Prerequisites for Trading as a Business

Trading as a business means generating consistent profits to cover all living expenses. Usually this is a full-time, independent pursuit. While I don’t think advanced degrees are necessary, I can think of three prerequisites for a trading start-up.

First, some degree of math proficiency is necessary for this level of money management mastery. Arithmetic is most applicable in order to calculate profit targets, stop-loss levels, performance, buy/sell points, position sizing, etc. A more advanced math background can make some derivative concepts more intuitive because option pricing models are based on differential equations. This isn’t mandatory, though; one can trade without having any knowledge of option greeks at all.

The second prerequisite for trading as a business is a strong capacity for critical thinking. No industry may be more littered with fraudulent pitches, false marketing/advertising claims, and overall chicanery than finance. I have written about this subject extensively (e.g. here, here, here, and here). In designing a business plan and sticking to it one must avoid being derailed into the quicksand. A background in statistics is a good defensive arrow to have in the quiver. Statistics provides a solid foundation from which to put questionable performance claims into reasonable perspective.

Critical thinking defends against the death knell that is being defrauded and suffering losses. Even greater than the financial losses may be the psychological damage in terms of trust, confidence, and safety: three key components to a fledgling business effort. I have spoken with a handful of people who have been violated by shady advisers. Once (if) they got out they never wanted (or couldn’t afford) to invest again (also reminiscent of catastrophic loss). I strongly suggest avoiding any black box system or advertisements of unrealistic returns. Steer clear of advisers who charge too much or smooth talkers who seem like they may have cut their teeth selling used cars. These last two sentences deserve separate blog posts of their own.

Finally, trading as a business requires money! Start-up capital is a safety cushion because like many other businesses, beginning traders often lose money (early success may actually be a curse leading to false confidence and a subsequent failure to adequately assess risk). Without this cushion, the stress of being forced to profit to stay afloat with bill payments can make long-term survival difficult. As the learning curve is scaled, magnitude of living expenses will dictate how large the trading account must be. A six-figure trading account might be necessary to cover the house, credit card, and insurance payments without taking on risk so great that Ruin is likely.

Managing Winners (Part 2)

Today I want to conclude my discussion on managing winners.

I can imagine something like the following if I were to start managing winners. Placing trades daily, I would see some days where number of open positions would decline precipitously. Over the next couple weeks I would build back toward a maximum number unless other positions had been managed in the interim. The big losers would be unaffected. Smaller losers would have a better chance at being flipped because they may at some point hit the profit target (think probability of touching). Management of winners (e.g. at 50% max potential profit) means the average win would be smaller.

Taken together, persistent big losers, higher win rate, significantly smaller average win, and equal number of trades all strikes me as a recipe for disaster.

One thing I observe in daily trading without managing winners is a mix of “in-play” and “out-of-play” positions. Recently placed trades are in-play with responsive position greeks. Older trades often carry unrealized gains approximating max potential profit. Even big market moves are unlikely to affect these older, “out-of-play” positions due to negligible, unresponsive deltas, gammas, and thetas. With the exception of MR, the total portfolio acts as if these out-of-play positions were already closed.

Reflecting on these observations makes me thankful the market hasn’t made any large, adverse moves as of late. Such moves tend to increase the number of positions in play up to 100% (managing losers—perhaps with a SL—can decrease total number). I am grateful for the trading experience that allows me to make and analyze these observations because at some point, volatility will return in a big way marking the return of stressful nights [hopefully not for very long]. My goal is to factor all this into the trading system development.

Reflecting on these observations also makes me think that carrying some out-of-play trades is part of the whole design (i.e. perpetual scaling and time diversification). I could close out-of-play positions to cut risk, though. Indeed, I strongly suggest other option traders “do the right thing” and adhere to such a guideline. In effect, closing out-of-play trades is managing winners albeit much less aggressively (e.g. 80%-90% max potential profit as opposed to 50%). The impact on performance metrics is therefore going to be different than that profiled in many of the TT studies.

I will wrap this up with an empirical question for the future. As a more conservative way to manage winners, exiting out-of-play positions may also be conceptualized as buying back-end insurance. How does this compare, I wonder, to buying the insurance up-front in the form of being net long [DOTM] contracts or buying a small number of NTM hedges?

Managing Winners (Part 1)

One direction I may or may not choose to explore at some point is that of managing winners. I have trouble wrapping my brain around this concept and today I will explain why.

Managing winners is a frequently discussed concept by the Tasty Trade (TT) folks but it certainly is not a new idea. In the past this has been described as a “yield grab” or “profit target.” Just like I might manage losers with a stop-loss order, I can manage winners based on a variety of criteria.

The TT philosophy is to manage winners, adjust (or not) losing trades if tested, and trade small. If a trade goes to max loss then I don’t get hurt because my position size is small. Some trades get down significant percentages but then recover to win, which is why they don’t advocate managing losses.

One of the problems I have with this approach is doubt over whether I can “trade small” and still make enough to pay the monthly bills. I could certainly do this with a multi-million dollar trading account. Few retail traders have this luxury, though. I see this as a big problem for anyone looking to trade full-time as a business but it probably doesn’t affect TT viewers very much if my lack of success in finding other full-time traders is any indication. “Trading small” suits part-time/hobby traders who don’t rely on trading profits to cover living expenses.

According to TT “research” (I use that term loosely for reasons discussed here), managing winners increases win rate, number of trades, and profit per day while decreasing standard deviation of returns. They generally conduct studies by comparing trades held to expiration with trades closed at a profit target. In both cases, a new trade is placed after the old trade is closed.

I have tailored my backtesting methods to avoid the pitfall of insufficient sample size by entering new trades every trading day. At some point I realized that as a perpetual scaling technique, this might be a viable approach to live trading. As long as I keep my daily position size small, the total position size may remain reasonable. This has been at the core of my NP research.

I believe it is through this looking glass that I get confused when contemplating management of winners. Managing winners allows for more frequent trade placement but I am already placing trades every day as part of my scaling effort. My number of positions is, in other words, already maxed out. Opening multiple new trades on a favorable market day that sees a number of winners managed (e.g. a big up day for NPs) would compromise my time diversification, which is not something I will pursue.

I will continue this discussion next time.