The New Market Wizards: Conversations with America's Top Traders

by Jack D. Schwager

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 trades that are more likely to be losers. What other advice would you have for traders? The most important advice is to never let a loser get out of hand. You want to be sure that you can be wrong twenty or thirty times in a row and still have money in your account. When I trade, I’ll risk perhaps 5 to 10 percent of the money in my account. If I lose on that trade, no matter how strongly I feel, on my next trade 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. I’ve gone from trading as many as three thousand contracts per trade to as few as ten when I was cold, and then back again.