The New Market Wizards 《新金融怪杰》by JACK D. SCHWAGER

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作者: Jack D. Schwager
出版年: 1994年12月


内容简介   · · · · · ·




        繼全美暢銷書「金融怪傑」(Market Wizards)出版之後，作者Jack Schwager再次對若干在金融市場上取得傑出成就的超級交易員及投機客進行訪談。
　　作者在書中探討的重點包括：他們怎麼做操作？為什麼他們不同於其它的交易員？一般交易員和投資人究竟能從他們身上學習什麼教訓？讀者細讀本書之後將會發現，這些超級交易員雖然各用各的操作方法，但都有因其獨到理念而享有的操作優勢。
　　「作者的確纂寫一本探討金融操作的絕佳作品。這本訪談實錄總會提供我思考的素材……」　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　—Richard Dennis
　　「想在金融市場上操作成功，必須具備長時間的經驗累積，因為操作者必須掌握影響操作情緒和決策的根本知識。如果要走捷徑，就只有學習別人的經驗了。作者纂寫本書，無異提供了最佳的捷徑。……」—Robert R. Prechter, Jr.

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这是一本老书，继《金融怪杰》后的后续作品，采访了一些交易战场上的老手们，看看他们的经验、教训，还有一些涉及到的历史数据。

下面贴一下我当时读这本书时的部分摘抄

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                      The  New Market Wizards

Patience was an element that a number ofthe supertraders stresed as being critical to success.

James Rogers said it perhaps mostcolorfully, "I just wait until there is money lying the corner, and all I have to do is go over there and pick it up. I do nothing in the meantime."

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Bill Lipschutz

What is important is to assess what the market is focusing on at the given moment.

[1985 Sep, G-7 Meeting] at which the major industrialized nations agreed to a coordinated policy aimed at lowering the value of the dollar.

But nobody understood the magnitude of what that meant. Even after the results of the meeting were reported, the dollar traded down, but nothing compared to the decline that occurred in the ensuing months. In fact, after an initial sell-off in New Zealand and Australia, the dollar actually rebounded modestly in Tokyo.

How do you explain that?

People didn’t really understand what was happening. The general attitude was:”Oh, another central bank intervention.”Remember that this meeting took place after years of ineffective central bank intervention.

What was different this time?

This was the first time that we saw a coordinated poolicy statement from the seven industrialized nations.

I sold $300 million, and the market went right through it. “That didn’t slow the market down too much, did it?”
I realized that I couldn’t cover these positions.

“I’m short the dollar and I’ve misjudged my liquidity in the market. I’ve tried to hold the market down, but it’s not going to work. And I can’t buy them back.”

“What do we want to do about this?” he asked. I distinctly remember being struck by the fact that he used the word we, not you.

I said, “If I try to buy some back, I may get a little here and a little there, but it won’t amount too very much, and we’ll just end up pushing the market further against us. The first liquidity is Tokyo.”

You took over four years to turn $12000 into $250000 and lost it all in a matter of days. Did you have a moment of self-questioning?

No, I just saw it as one major mistake.I’ve always had a lot of confidence as a trader.
      I was devastated by the way I had traded, but the money never had a major effect on me.
      I probably became more risk-control oriented.

I believe in this scenario very strongly –but if the price action fails to confirm my expectations, will I be hugely long? No, I’m going to be flat and buying a little bit on the dips. You have to trade the size such that if you’re not exactly right in your timing, you won’t be blown out of your position. My approach is to build to a larger size as the market is going my way. I don’t put on a trade by saying,”My God, this is the level; the market is taking off right from here.” I am definitely a scale-in type of trader.

I do the same thing getting out of positions. I don’t say, “Fine, I’ve made enough money. This is it. I’m out.”Instead, I start to lighten up as I see the fundamentals or price action changing.

Do you believe your scaling type of approach in entering and exiting positions is an essential element in your overall trading success?

I think it has enabled me to stay with long-term winners much longer than I’ve seen most traders stay with their positions. I don’t have problem letting my profits run, which many traders do.You have to be able to let your profits run. I don’t think you can consistently be a winning trader if you’re banking on being right more than 50 percent of the time. You have to figure out how to make money being right only 20 to 30 percent of the time.

I would definitely get out. If my perception that the fundamentals have changed is not the market’s perception,then there’s something going on that I don’t understand. You don’t want to hold a position when you don’t understand what’s going on. That doesn’t make any sense.

For myself, any trade idea must be well thought out and grounded in reason before I take the position. For example,before I put on a trade, I always ask myself, “If this trade goes wrong, how do I get out?” That type of question becomes much more germane when you’re trading large position sizes. Another important consideration is the evaluation of the best way to express a trade idea. Since I usually tend not to put on a straight long or short position, I have to give a lot of thought as to what particular option combination will provide the most attractive return/risk profile, given my market expectations. Having said this, there are instances when, despite all my planning, trading decisions are made that might best be described asinstinctive.

The best traders I know are really quite brilliant, and they all work very hard – much harder than anyone else. By the way, when I talk about working hard, I mean commitment and focus; it has nothing to do with how many hours you spend in the office. These traders have tremendous commitment to the markets – to their craft, so to speak. They develop scenarios, reevaluate scenarios, collect information, and reevaluate that information. They constantly ask themselves: What am I doing right? What am I doing wrong? How can I do what I am doing better? How can I get more information? It’s obsessive.

Besides intelligence and extreme commitment,are there any other qualities that you believe are important to excel as a trader?

Courage. It’s not enough to simply have the insight to see something apart from the rest of the crowd, you also need to have the courage to act on it and to stay with it.

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Randy McKay


In 1976, the British government announced that they weren’t going to allow the pound to trade above $1.72. They were concerned that the pound’s strength would lead to increased imports. Everytime it reached $1.72, it fell back, but by smaller and smaller amounts each time. The price range steadily converged until the pound was trading narrowly just below the $1.72 level. I felt that if the government announced that they weren’t going to let the price go above a certain level and the market didn’t break, it indicated that there must be tremendous underlying demand.
I watch the market action, using fundamentals as a backdrop. I don’t use fundamentals in the conventional sense. That is, I don’t think “Supply is too large and the market is going down.” Rather, I watch how the market responds to fundamental information.


Can you give me another example?

On the eve of the U.S. air war against Iraq, gold was trading near the crucial $400 level. The night our plans started the attack, gold went from $397 to $410 in the Far East markets and closed the evening at about $390. Thus, gold had broken through the critical $400 level, starting the rally that everyone expected, but it finished the evening significantly lower, despite the fact that the United States had just entered the war. The next moring, the market opened very sharply lower and it continued to move down in the following month.
One of my favorite trades was being short the Canadian dollar from about 85 cents down to under 70 cents during the early 1980s. Up until about  five years ago, the Canadian government had a policy of not intervening aggressively to support its currency. It would intervene halfheartedly at obvious points (for example, 120 to the U.S. dollar, 130, 140) for a few days and then let the Canadian dollar go. It was a very easy move. I was able to hold between one thousand and fifteen hundred contracts for virtually the entire decline, which spanned five years.
The canadian dollar eventually declined to 67 cents. Then, one day, it opened 120 points higher. The next day it opened 120 points higher again. My profit declined which helped wake me up a little bit.


I take it that you got out at that point.

Right, that was the end of it. When the trade was easy, I wanted to be in, and when it wasn’t, I wanted to be out. In fact, that is part of my general philosophy on trading: I want to catch the easy part.



How do you define the “easy part”?

It’s the meat of the move. The beginning of a price move is usually hard to trade because people are not sure whether they’re right about the direction of the trend. The end is hard because people start taking profits and the market gets very choppy. The middle of the move is what I call the easy part.
When I get hurt in the market, I get the hell out. It doesn’t matter at all where the market is trading. I just get out, because I believe that once you’re hurt in the market, your decisions are going to be far less objective than they are when you’re doing well. And if the market had rallied 1800 points that day to close higher, I couldn’t have cared less. If you stick around when the market is severely against you, sooner or later they’re going to carry you out.

What other trades in your career stand out for one reason or another?

I missed the giant gold rally in 1979, which culminated in early 1980. I finally ended up buying gold on the exact day it made its hign. I bought fifty contracts. The next day, the market opened $150 lower.
In 1982, I began to notice on the evening news that the Dow was up almost every day.


Could you tell me more about what made you so bullish on the stock market?

Part of it was just seeing the market up alomost every day without any particular supporting news. In fact, the news was actully quite negative. Another important factor was that the stock market was virtually unchanged from its level twenty years earlier, while inflation had skyrocketed in the interim. Therefore, in real dollar terms, stock price were extremely low. Also, I liked the fact that most of the experts weren’t particularly bullish.


What is your motivation for coming off the floor?

I stopped trading on the floor when my first child was born, because I want to be home with her. I was determined not to be one of those fathers that spends an hour with his kids before bedtime and that’s it. I was going to use the advantage of being self-employed to not only get wealthy but also to better enjoy my life.
One of the things I did that worked in those early years was analyzing every single trade I made. Every day, I made copies of my cards and reviewed them at home. Every trader is going to have tons of winners and losers. You need to determine why the winners are winners and the losers are losers. Once you can figure that out, you can become more selective in your trading and avoid those traders that are more likely to be losers.
I’ll risk no more than about 4 percent of my account. If I lose again, I’ll drop the trading size down to about 2 percent. I’ll keep on reducing my trading size as long as I’m losing.


You’ve seen lots of traders in your day both on and off the floor. Do the winners and losers separate into any distinct profiles?

One very interesting thing I’ve found is that virtually every successful trader I know ultimately ended up with a trading style suited to his personality. For example, my brother is a very hardworking, meticulous type of person, and he became a trader, which suited his personality perfectly.  And he was great at it. You could go into the pit and ask him for a quote on any spread combination, and he would be able to give you the price in an instant. He would nerver step out and take a risk like I would, but he traded the way he wanted to trade. On the other hand, my friends who are speculators are the type of people who will fly off to Las Vegas at a moment’s notice or climb a mountain in Africa. The bottom line is that the trading styles of successful traders tend to match their personalities.

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Monroe Trout


The most liquid period is the opening.
Our transaction costs [commissions as well as slippage] are very low, which is an advantage.
We have a maximum loss point of 10 percent per month. If we ever lost that amount, we’d exit all our positions and wait until the start of the next month to begin trading again. Thankfully, that has never happened.

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Al Weiss

In the case of the grain markets, I was able to go back as far as the 1840s.


Was it really necessary to go back that far?

Absolutely. One of the keys in long-term chart analysis is realizing that markets behave differently in different economic cycles. Recognizing these repeating and shifting long-term patterns requires lots of history. Identifying where you are in an economic cycle - say, an inflationary phase versus a deflationary phase - is critical to interpreting the chart patterns evolving at that time.

Many economists have tried to trade the commodity markets fundamentally and have usually ended up losing. The problem is that the markets operate more on phychology than on fundamentals. For example, you may determine that silver should be priced at, say, $8, and that may well be an accurate evaluation. However, under certain conditions - for example, a major inflationary enviroment - the price could temporarily go much higher. In the commodity inflation boom that peaked in 1980, silver reached a high of $50 - a price level that was out of all proportion to any true fundamental value. Of course, eventually the market returned to its base value - in fact, in the history of markets, I can’t think of a singlecommodity that didn’t eventually move back to its base value - but in the interim, anyone trading purely on the fundamentals would have been wiped out.

The essential element is that the markets are ultimately based on human psychology, and by charting the markets you’re merely converting human psychology into graphic representations. I believe that the human mind is more powerful than any computer in analyzing the implication of these price graphs.


Do any particularly memorable trades come to mind?

Whenever I’m on vacation, I continue to chart the markets. In the summer of 1990, while on vacation in the Bahamas, I was updating my charts on a picnic table beneath the palm trees. I noticed patterns that indicated buy signals in all the energy markets. These signals seemed particularly odd because it’s very unusual to get a buy signal in heating oil during the summer. However, I didn’t question the trade and simply phoned in the orders. Three days later, Iraq invaded Kuwait and oil prices exploded.

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Richard Driehaus


The essential element is having a core philosophy. Without a core philosophy you’re not going to be able to hold on to your positions or stick with your trading plan during really difficult times. You must fully understand, strongly believe in, and be totally committed to your trading philosophy. In order to achieve that mental state, you have to do a great deal of independent research through time and effort.

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Gil Blake


The lesson for me was that if you break a discipline once, the next transgression becomes much easier. Breaking a diet provides an appropriate analogy - once you do it, it becomes much easier to make further exceptions.


Have the markets changed in the past decade?

In a micro sense - yes; in a macro sense - no. Opportunities change, strategies change, but people and psychology do not change.


Why do traders lose?

First of all, most traders don’t have a winning strategy. Second, even among those traders who do, many don’t follow their strategy. Trading puts pressure on weaker human traits and seems to seek out each individual’s Achilles’ heel.


What advice would you give to a novice trader?

First, focus on trading vehicles, strategies, and time horizons that suit your personality. Fouth, set up trading rules. Fifth, follow the rules. In a nutshell, it all comes down to: Do your own thing(independence); and do the right thing(discipline).

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Victor Sperandeo


I discovered that you can’t train people how to trade by just important knowledge. The key to trading success is emotional discipline. Making money has nothing to do with intelligence.

To be a successful trader, you have to be able to admit mistakes. In trading, those who can easily admit to being wrong is the one who walks away a winner.  You can’t hide your failures. Your equity provides a daily reflection of your performance. The trader who tries to blame his losses on external events will never learn from his mistakes.

When I get into a losing streak, I like to read a nonfiction book to learn something new. That action accomplishes two thing. First, It takes my mind off of trading; second, by enhancing my knowledge, I help improve my self-esteem. The key is to do something positive.


What other mistakes do people make?

They don’t approach trading as a business. I’ve always viewed trading as a business.


Can you elaborate on your business plan for trading?

I view the objective in trading as a three-tiered hierarchy. First and foremost is the preservation of capital. When I first look at a trade, I don’t ask, “What is the potential profit I can realize?” but rather, “What is the potential loss I could suffer?” Second, I strive for consistent profitability by balancing my risk relative to the accumulated profits or losses. Consistency is far more important than making lots of money. Third, insofar as I’m successful in the first tow goas, I attemp to achieve superior returns. The key to building wealth is to preserve capital and wait patiently for the right opportunity to make the extraordinary gains.


Any final words?

Being involved in this business requires tremendous dedication and desire. However, you shouldn’t make trading your whole life. You have to take time off. You need to spend time with loved ones. You need to balance your life.

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Tom Basso


How do you achieve that balance?

I focus my total attention on trading well, and let the results take care of themselves.

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Joe Ritchie


The 1979-80 silver market was one of the great bull markets of all time. [Silver soared from $5 per ounce to $50 per ounce in a little over a year.] Did you have any inkling of how high prices might go?

None whatsoever. In fact, even $10 per ounce seemed extremely farfetched. I don’t know anybody who bought silver at relatively low prices and got out at over $20. The traders who bought silver at $3, $4, $5, and $6 did one of two things. Either, by the time silver got up to $7, $8, or $9 they got out, or they rode the position all the way up and all the way down. I’m sure there are exceptions, but I’ve never met one. I did, however, know traders that went short silver at $9, $10 because the price seemed to ridiculously high and ended up riding the position until they had lost their entire net worth. That happened to some of the best professionals I knew in the silver market.

A lot of innocent parties were hurt by the Hunt activity. For example, take a mine down in Peru whose cost of production is under $5 per ounce. When the price gets up to $15, the mine decides to lock in a huge profit by hedging their next two years’ worth of production in the silver futures market. This makes all the economic sense in the world. However, when the price keeps on going up to $20, $25, $30, $35, they have to keep putting up more and more variation margin on their short futures positions. Eventually, they run out of money and are forced to liquidate their position, going broke in the process.

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Charles Faulkner


One thing that really struck me was that not one of these people said they truly regretted anything they had actually done - what they regretted was what they hadn’t done. They regretted that they had wasted their lives on petty pursuits. They hadn’t identified their important values and then done everything they could to fulfill them. The lesson I learned from this experience was the same one emphasized years later in NLP: If we don’t live true to our values and fulfill them, we experience disappointment and emptiness.

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Robert Krausz


I believe the single most important factor is having control of your own life. Everything else is secondary.

patrician

谢谢分享，收藏了

wartoyou

读原文感觉更好

虎皮老猫

非常感谢！！