breakout trading !In technical analysis, a breakout refers to a substantial price movement of a financial instrument, such as a stock or commodity, surpassing a specific level of support or resistance. This occurrence is of paramount importance, as it frequently signifies the initiation of a new trend, offering traders and investors valuable insights for informed decision-making.
Outlined below are key aspects related to breakouts in technical analysis:
Definition: A breakout occurs when the price of an asset surpasses a well-defined level of support or resistance. The breakout can manifest as either an upward movement (bullish breakout) or a downward movement (bearish breakout).
Significance: Breakouts carry significance as they indicate a shift in market sentiment, suggesting that the prevailing trend may be weakening or reversing, potentially giving rise to a new trend.
Types of Breakouts:
Bullish Breakout: This occurs when the price surpasses a resistance level, signaling potential upward momentum.
Bearish Breakout: In contrast, a bearish breakout happens when the price drops below a support level, indicating potential downward momentum.
Volume Confirmation: Successful breakouts are often accompanied by an uptick in trading volume, serving as confirmation of the robustness of the new trend. Volume analysis is instrumental in validating the legitimacy of the breakout.
False Breakouts: It is important to note that not all breakouts lead to sustained trends. False breakouts can occur, wherein the price briefly breaches a support or resistance level but subsequently reverses. Traders commonly employ additional technical indicators or await confirmation before acting on a breakout.
Measuring Target: Traders frequently use the height of the pattern preceding the breakout, such as a triangle or rectangle, to estimate the potential price target. This aids in setting profit targets.
Common Chart Patterns Leading to Breakouts:
Triangles: Symmetrical, ascending, or descending triangles often precede breakouts.
Head and Shoulders: Both inverse and regular head and shoulders patterns can signal potential breakouts.
Rectangles and Flags: Consolidation patterns like rectangles and flags can lead to breakouts.
Role of Trendlines: Trendlines are commonly employed to identify potential breakout points. The intersection of a trendline with a support or resistance level is deemed a critical zone for a potential breakout.
Risk Management: Traders typically incorporate risk management strategies, such as setting stop-loss orders, to safeguard against false breakouts or adverse market movements.
In summary, breakouts in technical analysis are pivotal events offering valuable information to traders and investors about potential shifts in market trends. Effective breakout trading strategies involve confirmation, volume analysis, and meticulous consideration of various chart patterns.
Tradingplans
Learn Support Bounce- For Swing TradingSimply speaking a support is a zone where demand overcomes supply. There are more buy orders than the sell orders at this level, which could force the bids to go higher and hence the stock can rally.
I would like to discuss one of the efficient ways to trade support levels. This is not the only way and may not be the perfect one but still with good success rate.
There are a few simple points that needs to be followed.
🚀Step 1
There should be a support level from where the stock bounced significantly. Draw a horizontal line from the lowest point of the support.
🚀Step 2
Let the price pullback to this support zone and create a green candle. It could be a pin bar with long wick at the bottom or a full green candle that closes above support.
The setup may develop either at or near the support OR after the price breaks through the support and then fakes the break. Both ways we need a green candle above the support zone.
🚀Step 3
Buy few ticks above the high of the pin bar or full bar with stop loss few ticks below these candles.
Buying at the close of those bullish candles is another method to further reduce the risk (SL) but the first method will keep you from some awkward positions.
🚀Step 4
Here we are not looking for reversals. We are looking for 50% target of the previous down wave.
⚡Tip1:
Now we know the target and stop loss, before entering the trade please confirm that reward is 2 times, or more than the risk involved.
Ex if SL is 10 points, then target should be at least 20 points. So, the down wave must be more than 40 points.
⚡Tip2:
Once trade starts moving in your direction, keep trailing to bring your stop to breakeven or lock some profit on partial position if your like.
I will post some examples in the update section. One is right there on the SBI chart shown above. Two support zones and 3 buying opportunities that worked.
Keep boosting for more educational ideas in future.
Disclaimer: Examples shown in the idea are not an investment or trading advice. Apply your due diligence and backtest the strategy for good results.
7 Important Tips for Risk Management Hey everyone!
While trading and investing offer the opportunity for profit, there is always the potential for loss.
Here are a couple of time-tested tips to help you in understanding and managing your risk better.
📝 Develop a Trading Plan
─ Many traders jump into the market without a thorough understanding of how it works and what it takes to be successful.
─ You should have a detailed trading plan in place prior to engaging in any trades.
─ Your plan should include essential components such as the entry point, a strategically defined stop-loss level to mitigate potential losses, and target levels to define your anticipated profit points.
─ Having a well-structured plan equips you with a roadmap during stressful trading situations and ensures that your trades are consistently aligned with your risk tolerance threshold.
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🧘♂️ Understand your Risk Tolerance
─ Risk is subjective. Different traders have different personalities and systems, hence a different risk tolerance.
─ Start with self-reflection: Begin by reflecting on your own attitudes, beliefs, and emotions towards risk. Consider how comfortable you are with the possibility of losing money, how patient you are with market fluctuations, and how much stress or anxiety you can handle when investments don't go as planned. Understanding your own psychological and emotional response to risk is crucial in determining your risk tolerance.
─ Consider your financial situation: Take into account your current financial situation, including your income, savings, debts, and expenses. A thorough understanding of your financial resources and obligations will help you gauge the amount of risk you can afford to take.
─ There is no “One-size-fits-all” approach . Find out what suits your needs based on your account size, age, long-term plan, and other key variables that are specifically unique to your circumstances. Then, implement it accordingly.
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📚 Follow your Trading System
─ Develop a clear and comprehensive trading system that outlines your approach, rules, and criteria for entering and exiting trades.
─ A well-designed system provides structure and discipline, helping you avoid impulsive decisions driven by emotions or short-term market fluctuations.
─ A trading system is essential because it requires you to think deeply about your approach to markets before you begin risking real money.
─ Backtest and research your system: Validate the effectiveness of your trading system by backtesting it against historical market data. This allows you to assess its performance and identify any potential flaws or areas for improvement. Additionally, research and analyze your system under various market conditions to understand its adaptability and resilience.
─ Evaluate your system's performance in different scenarios: Simulate your system's performance in different market environments, including bear markets or periods of increased volatility. By assessing how your system would fare in adverse conditions, you can gauge its robustness and make necessary adjustments to enhance its overall effectiveness.
─ Some traders keep hopping strategies after a series of losses. This usually leads to more losses and is unproductive in the long term.
─ Stick to your system with a verifiable edge: If your trading system has been thoroughly tested, backtested, and proven to have an edge, have confidence in it and adhere to its rules consistently. Consistently following a system that has demonstrated positive expectancy over time increases your chances of generating consistent profits in the long run.
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🚨 Use a Stop-Loss
─ A stop-loss order is an order that is placed at a predetermined price level and can help in limiting your losses if the trade goes against you.
─ In general, this predetermined price level is the level at which your trade idea gets invalidated.
─ A stop loss helps in protecting against emotional decision-making and allows you to maintain discipline in your trading system. Implementing a stop-loss order ensures that you have predefined risk parameters, allowing you to quantify and control your downside risk.
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✂️ Manage your Position Size
─ Effectively managing your position size is crucial in mitigating risk and maximizing potential returns.
─ By carefully determining the appropriate position size, you can avoid excessive exposure in any single trade.
─ Trading is a game of probabilities. Hence, a trader should never put all his eggs in one basket and if he does, then he should be well aware of it.
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❌ Don't Overtrade or Revenge Trade
─ Resist the temptation to overtrade or engage in revenge trading, even in the face of losses.
Attempting to recover losses through higher-risk trades is never a good idea and can lead to even bigger losses.
─ It's easy to feel strong emotions while trading. However, making decisions based on emotions rather than rational analysis can be a recipe for disaster.
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📔 Maintain a Trading Journal
─ A trading journal can help you in identifying the shortcomings in your trading.
─ By documenting your trades, you gain valuable insights into your strengths and weaknesses as a trader. Regularly reviewing and evaluating your journal allows you to identify patterns, mistakes, and areas for improvement.
─ This self-reflection enables you to fine-tune your strategies, refine your risk management techniques, and enhance your overall trading approach.
─ Moreover, a trading journal helps instil discipline and accountability by keeping a record of your trading actions and outcomes. It serves as a reference point for future analysis and learning, enabling you to continuously evolve as a trader.
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Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed this post. Please feel free to write any additional tips or pieces of advice in the comments section below!
Trade safe. Be smart. I’ll see you in the next one. Cheers!
Rajat Kumar Singh (@johntradingwick)
The Top 3 Elements found in all good trading plansHey everyone! 👋
This month, we have been theming our posts around the concept of building a solid trading plan. Our first post asked you to think about the kinds of factors that can predict long-term success. Our second post looked at why trading plans are so important. Both of these posts you can find linked at the end 👇
Having talked about the *what* and the *why*, it’s time to talk about the *how*.
Today we will be taking a look at the top 3 elements found in all good trading plans!
1️⃣ Element 1: Every good trading plan knows why it wins.
In trading, there are two variables that matter: Bat Rate, and Win / Loss.
► Bat Rate describes what percentage of the time a trade ends up as a win. A trader with a 90% bat rate wins 9 out of every 10 trades.
► Win / Loss describes how big the average win is, relative to the average loss. A trader with a 0.5 Win / Loss takes losses twice the size of his wins.
If you multiply these numbers together, you will get an “Expected Value”.
For example, a trader with a Bat Rate of 50% (wins half of the time) and a Win / Loss of 1 (Losses the same size as wins) is a perfectly “Breakeven” trader.
In order to make money in the long term, all you need to do is make the multiplication of these values be a positive value. The breakeven trader above only needs to win 51% of trades to begin making money, if his W/L remains constant.
☝🏽To get these numbers into positive “expected value” territory, every good trading plan needs to devise a way to systematically find trading opportunities that it thinks have an edge. The inputs of this system are completely up to the trader, but they are typically rooted in repeating price patterns, fundamental observations, macro trends, or other patterns and cycles. Backtesting can be useful here for getting a general idea of whether or not an idea for a trading strategy has borne out to be true over time.
In short, no matter what it looks like, good trading plans identify their edge before risking capital. Why start a business without a business plan?
2️⃣ Element 2: Every good trading plan takes into account the emotional character of the trader.
This is the hardest element to quantify, but also arguably one of the most important pieces of a good written trading plan - the ability to work around a trader’s individual strengths and weaknesses. This is less important for banks and hedge funds, as decisions are typically made with oversight, but for retail traders, there is no-one around to temper your personal flaws.
You can do whatever you want! - but it’s a double edged sword of responsibility that your trading plan needs to prepare you for.
In short, you can best get an idea of where you are emotionally weakest by looking at your trading history. Nobody can do this for you, so it requires quite a bit of self-awareness. However, the rewards of removing emotional risk from a trading plan make it worth the effort.
😱 All trading is based on fear. You need to understand which fear is stronger - the fear of missing out, or the fear of losing capital. Figure out which is stronger, and plan accordingly.
Just because you understand a certain strategy and other people make money trading it, doesn’t mean that you will be able to. Executing with 100% consistency at 30% efficiency is more important than finding a strategy with 100% efficiency that you can only trade with 10% consistency. Make life easy on yourself!
3️⃣ Element 3: Every good trading plan outlines risk.
Whether you have one thousand dollars or one billion dollars, ignoring risk is a sure way to experience massively increased monetary and emotional volatility , which can have a huge negative impact on long term profitability. Here are a few simple-to-implement mechanisms that Banks, Hedge Funds, and Prop Firms use to reduce risk significantly - good trading plans don’t skip these.
💵 Total Account Stop
Exactly what it sounds like: once you lose a certain percentage of your capital, you stop trading, liquidate your positions, and assess what went wrong. Only once you’re satisfied that you have fixed the issue are you allowed to re-enter the market. In the industry, this number is commonly 10%.
💵 Per Theme Risk
This ensures that you aren’t too concentrated on a single “bet”, even if the bet is spread across multiple instruments. For example, if you own multiple companies in the same sector, their performance will likely be correlated to some degree even if they have different products or services. Adding a hard cap to this type of risk can massively reduce risky or over concentrated allocations.
💵 Per Position Risk
Many successful Professional Traders and Hedge Funds use the concept of “Free Capital” in order to manage risk. “Free Capital” is the amount of money in hard dollars that makes up the buffer between an account’s current equity, and the total account stop number.
For example, If a currency trader at a bank has a 10% total account stop out, and runs a $10,000,000 currency book, then he can really only “lose” $1,000,000 before his bosses pull him aside to have a talk. His “Free Capital” is $1,000,000. He will then size his positions to where he only risks 1-5% of his Free Capital per trade. This way, he has room to be wrong a minimum of 20 times in a row before any negative consequences come his way. Implementing a “free capital” risk limit per position ensures that you have a TON of room for error.
Yes, this typically prevents you from doubling your account overnight, but again, that isn’t the goal. Long term profitability is.
Some people call this per position risk “one R” (one risk unit).
☝🏽Whatever it looks like, including a plan for managing your risk is essential for *actually* managing your risk. If these plans aren’t written out and acted upon, they’re also a lot easier to ignore.
🙏🏽 Thanks for reading! Hope this was helpful!
- TradingView Team ❤️❤️
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