Forex Mistake #3 – TRADING TOO LARGE FOR YOUR ACCOUNT

The fastest way to go broke is to bet it all—all the time. Most traders don’t learn this lesson until they have had at least one blow-out; by that I mean they have lost all their equity quickly and have had to start over.

For some reason, there is a tendency for traders of all age and experience levels to trade too large for the actual cash in their account. This is a symptom of a larger problem and unless you are willing to consider that you personally might have this problem already you most likely will be trading too large for your account right now today.

Trading too large

What is this larger problem?

GREED, BABY—GREED

It is unrealistic for you to believe you are going to make a killing on THIS ONE TRADE RIGHT NOW. Sure, you might be on the right side of a large move but that will take time and evidence to see. For this moment, any trade you have on has the potential to run the other way against you and if you are trading too large, your potential to lose a lot on only a few trades is huge. No matter your age, education, skill or experience level you are not going to make 100% winning trades. Therefore a certain percentage of your trades will simply not work. Those trades cannot be so large that you lose a significant portion of your equity in the process.

To beat the greed habit you need to make a few changes to both your equity management and more importantly to your thinking.

First, trading is a business. You need to treat it like one. There are certain things every business needs to run effectively and the first thing is liquidity. Simply put, if you run out of cash to play you can’t remain open.

Second, if you had a reasonable plan in place already then it is a good guess that your plan calls for only a reasonable amount of percent gain on your equity regularly. If you were to use some basic mathematics while creating a sound trading approach one of the things you would be looking for was a realistic “risk-to-reward” ratio. That means for every dollar you lose you expect to make a certain number of dollars and out of every 100 trades a certain percent will be winners and some will be losers. If you put this all together and asked the “what-if?” questions you get this base-line number that statistically will be a winning set of results:

42% winning trades out of 100 taken

Two dollars out for every dollar you give back

This is not my opinion, this is the Probability of Ruin Matrix and you can research it yourself if you have time. Of course, if you have higher percentages of winners and take more out on those winners you make money a lot faster but the point is if your results are at least this good consistently you are on your way to success. I teach more about that in Trading Rules that Work and in my Psychology of Trading course.

It’s great to be on the high side of the matrix but most of us didn’t start there and that is why you have to TRADE SMALL at first. To protect yourself from being greedy about your trading and to help you stay focused on long-term success it is important to make your trade size small enough so that it won’t leave you in a position of not being able to play at all should you have a string of losses all at once. I found that limiting your risk/reward ratio to a factor of about 1.5% on any one trade is a great way to stay focused and not get greedy.

This means that for any one trade you take, no matter how you think of the trade or how certain you are of a win; you will not risk more than 1.5% of your account balance at any one time. This means that if you are trading so that your average loss is 3-5% of your account balance at any one time—you are trading TWO to THREE TIMES TOO LARGE for your account size. In that case, the Probability of Ruin Matrix will work against you and you will likely run out of capital before you make money with your approach. If you are the greedy trader right now and you are guilty of making this mistake; If this means  you have to drop your trading size down a few notches then you had better call your broker today and fix it—because if you don’t you are an accident waiting to happen. It only takes  making this mistake THREE TIMES IN A ROW to drop your account balance 15% or more in a heartbeat; especially if you are day trading!

HOW TO MAKE THIS MISTAKE WORSE: Convince yourself you are so good at trading that this couldn’t possibly happen to you, convince yourself that your analysis is good enough to help you find 80-90% winning trades all the time, trade without a stop-loss order “just this once”,double-up on the next trade after taking a large loss.

SOLUTION: Immediately reduce your account balance; take 20-30% of your cash home. Trade position sizes that are no more than 300% as valuable as your account balance. In other words, if your account size is $10,000, don’t trade anything that has a total contract value larger than around $30,000. If that means trading mini’s instead of big-board you had better do it.

Source: Ebook from www.forexbrotherhood.com

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