Most people get what we are about to share wrong, yet we consider it the most important thing in trading:
Don’t needlessly lose money.
Of course, there will be individual trade losses. That is normal. There has never been- and will never be a perfect, win-every-time trading system. If you ever see any such claim, you are being tricked: flee the scene.
Core to all Investing Winners trading approaches is considering ourselves risk managers. We strive to minimize downside risk while maximizing upside gain. It takes some losses to accomplish the latter and some constraining of the latter to support the former. Translation: those 2 core success variables have to be constantly BALANCED.
Those who only:
swing for the fences in trading are going to have a lot of harsh strikeouts too.
focus on trying to never lose, will never take enough risk to hit a home run.
The biggest hits may deliver a surge of excitement, but it is the singles, doubles, and occasional triple that wins this game. Balancing risk and reward potential is key to success.
In this lesson, we cover some simple techniques on how to limit losses.
There are only two things we have when we are trading or investing:
our capital (money), and
opportunity.
Since there is a great variety of different trading opportunities we could take advantage of every single day, we do not have to stick with any losing trade. At any time, we can cut a loss and move on to a new opportunity. If we become stubborn and hold that loser, we cannot reallocate that money to other, better opportunities. And if we let it erode our capital away, we cannot take advantage of any better opportunities with lost money we no longer have. So, the goal is to always conserve our capital and limit our losses.
Consider this simple truth: A 50% gain on a trade is a remarkable gain. A 50% loss is not really equivalent on the downside. Why? If you lose 50% on any position, it takes a 100% gain on what is left to only get back to where you started.
If 50% is remarkable, 100% is incredible. Can 50%-100% gains be realized on single trades? Of course… but that level of gain in any kind of “normal” circumstance is probably realized over several trades and, more importantly, over what will probably be a lengthy amount of time. Thus, waiting on a bad loss to “come back” is tying up money in a bad trade over what is usually a long time… not in trying to make additional money but only lose less. That remaining money in that trade is now trying for the “incredible” ROI- a full double- if you want it to make it all the way back… to break even.
Often, a better idea is first, not letting it fall so far… and second, bailing on a dud trade and putting the salvaged cash towards something with more potential in a shorter amount of time. That way instead of using precious time only working BELOW your entry point, freed up money can instead go towards something working ABOVE it.
APPLYING S.E.T. TO TRADING
Every trade or investment should have 3 components to it:
A stop,
an entry, and
a target.
We use the acronym S.E.T. for this: Stop, Entry, Target. You might add the word “get” in front of it as a mental reminder to use all 3 components: Get SET to trade the right way.
Every stock, ETF, option, and futures alert that our flagship service (Sal’s Private Trades) subscribers receive has a:
specific entry point: the exact price at which to buy or short,
target profit point: the price at which one should exit the trade and take a profit, and
a specific stop point: a price at which to bail out of a trade going too far the WRONG way.
Of the three, we consider the stop to be the most important. It very clearly tells us how much money we could lose if we are wrong about the core idea. Of course, we don’t want to ever lose on a trade and we don’t even want to get stopped out and lose that maximum amount we’ve chosen as the point where we give up on the trade, but that stop represents a hard line in the sand, where we WILL exit a failing trade that has moved too far in the wrong direction and then shift the salvaged capital on to a better opportunity.
If you think about the scenario of knowing where to bail vs. leaving that exit point completely open and potentially having cash parked in a losing trade for many months or years (instead of getting used on better opportunities), the rationale for using stops should be obvious. Do you ever want money tied up for a long time in anything that is underwater? Of course not… when the alternative is having it working in something else that is growing.
Think about common life analogies like staying in a bad relationship too long or hanging on to that “money pit” old car or house. At some point, you come to know you must exit those life “trades.” If you talk to people about their lives, just about everyone will have a tale of some such thing that almost always includes a line that starts something like this: “I knew I should have ended/sold it long before I actually did…” which is either following or then followed by how “hanging in there” cost them a LOT of money/time/angst/etc.
In some situations, many other variables drive us to hang on to something for far too long. However, in trading, it is best to use a stop (and target profit) to know EXACTLY when you are exiting each trade right up front.
When this stock gets here (profit target) or here (stop), automatically close this trade and move on to the next opportunity. It takes setting up only 2 simple orders when you enter the trade to automatically exit it.
So why do many people NOT use stops? Most of the time it is ego. If they do not close a losing trade, they technically have not lost on that investment. Human nature will have people go way out of their way to avoid facing a bad decision. Thus, we stay in a bad relationship too long or hang on to that old clunker car and spend fortunes on repair after repair to try to keep it going, etc.
There should be no emotional baggage tied to a trade… no sentimentality… no <other> rationale why ‘I’ must hang on to any given position. Just bail and move on. It is as easy to exit a trade as it is to enter it: take a few seconds to “close” it and it is over. No lawyers. No legal processes. No tears (hopefully). No having to list the clunker in some ad and deal with tire kickers. Etc. Click the sell button and get rid of it. Done!
Lock this one in permanent memory:
Trading is about wins and losses and the latter is NORMAL. Be normal instead of trying to be abnormal.
When ego or emotions gain control of trading- particularly in this situation- instead of losing a little amount, it often turns into a big amount. Positions tend to move with momentum. Once gravity takes hold, it tends to pull things down, down, down like sliding downhill.
Downward momentum is more likely to keep dropping than flip to upward momentum. And YES, it will likely “turn” eventually, and yes, that turn might even be that day after you opt to finally bailout (curse you Murphy(’s law)!), but regardless, it is better to just move on to greener pastures.
Our positions ALWAYS use stops:
a hard dollar monetary exit point,
a percentage below the entry or fill price.
or time stops, which are triggers for us to send an email alert recommending a manual exit of a trade.
Our stops are placed at the appropriate levels based upon our thorough blend of fundamental, technical, and sentiment analysis… further refined by long-term experience by Sal & team to see beyond only the quantitative (computers and A.I. get it wrong too sometimes, so best results are still a blend of art & science).
HOW WE DETERMINE STOPS
To fully address this topic might take 100 lessons. There is a LOT involved in developing and refining this particular skill and we have been at it for decades and even continue to tweak our own approach to this day… and expect that to continue forevermore too.
However, in brief, and trying to keep it simple, a stop should be placed using:
supply,
demand,
support
resistance.
pivots,
chart patterns,
Candlestick patterns, and
Fibonacci levels.
We regularly reference ALL of these things in features like Sal’s Investing Insights, Sal’s Investor (Chart) Patterns, Investor Questions Answered, and even more so in the trading alert and educational features of our subscription services… where they are applied to actual trades subscribers can place with their own brokers. A great way to learn about them and how we apply them is simply following along… which is basically how we learned them ourselves from our trading mentors up to many decades ago. We call this “learn as you earn” as actual experience in real trades is a great teacher.
FROM MICRO TO MACRO
Up to now, we have focused this lesson on single-trade considerations. Another very important part of risk management is through the use of money management applied to the entire account or nest egg.
As a smart, generally applicable rule, we should never lose more than 2% of our total capital in any one trade. For example, if one has $100,000 in total trading capital, they should never lose more than $2,000 in any one trade. More than that, that person is putting too much money at risk in individual trades. A good trader is going to spread their capital around so that one bad trade selection cannot cause much pain.
In the “What are ETFs?” lesson, we talked about the VERY IMPORTANT concept called diversification. In simple terms, it means spreading the money around to MANY investments instead of having too much money in one. Any investor or trader opting to manage their own portfolio should strive for good diversification of trades vs. a quite common mistake of having far too much money in one or two favorite stocks and then perhaps spreading whatever is left around.
Those who happened to place a relatively massive buy (for them) in Apple or Nvidia many years ago have managed to get rich on that “mistake” but then there is that other crowd who had far too much money in stocks like Enron and Theranos.
Often investors cannot really know if they have an Apple or an Enron until they are judging it in hindsight. So, because there are always Enrons and Theranos investments in play, trying to spread the account around to at least 20-60 Apples is far better than having say 30%-80% in an Enron and then perhaps good diversification in “the rest.” That can yield well if the big share of your portfolio is the next Apple or Nvidia, but it is a money management disaster if your “darling” is the next Enron or Theranos.
DON’T DO IT! BE DIVERSIFIED IN THE ENTIRE ACCOUNT(S)!
Understand the “up to 2%” general rule is not the amount of capital that one will be using in each trade. Instead, it is the amount of loss that we are willing to accept on each trade for whatever size account. More simply, it is a PORTION of the amount of money invested in a position- the portion you are willing to lose on that trade.
Thus, an investor might put a number like 3%-5% (or more or less) on each trade but then, by applying a stop, they are capping their downside loss risk at no more than 2% of the overall account. Let us look at an example using some numbers to illustrate this concept…
In considering the “up to” portion of the general rule, let us have our hypothetical investor choose HALF of the MAX or 1% as their number. If this investor has $10K as their total account value, 1% is $100. If the account is valued at $50K, 1% is $500. $100K account value = $1K. And so on. Let us assume our investor is working with only $10K total account value… so 1% = $100.
If they opt to buy a stock at $20 share and immediately put in a stop order at $19/share, they are risking $1.00/share. They can take the $100 (1% of the $10,000 account value) and divide it by the $1 worth of trade risk ($20-$19) they are willing to take in this stock to identify what is called “position size” … which will answer a common question: how many shares can they buy?
In this example, $100 / 1 equals 100 shares. This investor could buy up to 100 shares of this stock while sticking to their target risk cap of $100 of the total account value. Let us look at the scenario…
If the stock does drop to $19/share, they would automatically stopped out and lose $1.00 per share. $20 – $19/share times 100 purchased shares equals a $100 loss… which is 1% of the $10K account.
APPLY BOTH MACRO & MICRO APPROACHES
While there are MANY other techniques for limiting risk, these 2 are:
relatively simple,
VERY SMART, and
pretty much applicable to ALL investing situations.
Downside risk management is AT LEAST as important as techniques applied to find great upside trades.
To work towards only one of those is like trying to hammer in a bunch of nails with a screwdriver. Your toolkit needs ALL of the right tools. Acquire them or use a very loaded toolkit like ours. If you opt for one of our services, we even do most of the hammering too.
Most people get what we are about to share wrong, yet we consider it the most important thing in trading:
Don’t needlessly lose money.
Of course, there will be individual trade losses. That is normal. There has never been- and will never be a perfect, win-every-time trading system. If you ever see any such claim, you are being tricked: flee the scene.
Core to all Investing Winners trading approaches is considering ourselves risk managers. We strive to minimize downside risk while maximizing upside gain. It takes some losses to accomplish the latter and some constraining of the latter to support the former. Translation: those 2 core success variables have to be constantly BALANCED.
Those who only:
The biggest hits may deliver a surge of excitement, but it is the singles, doubles, and occasional triple that wins this game. Balancing risk and reward potential is key to success.
In this lesson, we cover some simple techniques on how to limit losses.
There are only two things we have when we are trading or investing:
Since there is a great variety of different trading opportunities we could take advantage of every single day, we do not have to stick with any losing trade. At any time, we can cut a loss and move on to a new opportunity. If we become stubborn and hold that loser, we cannot reallocate that money to other, better opportunities. And if we let it erode our capital away, we cannot take advantage of any better opportunities with lost money we no longer have. So, the goal is to always conserve our capital and limit our losses.
Consider this simple truth: A 50% gain on a trade is a remarkable gain. A 50% loss is not really equivalent on the downside. Why? If you lose 50% on any position, it takes a 100% gain on what is left to only get back to where you started.
If 50% is remarkable, 100% is incredible. Can 50%-100% gains be realized on single trades? Of course… but that level of gain in any kind of “normal” circumstance is probably realized over several trades and, more importantly, over what will probably be a lengthy amount of time. Thus, waiting on a bad loss to “come back” is tying up money in a bad trade over what is usually a long time… not in trying to make additional money but only lose less. That remaining money in that trade is now trying for the “incredible” ROI- a full double- if you want it to make it all the way back… to break even.
Often, a better idea is first, not letting it fall so far… and second, bailing on a dud trade and putting the salvaged cash towards something with more potential in a shorter amount of time. That way instead of using precious time only working BELOW your entry point, freed up money can instead go towards something working ABOVE it.
APPLYING S.E.T. TO TRADING
Every trade or investment should have 3 components to it:
We use the acronym S.E.T. for this: Stop, Entry, Target. You might add the word “get” in front of it as a mental reminder to use all 3 components: Get SET to trade the right way.
Every stock, ETF, option, and futures alert that our flagship service (Sal’s Private Trades) subscribers receive has a:
Of the three, we consider the stop to be the most important. It very clearly tells us how much money we could lose if we are wrong about the core idea. Of course, we don’t want to ever lose on a trade and we don’t even want to get stopped out and lose that maximum amount we’ve chosen as the point where we give up on the trade, but that stop represents a hard line in the sand, where we WILL exit a failing trade that has moved too far in the wrong direction and then shift the salvaged capital on to a better opportunity.
If you think about the scenario of knowing where to bail vs. leaving that exit point completely open and potentially having cash parked in a losing trade for many months or years (instead of getting used on better opportunities), the rationale for using stops should be obvious. Do you ever want money tied up for a long time in anything that is underwater? Of course not… when the alternative is having it working in something else that is growing.
Think about common life analogies like staying in a bad relationship too long or hanging on to that “money pit” old car or house. At some point, you come to know you must exit those life “trades.” If you talk to people about their lives, just about everyone will have a tale of some such thing that almost always includes a line that starts something like this: “I knew I should have ended/sold it long before I actually did…” which is either following or then followed by how “hanging in there” cost them a LOT of money/time/angst/etc.
In some situations, many other variables drive us to hang on to something for far too long. However, in trading, it is best to use a stop (and target profit) to know EXACTLY when you are exiting each trade right up front.
When this stock gets here (profit target) or here (stop), automatically close this trade and move on to the next opportunity. It takes setting up only 2 simple orders when you enter the trade to automatically exit it.
So why do many people NOT use stops? Most of the time it is ego. If they do not close a losing trade, they technically have not lost on that investment. Human nature will have people go way out of their way to avoid facing a bad decision. Thus, we stay in a bad relationship too long or hang on to that old clunker car and spend fortunes on repair after repair to try to keep it going, etc.
There should be no emotional baggage tied to a trade… no sentimentality… no <other> rationale why ‘I’ must hang on to any given position. Just bail and move on. It is as easy to exit a trade as it is to enter it: take a few seconds to “close” it and it is over. No lawyers. No legal processes. No tears (hopefully). No having to list the clunker in some ad and deal with tire kickers. Etc. Click the sell button and get rid of it. Done!
Lock this one in permanent memory:
Trading is about wins and losses and the latter is NORMAL. Be normal instead of trying to be abnormal.
When ego or emotions gain control of trading- particularly in this situation- instead of losing a little amount, it often turns into a big amount. Positions tend to move with momentum. Once gravity takes hold, it tends to pull things down, down, down like sliding downhill.
Downward momentum is more likely to keep dropping than flip to upward momentum. And YES, it will likely “turn” eventually, and yes, that turn might even be that day after you opt to finally bailout (curse you Murphy(’s law)!), but regardless, it is better to just move on to greener pastures.
Our positions ALWAYS use stops:
Our stops are placed at the appropriate levels based upon our thorough blend of fundamental, technical, and sentiment analysis… further refined by long-term experience by Sal & team to see beyond only the quantitative (computers and A.I. get it wrong too sometimes, so best results are still a blend of art & science).
HOW WE DETERMINE STOPS
To fully address this topic might take 100 lessons. There is a LOT involved in developing and refining this particular skill and we have been at it for decades and even continue to tweak our own approach to this day… and expect that to continue forevermore too.
However, in brief, and trying to keep it simple, a stop should be placed using:
We regularly reference ALL of these things in features like Sal’s Investing Insights, Sal’s Investor (Chart) Patterns, Investor Questions Answered, and even more so in the trading alert and educational features of our subscription services… where they are applied to actual trades subscribers can place with their own brokers. A great way to learn about them and how we apply them is simply following along… which is basically how we learned them ourselves from our trading mentors up to many decades ago. We call this “learn as you earn” as actual experience in real trades is a great teacher.
FROM MICRO TO MACRO
Up to now, we have focused this lesson on single-trade considerations. Another very important part of risk management is through the use of money management applied to the entire account or nest egg.
As a smart, generally applicable rule, we should never lose more than 2% of our total capital in any one trade. For example, if one has $100,000 in total trading capital, they should never lose more than $2,000 in any one trade. More than that, that person is putting too much money at risk in individual trades. A good trader is going to spread their capital around so that one bad trade selection cannot cause much pain.
In the “What are ETFs?” lesson, we talked about the VERY IMPORTANT concept called diversification. In simple terms, it means spreading the money around to MANY investments instead of having too much money in one. Any investor or trader opting to manage their own portfolio should strive for good diversification of trades vs. a quite common mistake of having far too much money in one or two favorite stocks and then perhaps spreading whatever is left around.
Those who happened to place a relatively massive buy (for them) in Apple or Nvidia many years ago have managed to get rich on that “mistake” but then there is that other crowd who had far too much money in stocks like Enron and Theranos.
Often investors cannot really know if they have an Apple or an Enron until they are judging it in hindsight. So, because there are always Enrons and Theranos investments in play, trying to spread the account around to at least 20-60 Apples is far better than having say 30%-80% in an Enron and then perhaps good diversification in “the rest.” That can yield well if the big share of your portfolio is the next Apple or Nvidia, but it is a money management disaster if your “darling” is the next Enron or Theranos.
DON’T DO IT! BE DIVERSIFIED IN THE ENTIRE ACCOUNT(S)!
Understand the “up to 2%” general rule is not the amount of capital that one will be using in each trade. Instead, it is the amount of loss that we are willing to accept on each trade for whatever size account. More simply, it is a PORTION of the amount of money invested in a position- the portion you are willing to lose on that trade.
Thus, an investor might put a number like 3%-5% (or more or less) on each trade but then, by applying a stop, they are capping their downside loss risk at no more than 2% of the overall account. Let us look at an example using some numbers to illustrate this concept…
In considering the “up to” portion of the general rule, let us have our hypothetical investor choose HALF of the MAX or 1% as their number. If this investor has $10K as their total account value, 1% is $100. If the account is valued at $50K, 1% is $500. $100K account value = $1K. And so on. Let us assume our investor is working with only $10K total account value… so 1% = $100.
If they opt to buy a stock at $20 share and immediately put in a stop order at $19/share, they are risking $1.00/share. They can take the $100 (1% of the $10,000 account value) and divide it by the $1 worth of trade risk ($20-$19) they are willing to take in this stock to identify what is called “position size” … which will answer a common question: how many shares can they buy?
In this example, $100 / 1 equals 100 shares. This investor could buy up to 100 shares of this stock while sticking to their target risk cap of $100 of the total account value. Let us look at the scenario…
If the stock does drop to $19/share, they would automatically stopped out and lose $1.00 per share. $20 – $19/share times 100 purchased shares equals a $100 loss… which is 1% of the $10K account.
APPLY BOTH MACRO & MICRO APPROACHES
While there are MANY other techniques for limiting risk, these 2 are:
We encourage any DIY investor to take full advantage of both for every trade they place during the rest of their lives. OR, for those who may need a little help, follow our educational features on this website and/or subscribe to one or more of our services and we will show ideal applications of both- and additional risk management techniques- in the novice-friendly, actionable recommendations we share and informative articles, Q&As, special reports and narrated webinars we offer.
Downside risk management is AT LEAST as important as techniques applied to find great upside trades.
To work towards only one of those is like trying to hammer in a bunch of nails with a screwdriver. Your toolkit needs ALL of the right tools. Acquire them or use a very loaded toolkit like ours. If you opt for one of our services, we even do most of the hammering too.
Question or Comment?