One trader lost ($3000) during the course of a year trading one contract of system A. Another trader makes $25,000 trading the same system that year. One trader makes $24,000 trading system B one year while another makes from that same system $79,000, both with the same starting capital. What is the difference between these traders?
1. MONEY MANAGEMENT - THE MATHEMATICAL PROCESS OF INCREASING AND DECREASING THE NUMBER OF CONTRACTS/SHARES/OPTIONS. THE PURPOSE OF UTILIZING MONEY MANAGEMENT SHOULD BE TO INCREASE THE PROFITABILITY DURING POSITIVE RUNS AND PROTECT THOSE PROFITS DURING DRAWDOWNS OF ANY TRADING SYSTEM OR METHOD.
Money management is what allowed Larry Williams to trade $10,000 into $1.1 million within one year. According to Larry, if he had traded ONE CONTRACT on every single trade, profits that year would have been only around $100,000. There were two aspects to Larry's record setting trades: 1) The system and strategies he used to determine where to enter and exit trades; and 2) the method he used to increase and decrease the number of contracts to place on any given trade. To put it simply, only 9% of the total profits came from the system and strategies used to determine where to enter and exit trades while 91% of the total profits that year came from the money management strategy he applied. Money management alone increased Williams' return by 1000%!
This is a statistic that I have heard for years on many different occasions
and from a number of reliable sources. In my own experiences hearing from
other traders, I could not offer any data to the contrary. Here is another
piece of interesting data I think is correlated to this statistic. 90% - 95%
of all traders spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars trying to
figure out where to enter and exit the market while they barely even put a
thought towards how much risk to place on each trade and when to increase or
decrease that risk. I seriously doubt that these two statistics are the same
by coincidence.
I opened the article by comparing two traders trading the same system. The
first trader lost $3,000 during the year while another trade made $25,000
taking the same exact signals as the first trader. The difference between
these two traders is the simple fact that the second one applied proper
money management methods to the trades while the first one did not.
Before we further explore the power of money management, it is important to
clarify that not just any money management should be applied to trading, but
proper money management.
To drive the point home, we will use the following illustration:
Take a coin, toss it in the air 100 times. The ratio of heads to tails
landing up should be very close to 50/50. If you were to win $2.00 every
time the coin landed heads up and lose $1 every time heads landed face down,
you should have won approximately $50 by the end of 100 tosses. This is a
positive expectation situation. The odds of you winning are heavily in your
favor. We will further say you have $100 to bet with. The question is, what
percentage of your money should you risk on each flip of the coin?
What would you say is the best percentage to reinvest on each flip? 10% 25%
40% of 51%? This means that if you begin with $100 and choose to risk 10% of
your capital on each flip, you begin by risking $10 on the first flip. If
the coin lands heads up, you win $20. You would then risk $12 of the new
$120 total on the next flip of the coin. If you lose, you lose $12 and if
you win, you win $24 and so forth the game goes. Would it make a difference
which % you used? If so, how much? Remember, you make twice as much when you
win than when you lose. The odds of you winning are 50% every time. The
answer may surprise you. By risking 10% of your money on each of the 100
flips (a $10 bet on the first flip) you will turn your $100 into $4,700!
Money management increases your return from 50% to a 4700% return!
Reinvesting 25% of your money would have turned $100 into $36,100! An
increase of just 15% per toss increases your total return from 4700% to
36,100%. It looks like it gets better the more you invest. But wait.
Increasing your risk another 15% every flip to a total of 40% being risked
on each flip would turn your $100 into $4700. This time by increasing your
risk, your return dropped drastically. What if 51% of your money is
invested? With this scenario, you actually lose money even though the odds
are statistically in your favor. Your $100 decreases to $36. A loss of 64%.
Our point? USING THE RIGHT OR WRONG MONEY MANAGEMENT CAN MAKE OR BREAK YOU!
The great thing about money management is the fact that money management is
purely a function of math. A hundred years ago, two + two = four. Today,
that same equation yields the same answer (unless you were raised in the
public school system at which point it would depend on how you feel that
day. Therefore, money management IS predictable unlike trading strategies or
systems. In the example above, it would not matter in what order heads or
tails were achieved. If you flipped 50 tails first and then 50 heads, the
outcome would be the same as if you flipped 50 heads first and then suffered
the 50 losing tails. You may be skeptical of these numbers at first, but I
assure you, the numbers are correct.
Before reading further, the previous illustrations should have left one very
big impression about how powerful money management can be. Let's take the
time to re-assert a few things before we go on.
1) Money management is more powerful than any trading system that it can be
implemented to.
2) Money management is more stable than ANY trading system. It is based on
math, and math does not change.
3) It is more logical to implement proper money management to a trading
system than to trade that system without it. Money management will take you
farther with less.
4) The wrong money management applied to your trading could actually hurt
the end result.
Finally before proceeding, we want to convey one more thought and leave you
a challenge. You may or may not have noticed that the commodity industry is
infatuated with trading systems. Have you ever stopped to ask yourself that
if money is to be made through trading systems, why do 90% of individual
traders end up losing money? Why don't system vendors know the effect of
proper money management? Our challenge is this; Call any system vendor, ANY
of them, ask them the following:
"if I were to purchase your system, at what levels should I increase the
number of contracts I am trading?"
More than likely, you will get one of the following answers:
1) I don't know.
2) It's really up to you.
3) Increase one contract for every $10,000 in your account.
4) X% of your account on each trade. (this will probably range from about 2%
to 10%.)
5) Increase when you double your money.
After receiving one of these answers, read the following and decide for
yourself whether you should take their advice or not.
The most widely understood technique of money management, especially among professional money managers, is called the fixed fractional method. This method simply risks X% of your money on each and every trade and is the method used in our coin tossing example. If you expect your largest possible loss to be $1,000 in a $20,000 account and you wanted to risk no more than 5% of your account balance on every trade, you would trade one contract for every $20,000 in your account. ($1,000 / .05 = $20,000) When the account is built up to $40,000, you would then be able to increase the number of contracts to two. When you reach $60,000, you will increase to three contracts, etc. You would increase or decrease contracts by one for every $20,000 you have in your account. This is the most commonly used method in the industry today. However, there are some problems with this type of method.
Fixed fractional trading is an objective process that is fairly simple to
implement. But, is it the most practical and logical? The answer is no.
Fixed Fractional trading has several drawbacks. For the average trader, a
typical account to start trading is about $20,000. Implementing the same
scenario of maximum loss per trade of $1,000 and risking no more than 5% on
each trade requires you to produce a 100% return before you increase from
trading one contract to two contracts. Further, if your largest loss
exceeded $1,000 you would be required to break your own rule just to trade
one contract. For example, if your largest loss is $1,500 instead of $1,000,
you are risking 7.5% of your account balance right off of the bat ($1,500 /
$20,000 = 7.5%). You either have to break your own rule or start with
$30,000 instead of $20,000 in the account. At this point it would take you
$30,000 in profits before you ever increase from one to two contracts.
On any scenario risking X% on each trade would require a 100% return on your
original investment before you increase to two contracts. However, to
increase trading two contracts to three requires an additional 50% increase
of your account balance. Using the $1,000 largest loss and risking 5% on
each trade requires an additional $20,000 in profits but computes to only a
33% increase in the account balance to go from three to four contracts. Keep
in mind that you are increasing the ability to achieve the higher goals in a
far less amount of time. This is true because you are trading more contracts
to reach the same amount of additional money each time. Theoretically, if it
took you one year to increase from trading one contract ot trading two
contracts, it should take you another six months to increase to three
contracts. This scenario continues on until it is absolutely absurd the rate
at which you are increasing contracts. For example, to increase from 1 to 4
contracts requires two years provided that you make on average $20,000 per
year per contract. However, over the following two years, your increase
skyrockets from 4 contracts to 33 contracts. At that rate, the increase is
one contract every 11 days instead of the one year it took to go from one to
two contracts.
This also poses a major problem when you try to compensate for the
incredible length of time it takes you to increase from one to two
contracts. The only possible way to increase that speed on the front end
(which is when it is needed most, especially when you are starting with a
smaller account) is to increase the percentage of risk. For example, we will
raise the percentage of your account to risk on each trade from 5% to 15%. A
single contract for every $6,666 in your account ($1,000 / .5 = $6,666).
Therefore, according to this scenario, if you start out with a $20,000
account, you begin trading three contracts before the system even started
proving itself. The increase from three to four contracts occurs in only
forty days. The next increase comes to pass in thirty days and by the rime
you go from ten to eleven contracts, a time span of only twelve days has
passed! From twenty to twenty-one contracts would take a little more than
five days. To look at this same scenario a little differently, instead of
using time, we will use dollars required per contract traded. Remember, you
only need a total additional $6,666.66 to increase contracts. If you are
trading 20 contracts, you divide that required amount by the number of
contracts you are trading to come up with how much per contract you need to
make ($6,666 / 20 = $333). That's right, you need a profitable trade of only
$333 to increase another contract. But wait.what if your next trade yielded
you a $1,300 profit? You actually skip from trading twenty contracts to
twenty-four contracts on ONE TRADE! Well, it doesn't take a rocket scientist
to see where we are going with this.
(*Note - The time examples are illustrative only using averages to make the
point. Do not read anything more into it)
If the method being used in the above scenario to increase from 20 to 24
contracts has average profitable trades in the range of $1,000 to $2,000,
this will cause the money management system to skip contracts at higher
levels. If you make it up to twenty contracts (which also means your account
balance is at least $130,000 ($6,666 x 20) and you have a profitable trade
of $1,300 and jump up to twenty-four contracts on your next trade, what
happens if a drawdown occurs? Let's say your worst drawdown is only $5,000
(which is far better than most realistic drawdowns). If your worst loss is
only $1,000, that means your drawdown has to be spread out between at least
five trades. To be conservative, we will say that these five trades occurred
consecutively rather than simultaneously (five open positions at the same
time at twenty-four contracts a piece).
The first trade occurs and you have twenty-four contracts. Your loss is
($1,000) per contract. Your account goes from at least $160,000 (24
contracts x $6,666) to $136,000 in one trade ($1,000 loss x 24 contracts).
As a result, the next trade you only put on twenty contracts $136,000 /
$6,666 = 20. The loss of ($1,000) comes and your account goes down to
$116,000. The next trade you have seventeen contracts and you move down to
$99,000 in account equity. Remember, this is only a $3,000 drawdown per
contract so far. Next trade comes, you have fourteen contracts on and your
loss takes you down to $85,000. Your final trade you have cut your contracts
in half to where you're now only trading twelve and the loss brings your
account balance to $73,000.
Your small $5,000 drawdown, which was only a 25% drawdown if you were only
trading one contract with a $20,000 account, has now turned into an $87,000
drawdown and 54% of your total account balance. Really bad news if your
drawdown exceeds $5,000 per contract. Remember, we were also being
conservative. If you had put on all five of those losing trades at
relatively the same time with the full twenty-four contracts, your account
would have gone from $160,000 to only $40,000!!!!! Totally Unacceptable.
Further, if the $5,000 drawdown continues, the $73,000 dwindles to only
$34,000. A $10,000 drawdown dropped the account by $126,000!
This is actually just a different way of saying X% risked on every trade. In
the previous example using a $1,000 largest loss, one contract for every
$10,000 would come out to 10% being risked on each trade ($1,000 / .10 =
$10,000). Therefore, the ridiculous discrepancy in time between increasing
from one to two contracts and nine to ten contracts is still the same. The
drawdown risks are the same with any fixed percentage being risked on each
trade.BIG. The only difference is HOW big.
These are the things most everyone else is telling you to do. As you can
see, breaking these methods down strips any logical argument for utilizing
them in your own trading.
It amazes me how many vendors in the industry push this money management
method. This may be good for managed funds with millions of dollars, but it
is totally impractical for individual traders with average accounts. I need
only make one illustration to prove my point. If you have a $20,000 account,
you can not trade unless the risk on each trade is at or less than $400. If
you have a $50,000 account, you can not take a trade with a risk of more
than $1,000. Further, if your maximum risk is only $1,000 with a $50,000
account, you can not increase contracts until the account increases to
$100,000! You can not increase to 3 contracts until the account reaches
$150,000.
You might be saying to yourself about now that this is simply a more
conservative method of money management and that someone may not want to
risk more than this. Don't entertain that thought because it is totally and
completely 100% false. I hear all the time how traders want to say money
management is simply a matter of preference and that it is going to be
different for every trader. To some degree, this is true. But if you take
the same account size with the same risk tolerance and the same profit
goals, there is only one "best" money management application for that set of
circumstances. In geometry, the definition of a line is the shortest
distance between two points. There are other ways to get from point A to
point B, but there is only one way that is most efficient to achieve the
same results. That is the same way with money management. It is only a
matter of preference is one trader doesn't want to reach point B in the most
efficient manner. If that is the case, you should probably hang up your
trading shoes. There is a "best" way and it is not a matter of preference.
It is a matter of mathematics. Keep that in mind as we continue on.
Back when I was researching all of the different type of money management
and getting frustrated at the various pros and cons, I ended up scrapping
everything there was and developing my own. The method I developed is called
Fixed Ratio Trading. Before I get into the logic of Fixed Ratio, let me
review a few examples of what the Fixed Ratio money management method can do
for systems like the ones you trade right now.
S&P Daytrading System.
Results trading just one contract were as follows:
# Trades 123
#Winners 67
#Losers 56
%Profitable 54%
Total net Profit $25,830
Avg. Trade $210
Largest DD 19%
As you can see, not the Holy Grail. But, apply the Fixed Ratio method to
these results and over the same 123 trades, the increase is spectacular:
#Winners 67
#Losers 56
%Profitable 54%
Total Net Profit $204,000
Avg. trade $1,658
Largest DD 22%
A better than sevenfold increase in profits while only increasing the total
drawdown by 3%!
I realize some of you may be saying that a fixed fraction and a fixed ratio
are the same thing. But, in fact, they are referring to two different
subject matters.and that is the difference. The fixed fractional method is
referring to what percentage of your capital should you risk on the next
trade, and every trade thereafter. The Fixed Ratio method is referring to
difference between each increase and decrease. This is the key.
You will recall earlier in the article that I gave examples using average
times to increase as well as average dollars to increase. Using the fixed
fractional method, the time needed to increase at the beginning was far
slower than the time needed to increase further into trading. The dollars
required to increase contracts at the beginning was far more than the
dollars require to increase contracts at higher levels. In all of my
research, this was the flaw in the method, the fly in the ointment if you
will. Fixed ratio corrected this flaw by simply making these differences
EQUAL or FIXED.
For example, if it took an average of 10 trades to increase from one to two
contracts, it will take an average of 10 trades to increase from 19 to 20
contracts. If it takes an average of $10,000 WITH THE FIRST CONTRACT to
increase from 1 to 2 contracts, then it will take $10,000 PER CONTRACT to
increase from 19 to 20 contracts. In other words, there is a Fixed Ratio of
contracts traded to dollars required to increase.
It goes like this. I call the ratio between contracts traded to dollars
required the "delta". This simply means "change". Depending on how
aggressive or conservative you want to be, you simply change the delta in
the following formula accordingly. A smaller delta is more aggressive while
a larger delta is more conservative.
Current Balance + (#contracts * Delta) = next increase in contracts.
A $20,000 starting balance using a $5,000 delta would increase from 1 to 2
contracts once the account reached $25,000. To increase from 2 to 3
contracts, you would apply the same formula:
Current Balance = $25,000 + (2 contracts * $5,000) = $35,000. You would
increase to 3 contracts once the account hit $35,000. This continues
throughout your increases.
This article barely scratches the surface of my research into the powerful
topic of money management. For a more thorough and in depth study on
everything in this article and so much more, I suggest buying my book "The
Trading Game, Playing by the Numbers to Make Millions". In the meantime, let
me make one illustration to prove my next statement. If you believe that
money management is a matter of preference, or that it is just my opinion
that my Fixed Ratio method is better than any fixed fraction, then I
challenge you to prove me wrong. Give me any system, any set of positive
results (and in many cases, negative end results) and I guarantee that
taking into account both risk levels and profit potential, there is no fixed
fractional method out there that will beat the Fixed Ratio method. There are
a lot of opinions out there, but I will back mine up. I will do it
hypothetically if you wish or real time, real trades and real money. You can
choose the method. You use a fixed fraction, any fixed fraction you want,
and I'll use my Fixed Ratio. We will start with 1 contract and the first one
to reach a predetermined profit level without violating a certain percentage
of the account at any given time will win. Further, both money management
plans have to be fully disclosed and stuck with prior to the start of
trading. This is a standing offer to anyone at anytime using whatever
trading system and/or market they want to use.
My PowerTrade S&P XT method made $39,500 based on a single contract from
January 1st through the end of April this year. The worst drawdown hit
$12,500. Using a delta of $5,000, profits were increased to $104,000 trading
6 contracts. This means that with a $2,000 single contract loss, the
drawdown would be $12,000 or 11.5% of the profits. This, by the way, is not
"the best" ratio to use in this scenario if you are looking for
profitability.
Using the fixed fractional method, I optimized to find the VERY BEST fixed
fraction to trade on this data set. If you will recall in the coin flipping
illustration, risking 25% produced more profits than risking 10% or risking
40%. In fact, for that particular situation, risking 25% produced THE MOST
profits of any fixed fraction. This is called "Optimal f". I used Optimal f
with this illustration. The VERY BEST fixed fraction could only produce a
total of $71,250 and it was trading 9 contracts at the end of that scenario.
This means that a $2,000 loss per contract would result in an $18,000 drop,
or 25% drawdown.
This means that the very best fixed fraction produced $32,000 less profits
and was risking 13% more of those fewer profits with a single loss of
$2,000. By the way, the best was 12% based on a $1,000 possible loss. 12%
produced more profits than 11% and more profits than 13%.
Remember what I said about using a smaller fixed fraction was just being
more conservative, and how that thought process was false. Try this on for
size.risking 2% based on a $1,000 largest loss would have never increased
contracts. This means that after a $10,000 drawdown using the "more
conservative" money management, total profits would be at only $29,500 for
the year. After the same $10,000 drawdown using a $5,000 delta, the account
would still be over $50,000.
The purpose of this article was not necessarily to promote my Fixed Ratio method above the fixed fractional method. The purpose of this article was more to open your eyes to the power of proper money management and encourage you to look further into the subject. Don't take my word for it, do your own research and see if the principles outlined in this article are not true. Having not even begun to scratch the surface, money management is the most powerful aspect of trading when it comes to your bottom line. It could mean the difference between your ultimate success or failure in trading.
