Feb

1

I am reading Ari Kiev's book The Psychology of Risk.

He argues that goal setting is most important in trading success. Instead of trading passively at what the market offers, one should first set his own goal, then develop a strategy based on the goal, commit enough risk, and trade with faith toward the goal.

Does anyone have any experience or thoughts in this approach?

Gary Rogan writes:

Leo, I just found it interesting that the language sounds like the industry-standard language of "financial planning", other than the faith part, in that that language involves "understanding the customer's goals", "finding their risk tolerance", "establishing a plan to achieve the customer's goals based on their risk tolerance".

Does he believe in some sort of "you dial the risk, you'll get the return if you believe hard enough" kind of thing? As he explains it, is the purpose of "faith" so that you don't chicken out when things get tough or as something else?

Ralph Vince writes: 

From the time I was 19 or 20 years old and a coffee-cranked margin clerk, until now, I have witnessed that the number one determinant of success or failure is a defined criteria (or lack of).

As Kerouac put it:

Two flies, You guys, What are you doing here?

So what are you doing here? If you're just here "To make a better return on your money," you may want to give your criteria a little better consideration.

What are you willing to accept as risk, how will you contain the risk to that? What's the time horizon? (the most overlooked aspect in investing, bar none. We live on a planet of delusion where people are using asymptotic, long-run values which often diverge greatly from the reality of finite time).

Pension funds are able to do this — articulate their criteria, as well as anyone. They need to keep to a specific liabilities schedule. Institutions tend to trump individuals in this regard.

You can tell the compulsive gamblers — the individuals without a specified criteria, disaster is imminent.

So…what are you doing here and when do you need to get it done by?

Gary Rogan replies:

But Ralph, and I'm not at all trying to be facetious, what if I have a hundred bucks, willing to lose fifty and want ten million in a year? Aren't your capabilities/means/methods at least as important as all the other factors put together?

Ralph Vince replies: 

Gary,

Ha! Maybe your plan is a deep OTM option….parleyed 6 times in a row, with half the $100 ?

Without a specific, detailed, articulated criteria, I cannot determine my exposure plan. I don;t have control over what the markets will do
– I DO have control over my exposure.

The whole thing gets you out onto that lumpy landscape I call leverage space, and without getting into the nittygrittynasties of that (and acknowledging you are IN leverage space whether you like it or not, and it is applicable to you whether you acknowledge it or not), let's say your criteria is exactly as you defined. Well that sounds like some sort of portoflio insurance, yes? Your strike price on that is $50. Now, given that there is a peak to leverage space, portfolio insurance runs from that peak (as a % exposure) to 0 (as a % exposure) as your equity decreases to $50 (where your exposure is 0).

So now, given that you have articulated a criteria, you can plot a path through leverage space. In other words, you can create a specific plan to achieve that criteria in terms of your desired exposure.

Leo Jia adds: 

Gary,

I am only a quarter into the book, so still can't comment on all your inquiries.

You are right, it does sound somewhat similar to the financial planning language. The difference perhaps is that the goal is meant for a daily goal or very short-term goal. It should be set at a level as high as one can stretch. One should clearly envision the realization of the goal to make sure that he WILL achieve it. Only by doing this, one can be ensured to devote all his power to achieve the goal.

The faith is to ensure that one does not get chickened out easily. It helps one to steer away from common beliefs one grow up with, such as staying safe.

Victor Niederhoffer writes: 

The power of prayer in markets and life for extending life and gains was well studied by Galton who noted that insurance companies did not reduce the rates for boats owned by divines nor was their life expectancy greater.Having faith in a market reaching a goal, will not alter the counts as to whether to hold for the end or the middle or the reverse. It will just cause unnecessary vig.

Leo Jia asks: 

What about the faith not in a religious sense? Shouldn't one have faith in oneself, in one's well-designed strategy, and in one's ability to reach the goal?

Ralph Vince writes: 

I return to this thread, which, despite it sounding like a hokey, self-help sort of thread, is, as I mentioned, the single-greatest determinant I have witnessed through the peephole of my own experience watching and participating in the trading world. It is what transforms those who are lured here for all the wrong reasons, into dull successes at this endeavor.

Especially as an individual trader, it's so easy to get sidetracked, derailed, spun around and disoriented by the markets. And if we agree that quantity is, over the course of N trades, at least as important as direction (the latter of which we don;t have much control over, and that a gentleman's bet and betting the house — the spectrum across there determines the weight of the specific risk on us), and that quantity is specified by a plan to achieve our criteria, then it is exactly the execution of that "plan," which becomes the vital exercise in trading. And without a goal, without specific, well-articulated criteria, you cannot craft the plan to execute — you are just waffling, flailing.

(And these goals the individual can craft should be more clear than that specified by the investment committee of an institution, because as individuals, you can set a higher bar than a committee of bureaucrat-types).

The exercise then becomes one of executing the plan, something quite boring and clerical, but, to me, something that has resulted in extreme trading success. I won't elaborate further, there are plenty, always, not experiencing success and my aim in this note is to point them in the right direction to achieve one pathway to that success (as I believe there are likely many, though I am only familiar with this one). Granted, I am very familiar with the linkage between achieving a criteria, specifying a path to achieve it, in terms of simple mathematics, but this is not something someone cannot learn and familiarize themselves with to a greater level than i have.

Since doing so, I have encountered success with this that I did not think was possible. The execution of the plan turns you into a trading apostate, relegating most market-related exercise, entry & exit, selection, etc., to their rightful place as secondary or tertiary concerns, contrary to what most believe.

No, I'm not going to detail my specific plan — it's unique to the criteria I am seeking to achieve, and the point of this note is to further highlight the critical importance of criteria and plan. Along these lines, what I later found echoed what I was discovering about my plan in a book called "Great By Choice," by Collins and Hansen, specifically the "20 Mile March" notion as it pertains to specifying such criteria-plan relationships as detailed here for trading and their execution.

I doubt most will bother with what I write here. Growing up in the raucous world of Italians and Jews and their gambling, the lure of a little self-created danger and excitement — the little rush of that, is what draws most to this arena and keeps them here, though they don't see it that way.

Gibbons Burke writes: 

Great post, Ralph. It brings to mind CompuTrac/Telerate's Teletrac software, which was originally named TradePlan. It was built to facilitate putting into practice the old Frenchman's wizened admonition "Plan your trades, and trade your plan." Unfortunately it was a bit weak in an area you championed, sizing your trades appropriately, but in many other respects its design remains one of the best for indicator and rule based analytics.

Ralph Vince writes: 

And, if the Chair will grant me a pardon just this one last time (regarding the French, a topic of seemingly poisonous exosmose to our regarded Chair) the number one rule I have learned of the markets and life: "Never face the Old Frenchman. Never. In anything."

Leo Jia comments: 

Hi Ralph,

Thanks very much for the inspiring posts on this thread.

Your point (if I understand correctly) is that the single purpose of a goal is to define the size of the trades. I understand size is very important but am not very clear on how exactly a goal works on that.

According to some literatures (yours as the most prominent), size is determined by how much one want to lose on each trade based on his strategy, and to win more, one has to increase the size, but there is an optimal size beyond which one's return will diminish. Isn't all that simply mathematics and how aggressive one want to be? How does a goal serve here?

On the other hand, how aggressive one want to be is very much influenced by his faith (or his illusion) on how successful his strategy will be. A key question I often have is how one can be so sure that his strategy will work as tested so that he can simply increase his size to the optimal level in order to maximize his return? And this doubt also applies to execution.

Would you kindly explain?

Ralph Vince responds: 

Leo,

You're asking me to explain an awful lot, too much for a simpled response I fear. Let's say there is a risk proposition, a potential trade or wager. If I am going to play it one time, what I stand to make as a function of what I risk is a straight line (from a gentleman's bet, i.e. risking nothing, where f, the fraction of our stake we risk, is zero, to risking the house, f=1.0, where the line goes from 1, that is, risking nothing we make a multiple of 1 on our stake after the proposition, to some value > 1 where we risk the entire house).

For a subsequent play, where what we have left to risk is a function of what ocurred the first play, a curve begins to form (and thus you can see how the notion of a "horizon," that is a finite number of plays is an important parameter in all of this). No longer is the peak at f=1 when we have more than 1 play. The peak begins to move from 1.0 in the direction towards some value > 0 .

And I can show mathematically (because this is NOT a story about may, but about graphic visualization) that, absent knowing where that peak will be in the future, that the long-term best guess for this peak is p/2, that is the percentage of winning periods divided by 2. If I expect 50% of my plays or periods I have a position to be winning, then the best guess for this peak is 50% / 2 = .25. I am not going into the mathematical reasoning behind that here.

There's more….a lot more now. A curve has formed. The curve has a shape, and the story is in the shape of the curve and all the geometrically important points therein (I have catalogued these and discussed them at length to a disinterested world). And you are neccesarily on this curve when you trade this instrument, whether like or not, acknowledge it or not, and likely moving about this curve — and you are paying the consequences and reaping the benefits of where you are on this curve.

And here's the thing — you have control over where you are on the curve, and where you are moving on it. You don;t have control over the trade. And the thing you have control over is the difference between a gentleman's bet (where nothing is at risk) and having your entire life at risk.

Now, you have a criteria. Someone asked earlier on this thread for a particular criteria, which sound like a sort of portfolio insurance, and thus, a path can be plotted on this curve to accomplish precisely that.

There's a lot more to the geometry of this, and the paths on the curve (or surface in N + 1 dimensions, where N is the number of components you are trading), but people prefer to be blind to this but they do so at their peril and cost.

Newton Linchen writes: 

Ralph,

When I finally understood Kahnemann's proposition, that people (including and - specially - me) are not "risk averse", but "loss averse", and later recognize that was this "loss aversion" that caused me to lose more than I needed to, (since I have always researched trading strategies), the next logical step was to dive into your work.

I'm now at the point of embracing your ideas about the leverage space "for good", because I finally realized that trading requires so much toil… that it's simply not worth it if you don't aim for the maximum goal.

In other words, trading is difficult regardless of anything else… So why not do it for the maximum available profit?

That of course, requires courage, since humans have a great deal of loss aversion - and it's only possible when one realizes that it's just not worth it if you don't aim at the zenith.

Ralph Vince writes: 

If you want to Newton, and you have the stomach for it. If that's your criteria — growth maximization and drawdown be damned, then yes, you want to be at what you expect the peak to be over the future horizon of holding periods you are going to engage over.

Me, I'm old and cowardly. I like to sit on park benches with a shawl on…

Leo,

These are already things everyone is already doing, i.e. they ARE moving around in this leverage space, like it or not, likely moving about it, paying the consequences and reaping the benefits of a location in a geometry which has extreme bearing on his fulfillment (or not) of his criteria. Your guy employing the mean variance approach has, as his criterion, maximizing expected (1 period!) gain with respect to variance (usually within some specified other constraints, like without using margin, without more than x% in any one group, no short sales, etc). He is still invariably in leverage space, moving about it. (Further, in assuming the main facet of his criteria, maximizing return vis-a-vis risk, wherein he specifies risk as variance in that return, is mathematically misguided as variance is a diminution in [consecutive] return, and not risk, i.e. it is already baked into the return portion, i.e. the altitude in leverage space, as one considers consecutive return [i.e. reinvestment]).

It's not a matter of maximizing return, alone or with respect to something — unless that is ones criteria. Regardless, we are in leverage space, moving around, and can craft our plan our path through or stationary location within this space to satisfy our criteria.

And, absent a criteria, a "goal," the virtue of which was questioned at the trailhead of this thread, there can be no plan as nothing is being sought (other than perhaps entertainment or some form of self gratification). And if one does have a goal, a plan can be crafted to try to achieve that goal.
 


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