I can still remember a friend telling me that you will want to learn about options. The conversation had to do with reducing risk, and portfolio protection. I went and picked up a book on options and started reading it. Unfortunately I got a headache within the first 10 minutes and found the subject quite confusing. So one day, I signed up for a fairly expensive options class taught by one of those companies that takes over the airwaves before they come to your town. They draw you in with a teaser to sign you up for their options class. I signed up along with a good friend of mine. Confidence in numbers.
The classes were held on the weekend and I had to take one day of vacation from work. I was pleasantly surprised to find a large hall full of eager people wanting to learn options and make money. Some of them did not know the ABCs of trading, and here they were suckered into learning options! My primary objective was to understand how to use options to protect my positions. Just before the class began, in walks in one of the big names in the business – one of the co-founder and leaders of the company who’s class I was taking. I will not mention his name as I do not want to get into name calling here. But when he introduced himself, the atmosphere was electric. And we were excited.
He started of by asking us who used what technical analysis tools and pretty much derided all of them and told us he would tell us about “the method” which we would use to make lots of money with, because it was not commonly used but was incredibly accurate. He was talking about Elliott waves analysis using a major software available then and today. During the class he did a search and brought up 5 stocks ready to do wave 5 and each one had met all the rules and had targets that showed the risk:reward ratio was perfectly in line for the trade. Of course I jumped into about 4 of them with some small call and put positions with real money. After all this was the prophet telling us a sure thing and why not use the class learning to pay for the cost of the class. After all I was going to double my money in six months or money back.
You can imagine what happened next. After a month, I found that all his picks were all losers. And not only that, all my wave numberings on my software chart had changed in a month. I could not understand that.
The first lesson I learned was - do not believe these shysters out there. Most of them are just very good at yapping and selling, and that is why they make money, not trading.
Second lesson: Elliott waves analysis will number the waves on your chart one way but when the stock behaves differently from the numbered wave counts over time, the software will re-number the waves. The chart always looks good on paper; but it is extremely hard to trade it and to make money of it. I do have a good friend who loves Elliott waves and he will take exception here. But I thought when you saw signals on a chart they occurred in the past and not adjusted after looking into the future! Wish they had told me that in the beginning! In case anyone is interested here is the Wikipedia reference to Elliott waves: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliott_wave_principle. I think it is a good tool to know – that human psych works in waves; but not a great tool for timing and trading.
And the third lesson: proceed with your learning cautiously and test - backtest your ideas in a manner that gives you confidence to trade before you put real money on the line. I did learn about options and I think that learning was well worth the price of the course. It is that background that helped me eventually develop my dynamic hedge method to manage stocks while controlling risk using both stocks and options.
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