subconsciously latches on to an idea, an assumption or a set of figures and uses that information in decision making, regardless of whether it's accurate or even relevant to the matter at hand.  

What's more, as humans, we tend to carry these impaired decision-making processes forward so that we end up using an inherently flawed system and often without realising it.

Behavioural psychologists have highlighted these tendencies in their experiments.  

In the case of anchoring American academic Professor Jay Edward Russo performed tests on 500 graduate students in which he asked them pairs of questions on history and general knowledge, but, unknown to the students, he had "salted "the questions with erroneous dates and figures.

The student's answers invariably reflected the incorrect numbers, which were varied across different groups of students within the experiment, highlighting a clear bias.

Professor Russo was effectively projecting those values into the student's subconscious, creating an anchor point.

When we become anchored to figures or a plan of action, we filter new information through that framework, which distorts our perception and decision making.  

This can even make us reluctant to change our plan or framework even if the situation calls for it.

There are few consequences if any when this happens in an experiment inside a university psychology department. Still, if it happens in the real world like in trading or investing, then there most certainly can be consequences.

Anchoring Bias has been described as one of the most robust effects in psychology, the fact that our decisions can be swayed by values not even relevant to the task (or trade) at hand.

Let's say we are negotiating the purchase of a house and I tell you it's worth $1,000,000, and I wouldn't sell it for less. You, as the willing buyer might have only had a price of $800,000 in your head. But all of a sudden, you now are anchored on my price. Not yours. The worst part is that the person who goes first in the negotiation tends to anchor the other party (remember this for the next salary negotiation you need to do with your boss!)

The studies even show that if you rolled a pair of two dice, gave the numbers (e.g. 10 and 19) to the study participant, that subconsciously, you would anchor them on these two numbers. Ask them what they would pay for a house, bottle of wine, or in one notorious study, the judges sentencing a criminal, these numbers are in and heavily influencing the participant's decisions whether they like it or not.

Anchoring always occurs in making our trading decisions, especially as it might help to explain our fixation with round numbers. E.g. EURUSD at 1.20. Gold at $2000/ounce. DJ30 - 30,000. Once we get hooked on the number, we always use it as a reference point in future, probably because it "feels right".  

Let's say in the past you might have successfully gone long EURUSD at 1.20 earlier in the year, and now whenever it comes back to that number, you will buy it again (the same thing happened to EURUSD at 1.10). You can't explain it, but you had past success with that number and you will gravitate towards it without understanding why.

Take a moment to consider some key support and resistance levels on your favourite instruments. Are they round numbers too? Why might that be? Could it be because people are anchored at Gold at $1900? And that every man and his dog has placed their buy orders at that level because it's "good value" or has spent time around that level in the past? Remember that the market is driven by sentiment and agreed upon narratives. Think what else could the crowd be anchored on that might be to your advantage knowing what you know now.

How do we avoid being anchored? 

Given that we don't completely understand the processes that cause anchoring to happen in the first place, we are unlikely to avoid it entirely.  

However, by being aware of its existence, we can revisit and retest our assumptions when making important decisions, to ensure that we are acting rationally and basing our decision on the situation at hand, not irrelevant inputs.

Perhaps the best way to avoid anchoring in trading is to treat every trade as an individual event and to judge a trading opportunity on its current merits. By doing this, you have a better chance to ignore any reference or prior interactions you have had with the instrument you are trading. It won't be easy to do at first, but it could prove to be a valuable discipline over time. As mentioned, this is crucial to comprehend for putting your stops and limits around key support and resistance levels.

Think about a time you have been fixated on a number. Was it buying a house? A pair of shoes? Trading? Now think whether that number could have been influenced by someone else, e.g. the seller, the shoe store etc.

Anchoring can certainly also play a part in other hidden biases and behaviours such as loss aversion (e.g. not wanting to close your open losing trade).

The next time that you are about to trade, take time to think about why you are fixated with that number for entering and exiting the trade, and how you reached the decision to pull the trigger. A few moments of reflection might make all the difference.

In trading, as in life, we are faced with the need to assess complex situations and quickly make judgements or decisions. And in both cases, we can’t be certain what the outcome of those snap decisions will be. Though we have to deal with the consequences regardless, even if they don’t reveal themselves for some time.

I wonder how many of us look back at the choices we made and judge them solely by the outcome they achieved, be that good or bad, rather than looking at how we got to that endpoint?

Behavioural psychologists believe that if we look at events purely in terms of their results, we are under the influence of outcome bias and as such we are likely to have a flawed view on risk and reward.

That outlook has been famously summed up in the phrase “picking up dimes in front of a steam roller” which has been variously attributed to Nassim Taleb and or economists Martin Wolf/John Kay.

Whoever coined the term (no pun intended) got it just right, because if you are picking up those coins then yes you are acquiring money, but you can only afford to slip up once and then it will be game over, and in a very messy way.

Another renowned economist, John Maynard Keynes, wrote on the subject of risk-reward and outcomes, just over 100 hundred years ago, in his treatise on probability.

Where Keynes thinking differed from traditional schools of thought was that he believed that an event could be, what he called, objectively probable, even if it didn’t actually take place. And that it would remain so even if you were looking back at events at a future point in time.

For Keynes, it was more important to be rational in your decision making than to be right.

Keynes of course also famously said that “the markets can remain irrational for far longer than you can remain solvent “  

That is one of my favourite quotes on investing. It neatly sums up the practicalities of being rational versus being right, as far as a trader is concerned - Being right doesn’t necessarily make you money and in fact, even if you are right waiting for that to be proven could cost you a fortune.

Whereas being rational or pragmatic, and acknowledging that the market is “directionally right “ but for the wrong reasons (which is usually the sheer weight of money) is one thing. But then trading with the market until the point when the crowd realises their folly, is likely to be a more profitable approach in the long term.

After all, by adopting this approach you don’t have to time the market at all instead you just need to watch for the points at which the crowd turns. And to that, we can use momentum and sentiment indicators, which you can set up in advance.

In short, when it comes to trading at least, the process is more important than the outcome.

The British military has a saying which runs as follows: Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.

As a trader it’s hard to fault the logic in that statement, because if we believe that there is a symmetry between risk and reward, inputs and outputs, effort and results, and in trading where there must be a loser to offset every winner, why wouldn't you believe that?

Then if we don't prepare properly for each trade we make; we are not giving ourselves the best possible chance of making money.

We often say that a systemised approach to trading is the best one to adopt. What we mean is that we should have a framework of rules that we follow in each trade we make.

And we don't let our hearts rule our head or worst of all let our egos’ fools us into thinking that we have some special insight our secret trading sauce. Because in 99.9 times out of a hundred that won't be even remotely true.

Talent and luck will carry you only so far and many a sportsperson has built a successful career by recognising their own abilities and limitations, and then working hard to improve their technique and approach.

And in turn in recognising the weaknesses in their opponents game, which they can then exploit.

The opponents may still score against them but if they are reducing the rate at which they can score then they are doing something right, and they are slanting the odds of a positive outcome in their favour.

In trading, you won't win every contest but if you win more than you lose and have bigger wins and smaller loses, then, over the long term you will definitely come out on top.

That’s a good question and is one that was posed by a man with many years of experience in the markets, Charley Ellis. Ellis, after a stint on Wall Street, founded Greenwich Associates in 1972 which grew into one of the world's most respected research houses. He said:

“Go to a continuous-process factory sometime — a chemical plant, a cookie manufacturer, a place that makes toothpaste. Everything is perfectly repetitive, automated, exactly in place. If you find anything interesting, you’ve found something wrong.

Investing is a continuous process, too; it isn’t supposed to be interesting. It’s a responsibility. If you go to the stock market because you want excitement, then sooner or later you will lose. Everyone who thinks the stock market is a game loses — everyone, to the last man, woman and child.

So, the purpose of an investment policy is simply to ensure that your continuous process never breaks down...

Benign neglect is the secret to long-term investing success. If you change your investment policy, you are likely to be wrong; if you change it with a sense of urgency, you’re guaranteed to be wrong.”

There is a lot of sense in those comments after all the key to successful trading is finding a system, trading style or approach that works for you, and does so consistently.

Developing or creating that approach gives you your edge, which is something that every trader needs if they are to succeed and grow their capital long term. Creating a viable trading strategy or trading edge is the exact opposite to the random and emotional trading that sees many new and aspiring traders come to grief early on their career.

When we read about great traders, we often wonder what makes them different to you and me and what it would take to follow in their footsteps. Let’s be honest we probably aren’t going to be the next George Soros, Ray Dalio or Jim Simons. However, what we can do is to emulate their systematic approach to the markets.

Systemising your trading is about creating a set of rules which describe your trading approach, the opportunities you look for, and the risk management ratios you apply.

Once you have written these down, you have effectively created your trading plan, and what’s more, you have laid the groundwork for creating an algorithmic strategy.

An algorithm or algo is just a set of rules that a computer can follow and execute. Of course, nearly all trading today is conducted electronically. Yet, as much as 70% of that business employs algorithms to improve trading efficiency, execution quality and anonymity. The latter can be beneficial in retaining your trading edge and not seeing it arbitraged away.

A report by Business Wire predicts that Algorithmic trading will experience a compounded annual growth rate or CAGR of 10% per anum between 2018-2026. Two years into that period, and there is no suggestion that the analysis is wrong.

Using a rules-based system to decide when you should buy and sell is the key to maximising your profitability. And perhaps just as importantly, minimising your losses. Leaving those decisions to our emotional selves is not a viable option for long term trading success.

As we have discussed before, our psyche contains biases, emotional responses and short cuts that are not suited to trading and they can actually hinder the process. It’s far better to use a systematic rules-based approach that can help us run winners and cut losses rather than the other way around.

To take your trading to the next level, you need to ask yourself a question, and that is...

Have you developed a system, or are you just having a punt?

Do you follow a set of trading rules and stick to them each time you trade? Think about your trade sizes, risk-reward ratios, the use and placement of stop losses. Consider the average profitability of your trades and how often and by how much do the results deviate from that average?

Much of this data will, of course, be available to your in trade history and statements that’s one of the great benefits of electronic trading. It should be possible to identify the products you trade well and the time of day (your peak). Not to mention those times you switch gears and try to trade something you’ve never done before. E.g. an FX Trader dabbling into commodities because it’s “hot”.

A very effective way to systemise your trading and improve its efficiency is not to trade in the instruments, and at the times of day that you do poorly on. And instead, focus on the most profitable areas of your trading. You will be amazed at just how much difference that simple change could make.

Finally, ask yourself, are you getting too excited about your trading and the individual positions that you take? Do you wake up in the middle of the night dreaming about your positions or checking them? If you are, then you are probably taking too much risk.

You see a trader should largely ambivalent about individual positions, because if he or she has systemised their process, then trades will be a bit like riding the tube in London, that is, another one will be along in a minute.

What will or should be of concern to them, however, is whether they are making the most out of every trade that comes by. Better to be focused on the process and the system and not the individual trade outcomes. Transitioning from one way of thinking and approach to the other will very much put on the right route for trading success.

That's just the way it is
Things will never be the same
That's just the way it is
...Some things will never change

2pac - Changes

In modern life, our focus is often on change. We quickly assess something as either Good changes or bad changes.

Change is also the lifeblood of the financial markets which would, of course, be pretty dull if everything remained static and prices never moved.

However, the opposite is true in these days of computerised and algorithmic trading.

Prices are rarely static and fluctuate throughout the trading day, which blends seamlessly into the next business day across the working week, which may eventually extend into the weekend as well, but I digress.

As much as our lives are driven by or focused on changes, they are underpinned by many constants, things that don’t change over time no matter how much the world and our everyday lives do.

Information

One of the constants today is information, inside thirty years, the internet and world wide web have become an integral part of our lives. To the extent that we can overload ourselves with information on almost any subject imaginable in seconds.

However, there is a big difference between having that information at our fingertips and understanding a subject or topic thoroughly, and it's very easy to conflate one with the other.

You can feel like an expert when in fact you may have missed the point entirely. Reading between the lines is often what's most important, and we need to recognise that we don't know as much we think we do and be comfortable with reconciling ourselves to that.

In trading, even in the information age, we can only ever hope to see a fraction of the big picture. The only comfort is it's exactly the same for almost everybody else.

If you think you really can understand the exact reason the market has gone up or down, think again. The financial media will say the market went up or down for the same reason. Could they ever admin something like: “There’s no story we could slap on this for why the market went up today. It just did”. No.

Greed and fear

Another constant in trading is the role of Greed and Fear these are the two primary drivers of investor behaviour, particularly when we are looking at that in aggregate.

That is, when we consider the trading crowd. The crowd has always been with us, journalist Charles Mackay wrote about them in his 1841 work Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.

In the book, Mackay looked back to events in 1720, the South Sea bubble, and the Dutch Tulip mania of 1637, to highlight just how crowd behaviour, driven initially by greed and subsequently by fear, leads to the creation and bursting of investment/trading bubbles. If those bubbles become big enough then they can not only affect the markets but also the real economy too.

Speculation is as old as the hills and financial crises are nothing new. In fact, in modern times they have become cyclical, occurring around once every 10 years or so, for example, we had the 1987 crash, the Russian default and Asian currency crisis of 1998 and the subsequent dot com crash. That was followed in turn by the Credit Crunch and Global Financial Crisis of 2007/8 and more recently the COVID crash.

A decade is enough time for a new generation of traders to enter a market and each new generation believes that “this time it’s different” a phrase which is often described as being the four most dangerous words in trading.

Traders make the same mistakes and fall foul of the same biases and behaviour as their forebears did. It’s just that now there are scientific labels for it (we do love to put a label on something).

If you read trading books like the Reminiscences of a Stock Operator by Edwin Lefevre (first published in 1923) you instantly recognise patterns of behaviour regularly seen among market participants today.

Too much risk

One of those behaviors is taking too much risk or over-trading, relative to your capital base. That's often brought about because markets move in one direction for an extended period. People climb on board the trend, and the longer it goes on the more they believe it won't end and the greedier they get.

They don't deliberately mean to do this but one of the characteristics of bubble behaviour, because that's what this is, is the participants inability to tell that they are in a bubble. The narrative simply changes. When you’re inside the bubble you will cut off contact with or ignore those on the outside looking in or who have a different viewpoint or opinion.

Market aphorisms or sayings are grounded in the truth and experience of history they may sound quaint, but they are there to teach us a lesson, and none more so than

 “It's only when the tide goes out that you see who’s swimming naked”

In this case, the tide going out is the market changing direction and those swimming naked are the overleveraged and overlong bulls in the bubble. Markets crash because the trading crowd wakes up to the existence of the bubble simultaneously, and everyone heads for the exit at the same time, as greed turns into fear.

A good trader knows not to outstay their welcome, and that it is always better to leave the party before the end.

We’re not saying that markets don’t change and evolve over time and that a strategy you use will work forever, but the same fundamental principles like we’ve tried to highlight such as greed and fear never will.  Some things will never change.

Much of what we write about in these articles is about the mindset and behaviour of traders and trading. The reason for this is quite straight forward; it's because it's the decisions that we make and take that will ultimately determine how we perform as traders.

Yes, of course, price changes in the markets will play their part but, in the end, it's our decision whether to get involved or not and that determines how much capital we commit to trade, how long we hold the position for, and what the ultimate outcome of the trade will be.

Hidden costs

When we examine the costs of trading, we tend to focus on commissions and spreads and our PnL, but there are other costs, costs that we don't consider when really, we should.

These are the costs of inactivity and indecision, the costs of listening to outside influences more than to your own inner feelings and intuition. They are the costs of missing out, what economists call "opportunity costs".

Self-doubt among traders is not unusual, and in truth, it's better to exercise a degree of caution than to be 100% confident about everything you do. Hubris has been the downfall of many traders, and we certainly advocate being prudent with your risk. That said, It's always worth testing your thinking and assumptions and checking that they are still valid before you trade.

The problem comes when you start to talk yourself out of the trade entirely. After all, trading is a risk and reward business. There can be no profit without the possibility of loss.

A trader's job is to try and ensure that the risk that they take is in proportion to the potential rewards they could make. Not taking that risk could be limiting your potential as a trader which in turn may be limiting your rewards or returns.

Moments of clarity

Sometimes as a trader or investor, you will enjoy a moment of clarity, a moment of pure thought and insight, in which you can see exactly how a market setup or situation will playout. Moments when you just know you are right

If that moment of clarity coincides with significant moves in the markets, then that can be a very valuable situation indeed. But only if you act on it.

Allow me to tell you a personal story. During the great 2020 downturn in oil (where a Saudi/Russia price war caused prices to go NEGATIVE), I found myself holding oil from $30 a barrel and riding it all the way down watching in sheer horror. I kept buying the dip. How much lower could it go, I thought? I ignored every rule and everything I've written in the past about this. I didn't put a stop loss on. I told myself it was a long-term trade that I would stay in forever. Prices surely couldn't go below $20. That's madness. Then… The unthinkable happened in the futures price – it went negative.

Thankfully, Fusion's price didn't go negative (we use Spot Crude oil) but with spot prices at $15, I was sitting watching Netflix on my couch, and my heart raced as I saw it go down like World War III just started. The news sites told me nothing new had happened (funny how we search for any narrative to make sense of it all). Here it went. $14. $12. $11. Back to $12. Back to $11. $10. $9. Thoughtful me knew these prices were unsustainable. I told myself I would hold until it hit $0 if it had to. My account was down 70%. I'd never suffered such steep losses. I felt sick. I then couldn't sleep. I woke up, and it was still down a lot but had recovered from $7.

Watch out for the narratives.

I started to read more about what others were saying. What the hell was going on? Would this happen again? Yes, there was nowhere to store the oil (so the narrative went) but surely rationality would prevail. Seriously, how could you have negative prices? It was impossible to find anyone bullish in the media or otherwise. People assume if something just happened, it will occur again Goldman came out and said to expect more negative pricing. But I just couldn't believe it was so cheap. I knew it was time to buy more!

But then I didn't buy it. I waited for another opportunity for when I knew "the worst was over" I was so sure things would bounce back, but I didn't have the guts to buy one more time, and the opportunity passed me by forever. I let the external narrative cloud my previous judgement. But I was just so worried I couldn't think properly. Within days, it had doubled back to $15 a barrel. Then it was $20 a week later. At the time of writing it is $40 a barrel. By the time you read this, it might be $60 a barrel. Who knows? All I knew was fear and too much outside influence completely warped my view, and I failed. I just wanted to survive the calamity. While I survived to write you this, I did not do as well as I could have.

Self-belief

People often talk about having the courage of their convictions, but in trading, it's not really about courage, it's about belief, belief in yourself and your ideas and be prepared to back them, rather than talking yourself out of them, or allowing yourself to be talked out of them by others.

We all like to take advice and read and hear the opinions of so-called experts. But the absolute truth is that nobody really knows what going to happen next in the markets.

For example, nobody was predicting that an 11-year bull market in equities was going to end and end so abruptly in Q1 2020. Or that US unemployment would spiral to +14.7% in a single month.

Do not get me started on the rebound from the lows in March. To be bullish on the markets in April and May of 2020 was to look like you had lost your mind given the narratives surrounding COVID.

So-called "market legends" like Druckenmiller and Buffett told everyone it was not the time to buy. Sadly, so many would have listened.

Let's not forget Yogi Berra's famous saying "It's hard to make predictions, especially about the future" which is why it's best to take these so-called forecasts with a grain of salt. The best that any expert can do is to make a prediction or forecast about the future. And the longer the time frame that the forecast is over, or the more unusual the circumstances under which it is made, then the more significant the room for error and the higher the chance that they are simply wrong.

Loss aversion

As humans, we are subject to subconscious emotional biases that can cloud our decision making. One such bias is loss aversion.

Loss aversion can hamper a trader in two distinct ways. It's most commonly associated with the practice of running losses, ignoring stops and breaking money management rules when a trader can't or won't accept that they were wrong and refused to close a losing position.

The other way that loss aversion can muddy the waters is in our initial decision making. You see as species we are poor judges of risk and reward; we don't calculate probabilities very well, and the upshot of this is that we do not like uncertainty.

To the extent that when we are faced with situations that have a series of potential outcomes, we tend to favour the outcome with the highest degree of certainty. Even if that outcome is the least beneficial to us financially. Which, of course, is the exact opposite of the risk versus reward culture that we spoke about earlier.

Fortune favours the bold.

Though we might not like to admit it, our subconscious is often trying to talk us out of taking risks. Outside influences from the media, fear, our aversion to loss and a preference for certainty may often be our worst enemy as traders.

As Howard Marks said, "If you're doing the same thing as everyone else, how do you expect to outperform them"?

There have been several once in a generation trading opportunities over the last six months. I wonder how many of us were bold enough to seize the day and take advantage?