Getting Started Money Management Technical Analysis Basics of Trading: Part 1

The Basics of Trading

I've had a long running thread on the T2W boards giving an introduction to the central themes of trading. This series of articles has been adapted from that thread and will take you through all the areas you need to get a start in trading, from chart reading to defining a strategy.

In Part 1 I will look at:
  • Basic chart reading
  • Money management
  • Exiting a losing trade
  • Setting a price target

Part 2 will then consider:
  • The importance of discipline
  • Paper trading
  • The trading plan

And finally, in Part 3, I will bring it all together by taking you through a simple trading strategy.

Basic Chart Reading

Ok let's start with the basics of chart reading and deal with Support, Resistance and Trendlines. This really is the core basics of trading, and in my view is the foundation of a trading strategy.

How Candlesticks are constructed.

There are 3 types of bars that can be used for charting. A line chart (which connects the
closing prices), a bar chart and a candlestick chart.

A bar or candlestick chart will show the high, low, open and close for a set period (so on a daily chart, one bar represents one day). The high and low data is very important, so we can not use a line chart as this information is left out and only the closing prices are shown.

There is no real difference between a bar or candlestick chart - they both show the same data so it's personal preference. However, as you move further on in your trading career, you will find that candles offer more information, but for the moment, I'm dealing with the basics of trading.

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The above just shows how a bar or candle is created. The up candles have light or hollow "bodies", whereas down candles have dark or filled "bodies."

Ok, time to look at the more technical aspects of trading, support, resistance and trendlines.

Support

Support is a level on a price chart, that price hits and finds a large amount of buyers, and hence the price starts to rise again

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On the chart above of Cadbury's you can see that every time price hit 399 / 400, it found enough buyers to force the price up.

Resistance

Resistance is the level at which a price chart struggles to break above. When price hits a resistance level, the number of sellers is strong (as they know that the next move is down), and it takes a lot of buying pressure to get it above this level.

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On the above chart you can see that there were a large number of sellers at 423, which was too strong for the buyers to push through.

Trendlines

Trendlines are made by connecting 3 or more points along the same line. They either connect the tops of the highs together or the bottoms of the lows. Trendlines work because everyone sees them and know that the next time price hits that level, a reversal should happen, so they either rush to buy or sell depending if it is an uptrend or downtrend.

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On this chart I have connected the highs together to create the straight line (or trendline). This is a downtrend because the trendline is pointing down.

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On this chart I have connected the lows together, and as the lows are rising, it is in an uptrend.

...and that's pretty much the foundation to trading. I know it sounds simple (and many of you would all ready know this), but it works and that is the main thing.

Now we will move on to look at money management.

Money Management

At this point, I would like to show you the solution to trading. The hidden secret that will change your life forever, and this is it:

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Money Management

This is nothing new, but few new traders use money management wisely and get "killed" because of it. There is a myth among new traders that you HAVE to be right more times than wrong. This table is one that I've taken from "The Master Swing Trader" by Alan Farley:
%WinTradesAvg winAvg lossProfit
75%100£800£2000£10,000
50%100£800£600£10,000
25%100£800£133£10,000

What the table shows is that to be profitable, or more profitable, you can either work on being right more often, or reducing the losses. Most new traders will let their losses run and run, which means the trades that follow must be right to claw back the money they have lost.

This is a table that Chris Manning displays, and it really shows the importance of cutting your losers
% Loss% Gain needed to break even
10%11%
20%25%
50%100%
100%400%

It shows that the higher the loss, the significantly higher % gain it takes just to get back to square one.

The most effective way of controlling your trades is to look at the risk / reward ratio of the trade before you enter into it. This is done by setting a rough price target, and knowing the position of your stop. From this you can then work out the risk / reward ratio, for example

Current price = 100
Target = 109
Stop = 97

Reward = 9 points
Risk = 3 points (including commission).

Giving a 3:1 ratio

Knowing where to place the stop is a difficult thing, but the rule of thumb is that the stop is placed at the point the chart tells you "you are incorrect" Most people (including myself) rarely take anything less than a 3:1 ratio, especially for stocks. A 3:1 ratio means that you only have to be right 25% of the time to break-even.

Once you are in a trade, one of 3 things can happen. Either your stop gets hit, the price moves sideways or the price moves into profit. The first 2 you can't really do much about, but when a price moves into profit, then you move the stop to lock in some profit. This is an art form in itself.

The important thing is to make sure that at any one point, the risk should not be equal or greater than the reward. In the above example, if the price went to 105, and we didn't move the stop we would have this scenario.

Current price = 105
Target = 109
Stop = 97

Reward = 4 points
Risk = 8 points
Giving a 1:2 ratio

A 1:2 ratio is very poor. This is where moving the stop to lock in profits really comes in. If we move the stop to 102, we lock in 2 points worth of profit and have the following risk / reward

Current price = 105
Target = 109
Stop = 102

Reward = 4 points
Risk = 3 points
Giving a 1.3:1 ratio, which is a lot better than the 1:2 ratio we had earlier.

Moving stops, and stops placement is very difficult, but I will deal with this later.

Ok, so lets take a closer look at a real chart and see how the Risk / Reward profile can be used.

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Here we have a chart of AAL (Anglo American):

Current price = 874
Target = 930
Stop = 859

Reward = 56 points
Risk = 15 points
Giving a 3.73:1 ratio, which is good enough for me.

The other aspect of money management is the stake size. I know a few traders whose stake size is too large for the account they are trading. The important thing, especially when you are first starting out, is to make sure that you "stay in the game" as most of your learning will come when you're actually trading.

The accepted level of risk among the professional traders and the trading authors is 1% of your capital on every trade. I used to trade with 2% risk, but that was far too much, and it still scares me today to think that I actually had that level of risk!! When your risk increases, any bad run that you have will be magnified beyond your control. To make sure you stay within your risk profile, work out how many points you are risking, how much 1% of your trading capital is and from that work out the stake size, so that if your stop is hit, you will only lose 1% of your trading capital.

Now we will move this one step further and look at exiting a losing trade.

Exiting A Losing Trade

As demonstrated from the table above, cutting a loss is really important, to do this we will use a stop-loss. Knowing where to place a stop, is one of the hardest things to know. There are so many factors that come into play, like the volatility of the instrument that you are trading, your risk tolerance...etc

Stop-losses are an important part of trading. I've said it before, when you are learning to trade, the important thing is that you "stay in the game" long enough to put what you have learnt to good use. Stop-losses save you money, they don't make you money. There will be many times as a trader, your stop gets hit, and your closed out of a trade only to look back later to find that you would have made an absolute fortune. This happens in trading, and at times like this you must remember that the stop loss is there to protect your capital.

The point at which you are incorrect.

The general acceptance is that your stop is placed at the point at which you are told that you were wrong / incorrect. Most of the time it will be a break in a trendline, or a point of support / resistance that has broken.

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With this example of SDRC, the support was at 450, and the natural place for the stop-loss was about 445. The support failed, the stop got hit and the price carried on lower. At 445 the price has violated the support line, so you would expect the price to fall further, which is what happened in this case.

The trader versus the market makers.

The unfortunate matter is that the market makers know where the stops are. They know because most people trade the same way. There are plenty of occasions when a market maker will go "gunning" for stops. What I mean by this is that they drop the price below support, to get the stops hit and then the price carries up, up and away.

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This GKN chart shows how the price fell below support at 197, hit 195 and then reversed. If you had placed a tight stop at 196, you would have been stopped out.

The only way to combat this is to allow the price a bit of room to move once the support / resistance / trendline has been broken, that way any stops that get gunned won't be yours. How much you let the price move around is down to personal preference, but YOU MUST KNOW THE POSITION OF YOUR STOP BEFORE YOU ENTER the trade, this includes the room for manoeuvre, and should be part of the risk calculation that we talked about earlier.

Mid-trade stop-losses.

I talked earlier about moving the stop-loss so that at any point in the trade, the risk does not exceed the reward. Moving your stop during a trade must only be used to lock in profits. If you move the stop loss to increase your risk, you are asking for trouble.

Moving a stop to protect your profits, the stop should be placed under the last support for a buy or last resistance for a short. On an end of day chart you might look for the last low to act as the support, or the last high as the resistance, for example.

image10-2.gif


If we enter this Corus trade, short at 59, with a stop-loss at 64 and a price target of 45.

Risk = 5
Reward = 14
Reward / Risk ratio = 2.8:1

Now if the chart does this...

image11.gif


At the current price of 52, and leaving the stop where it is, we would have this scenario

Risk = 12
Reward = 7
Reward / Risk ratio = 1:1.7

At this point we have more risk than reward. So the logical place to put the stop is at 57, as this is the last significant high, giving...

Risk = 5
Reward = 7
Reward / Risk ratio = 1.4:1

Which is better than the 1:1.7 ratio.

Moving stop-losses to protect profits is just that, taking the profits that are on offer.

Stop loss placement is difficult and takes time to master, but as long as you remember the fact that stop-losses protect your capital, the emotional side of trading should be easier to follow.

Next we will look at setting price targets.

Setting Price Targets

We've already looked at stop-loss setting and risk / reward analysis. The other part is of course price target setting.

Your price target (as with the stop-loss) is governed by the time scale you're trading in and how long you expect to hold the shares.

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This ALLD has 3 levels of resistance

322 - January support
363 - October and December support
420 - High of January and also resistance in early September and back further.

The short term target is 322, which as I say is the January support. It's the short-term target for 2 reasons, 1) It's the closest to the current price and 2) There is enough resistance to hold it on a short-term basis (the resistance was only valid for a week), and for a short-term trade, we would expect it to get there pretty quickly.

he medium term target of 363 would take longer to get to than the short-term target, but that's what you would expect. For 363 to be hit, it will have to take out 322 and although you would expect price to stop there, it wouldn't hold it back long enough to be a problem.

The long term target will have to get through both the short-term and medium-term resistance, but as we are prepared to hold it in the portfolio for a while, that is not a problem.

Target setting comes down to how strong you think support and resistance is at the various stages. The text books say that the more often a level is tested and the longer the period it is tested over, the stronger it becomes.

Choosing how long you are going to hold shares for, is a very individual thing and take many years to figure out what suits you best. Having an idea of how long you're planning to hold your shares though should decide your target.

That is pretty much it for target setting. The only other thing to realise is that changing the target is no different to changing a stop-loss. There must be good reasons for doing it and it can be adjusted as time goes on and the chart develops. Just remember that a stop-loss MUST NOT be changed to add risk, but to protect profits where suitable.

Read part 2 of this series.
 
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I've read this thread numerous times, and it's great to have the basic principles distilled into a succinct article like this which reminds us of the ground rules when we haven't got time to re-read the in-depth text books. It really helps you to see the wood through the trees. I'm looking forward to parts 2 and 3.

Thanks Mark, this is extremely helpful.

Legalbeagle
 
All good stuff.
There is a fundamental question for the newbie which doesn't seem to feature in articles like this - what is the minimum amount of capital one needs to actually get into trading effectively? Once an allowance is made for trading costs (say £10 buying plus 2.5% stamp duty and then £10 selling) and you take account of the spread so you sell for less than you paid, you have to get over 5% growth just to stand still. If you then place your stops to limit your risk to 1% of capital and want to spread your capital over 3 stocks you are not going to be able to start with less than £10k. Or am I reading it wrongly?
Perhaps some well informed person could draw up a chart that explains this?
 
Hi Ale

I understand what you are asking, and I think the answer is to spreadbet. Your talking about trading and holding the actual shares, which could easily drain 5% of your account before you have even started. If you are trading UK stocks (the top 100 anyway) via spreadbetting, the only thing you will pay for is the spread which is a much more efficient way of getting into the market.

I hope this helps, but please feel free to ask me to explain it more clearly.
 
FTSE Beater said:
Hi Ale

I understand what you are asking, and I think the answer is to spreadbet. Your talking about trading and holding the actual shares, which could easily drain 5% of your account before you have even started. If you are trading UK stocks (the top 100 anyway) via spreadbetting, the only thing you will pay for is the spread which is a much more efficient way of getting into the market.

I hope this helps, but please feel free to ask me to explain it more clearly.

Hi FTSE Beater.
Being new to this game I'm still trying to understand the differences in trading modes. Is the article more relevant to spreadbetting? Can you recommend a good article/book etc for the uninitiated.
Is there an answer to my basic question ie what would be the minimum capital to start trading stocks effectively using the 'rules' of the article? :confused:
 
Hi Ale

Being a newbie too and i think in the same boat i'll give you my views thus far! (and prob be a complete t...)

I've been dealing with ig index who from what i can gather have the biggest spreads for eg i think about 10 to 13 pts on their indices so if you've got a small pot eg a £1 point its not worth thinking about. If your doing end of day as well like me and thinking of holding a postition for a few days then theres the added cost. Not much good again if your on a small pot. Don't know what the spreads are for uk stocks but then again theres not much volatility.(am i rite ftse?)
Then theres the stop limit thats hit on a daily bases. (back testing results!)
Summary- So far i think my formula is 2 years expierience x £5000 plus funds.

Millsy
 
millsy500 said:
Hi Ale

Being a newbie too and i think in the same boat i'll give you my views thus far! (and prob be a complete t...)

I've been dealing with ig index who from what i can gather have the biggest spreads for eg i think about 10 to 13 pts on their indices so if you've got a small pot eg a £1 point its not worth thinking about. If your doing end of day as well like me and thinking of holding a postition for a few days then theres the added cost. Not much good again if your on a small pot. Don't know what the spreads are for uk stocks but then again theres not much volatility.(am i rite ftse?)
Then theres the stop limit thats hit on a daily bases. (back testing results!)
Summary- So far i think my formula is 2 years expierience x £5000 plus funds.

Millsy

I suppose you can't really say how much you need up front until you know your system and its likely drawdowns.

A £1 per pt bet of the FTSE with capital Spreads would require £30 margin (£60 for £2 etc), plus the width of your stop (so 100 pts away would require a further £100) up front. So you could "play the game" with less than £500. But what's the chance of a long losing streak - how long is a piece of string.

Millsy - if you want to trade indeces, look at capital spreads - rolling daily is 2pts spread - you reveive interest if short and pay it if long for each daily rollover - no other costs.

Ooops.....not sure if this is the right place for this discussion though - sorry.

UTB
 
You can spreadbet for a few hundred quid easily - you are unlikely to make an absolute fortune, but you will be able to learn a huge amount THEN scale up. I was starting to type loads, but I think it'd be an idea to type a quick 'SB for Dummies' up and see if they'll add it to the knowledge base stuff - I'll go check if something like that already exists, if not I'll rattle a couple of pages of info off over the weekend.

I'm interested in this, and learned it all recently (well, 'all' is a bit of an exaggeration <g>). A lot of people, I suspect, want to trade but have small amounts to hand - I decided to learn how to spreadbet and just shoved £500 into an account and I've had months of fun with it. (I'm hoping to make a profit at some point too!) It's a cheap entry to trading, and if you are less impatient than I am you can avoid the costly mistakes... bargain!

I'll go check, if I can't find an article in the knowledgebase I'll have a go at it....

Dave
 
Go for it

DaveJB said:
You can spreadbet for a few hundred quid easily - you are unlikely to make an absolute fortune, but you will be able to learn a huge amount THEN scale up. I was starting to type loads, but I think it'd be an idea to type a quick 'SB for Dummies' up and see if they'll add it to the knowledge base stuff - I'll go check if something like that already exists, if not I'll rattle a couple of pages of info off over the weekend.

I'm interested in this, and learned it all recently (well, 'all' is a bit of an exaggeration <g>). A lot of people, I suspect, want to trade but have small amounts to hand - I decided to learn how to spreadbet and just shoved £500 into an account and I've had months of fun with it. (I'm hoping to make a profit at some point too!) It's a cheap entry to trading, and if you are less impatient than I am you can avoid the costly mistakes... bargain!

I'll go check, if I can't find an article in the knowledgebase I'll have a go at it....

Dave
Totally agree DaveJB I have wanted to trade for years but have not had enough money to do so properly 6 months ago I had some spare cash £150 which would just of gone on nothing in no time so I had a go at http://www.binarybet.com/ .I lost in the end but it took a while and I had great fun looking at charts doing the daily & hourly bets and I did learn and had the chance to apply the things id picked up in a more real environment with the thrill and fear of the game yet only losing £150.
Some may take a dim view of this and say it is not real trading may be not but it felt like it to me and it felt good not to be just reading about others trying and as I say £150 wont go anywhere if its going spare.
So I would be very interested to see what you have to say and any one else who has info on the way to play options spread betting forex futures shares day trading commodities with little cash or minimal cash. Some time some people just need to have a go if you don’t play you cant win ok so you don’t lose but maybe if you don’t play and lose you lose much more in years to come when you look back and say if I had only tried.
So I would like to see information along those lines even if it is under the title of almost gambling.
 
Okay, I'm on page 2 and will add to it when the Nasdaq closes....
Not one for high rollers, and definitely inclined to the light hearted approach, but there's a market for 'don't know much, and may never have much, but it'd be nice to have a go before death sets in' <g> It won't be definitive, it may contain errors, but it'll give a feel for what really involved in taking a very small pot and having a go at it from the amateur hour viewpoint.

Might have known Daniel would chip in <g>

Dave
 
Ale,

In response to your question about initial capital investment, I did a few figures and came up with a couple of things. I started a couple of years ago with 7k which went up some, and I made two trades in particular that worked out well. First I just need to correct your figure for stamp duty, the rate is 0.5% not 2.5% (according to the LSE). Basically, it all depends (of course) on how much the stocks rise in value. At 1000 initial investment, the stock would have to rise by 3% to pay for the charges. Only at 5,000 would a 1% rise in value let you break even. So it really does depend on what you expect to gain.

As for spreading your 10k over 3 stocks, consider that carefully, as although it minimizes your exposure to charges, it makes for the effects of market fluctuations to be far greater over your whole portfolio.

I would recommend choosing five shares, with three of those paying large (above 3%) dividends. That way you cover your costs in dividends alone, assuming the stock price remains constant. Whatever changes in stock price after that you are covered for the initial five purchases at least...

As a rule of thumb, I use a minimum gain of 50 GBP on purchase cost (including charges) as an indicator that I have broken even on a share, as my largest holding is 3000 (and it immediately slumped 8% - grrr)...

As for spread betting? Sounds far too risky! Stick with compounded annual returns and the occasional potential high flier!
 
DaveJB said:
Okay, I'm on page 2 and will add to it when the Nasdaq closes....
Not one for high rollers, and definitely inclined to the light hearted approach, but there's a market for 'don't know much, and may never have much, but it'd be nice to have a go before death sets in' <g> It won't be definitive, it may contain errors, but it'll give a feel for what really involved in taking a very small pot and having a go at it from the amateur hour viewpoint.

Might have known Daniel would chip in <g>

Dave
DaveJB anything new yet i have £500 i need to make into £250000 in 2 months so i am waiting patiently
 
Yup,
I sent it off to Daniel last weekend, but he had some business to take care of and has to do the editor type stuff and so on. As I've pointed out (copiously <g>) you ain't gonna get rich off any of it, there's a bit about what you can trade, how the spreads affect your decisions what to trade, simple stuff like adding the margin requirement up to see how many points of how many shares you can run at the same time, and so on - nothing about selecting trades, I'm not good enough to do that, and I still make some basic errors... like you I put a few hundred into an account, I view this as my tuition fee - losing bits of it teaches me a lot more than paper trading thousands ever did.

I think my little effort is likely to appear sometime in the next week from what Daniel said when he got to it,
Dave
 
ale said:
Hi FTSE Beater.
Being new to this game I'm still trying to understand the differences in trading modes. Is the article more relevant to spreadbetting? Can you recommend a good article/book etc for the uninitiated.
Is there an answer to my basic question ie what would be the minimum capital to start trading stocks effectively using the 'rules' of the article? :confused:
Hi Ale

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you.
The information in the articles is designed for everything, as Technical Analysis can be applied to any market in any time-frame and the market doesn't care if your spreadbetting, direct access trading or broker trading - it will still behave in the same way :cool:
With regards minimum capital needed. It's based on the level of profit you have to make. The more profit you have to make, the larger the capital size needed. A profitable trader should be looking to increase their trading capital by roughly 1% each day. Which, if you do this constantly for 20 trading days in the month, would result in a profit of 22% - It makes it sound so simple doesn't it ;)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Hi Millsy

Don't know what the spreads are for uk stocks but then again theres not much volatility.(am i rite ftse?)
The volatitilty on the UK stocks is good enough and the spreads from the spreadbetters should be the same as the real market. The stocks I love trading are:

AVZ, AZN, GSK and any of the big banks - LLOY, HSBA, BARC ANL etc.

Hope this helps
 
Hi FTSE
Thanks for the reply. A quick one regarding risk. I've been looking at us stocks because its easier for me doing eod and from what i can gather from on here they're more volitile and therefore more profitable especially the software stocks etc. The problem is even on the small ones they require around a 300 p stop so if your risking 1% then you need £30000 pot. Is this correct? On a pot of around £3000 is this too risky?
Many thanks regards Millsy
 
I'm glad to see the level of discussion here. Clearly a lot of people have need for some basic guidance and I'm learning a lot just by following these comments.
Just to lay my cards on the table:- I had some shares in my ex company from a sharesave scheme and I sold them a few months back at a peak (using iii as a cheap trade method). I took 120% profit on the original cost price (due to the discounts and the well timed peak) and have reinvested the £2700 in 4 other stocks. I won't name them but they are in oil, mining, chemicals and entertainment. After a month I am even (including allowing for all trading costs), although one is down a few %, one level and 2 up marginally. I could have reduced trading costs by taking only 3 stocks although would I have not taken the loser or a leader? So, £2700 in 4 stocks. Hold, sell and rebuy, try some SB? Based on info so far I plan to sell one stock and have a go at SB but I'd like to try a dummy account first. Are there such things? If so can anyone recommend one or is this not the place to mention specific sites?
 
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