How To Control Your Risk By Sizing Your Trades
Perhaps the most neglected, and undoubtedly the most necessary, aspect of trading any
market to a new trader is money management. Traders
tend to fixate on wealth and a different kind of lifestyle. They’ll tell
themselves that money management is “something I’ll pick up later
when I need it.”
But money
management is the most important self-imposed rule in the business of trading.
One very important component of money management that I’ll focus on in this
lesson is “position sizing.”
There
are two aspects of position sizing that I’ll touch on. One is psychological and
the other is the “how-to” aspect of it.
First,
let me deal with the psychological component. A popular piece of advice being
handed out these days to beginning traders is to gain experience by using “paper trading.” That is, you trade for a while without using real
money, going through the motions of buying and selling. You apply whatever trading
strategy you’d be using if you were trading for real. Advising beginners to
paper trade is, in my opinion, one of the worst things you can do. It makes you
overconfident. It doesn’t take into the account the powerful emotions that cloud
your thinking when you’re using real money. We all trade because we love
money and what money can do for us. Feelings of intense pain and pleasure are
associated with the losses and gains we experience as traders. These are the
emotions that make us do dumb things even when we know better.
So my first piece of
advice is this:
Adjust
your position size to a level that enables you to think clearly and
rationally.
This
can take some experimentation, but I’d venture to guess that adopting this
simple rule would benefit scores of traders.
Now — let’s
say you want to put this into practice. How do you do it? If you’ve thought in
the back of your mind that position sizing was somehow important, but only had a
vague sense of what to do next, I will now give you a tool that you can use to
quantify your risk before a trade is entered.
Sizing allows a trader to adjust the amount of money that
he is willing to lose in a worst-case scenario in any market.
It is a plan to limit the inevitable loses in trading. The
method I will teach you is “% risk into entry/exit.” The
“% risk” refers to the portion of money from your total amount of
available money that you are willing to lose or put at risk. The terms
“entry/exit” refers to the price at which you plan to enter
the trade and the exit price where you would place
your stop loss order…the price at which you think you would not want to be in
the trade any longer.
The “%risk into entry/exit”
uses an entry price, a stop loss price, and the difference between the two expressed as a dollar amount (1 5/8 = $1.62), which is
divided into the total dollar amount a trader is willing to lose, or % risk.
Most sources suggest risking no more than 2% of your total amount of trading
capital on any one trade. As stated
earlier, you should decide what this number should be on the basis of how you
will be affected psychologically. The “% risk into entry/exit “ is a
method used under the most ideal market conditions of liquidity and lesser
volatility.Â
Using
this formula to limit your position size will keep your risk exposure under
control. It will prevent you from deciding how many shares to buy purely on the
basis of emotion or feel. Without this criteria in place, you are most likely
to be overly optimistic about your odds of success and buy more shares than you
should.
So
let me take you through the steps you’d go through if you were applying this
formula. Let’s say you had a total of $14,800 to trade with, and you wanted to
risk no more than 2% on any given trade. That risk amounts to $296. To properly
size the trade, you would subtract the entry price from the stop loss price and
divide that amount into $296. For example, we have a trade where we will enter
long in stock XYZ at $42 5/8 and, if filled, we’ll place a stop loss at 41
15/16. The difference between the entry and stop loss is 11/16 ($0.68 cents). Doing
the division: ($296/$0.68 = 435)Â tells
us we should buy 435 shares. Finally, as a matter of course in sizing, we
would round DOWN this number to 400 shares. These calculations do not include
commissions and slippage, however, the astute trader can minimize these costs by
choosing a very liquid stock and a low-commission brokerage.
Does
the logic make sense to you? It will if you play with the numbers a bit. If you
loosen your stop and put it farther below your entry price, but keep your total
risk at 2%, the formula will make you buy fewer shares. If you tighten your stop
and put it closer to your entry price, you’ll wind up buying more shares.
What
this formula does is give you an objective way of determining the number of
shares you should buy if you have a specific percent of your total trading
capital that you want to risk. It allows you to play out “what if” scenarios.
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