Trading lessons learnt in a nutshell

1. Not losing money and earning steadily in trading is when the stock prices are trending sideways or slowly trending.

2. Losing and winning a lot of money in trading is when the stocks prices are swinging wildly with long red or green candles. (That's great opportunity for day trading.)

The latter needs Jedi mind power - astute and quick judgements (analytic skills) to act on the price actions, hedging if you must, and take profits off the table before you get caught with your pants down.

Sometimes you do number 1 for too long until you get complacent. Then you forget how to react when number 2 happens. We need different strategies to ride different market conditions and steer away from speculation.

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We are in a pretty crazy hot market right now, where stocks, cryptocurrency and gold have sky rocketed in prices. When yields drop, we would expect bond prices to rise (it's a vice versa chicken & egg effect). Short term bonds e.g money market funds are no longer offering good yields. Longer term bonds would become more attractive but not sure if attractive enough compared to gold (perfect hedge for inflation?). Perhaps we will see REITs recovering slowly from their lows and my REITs will finally be out of wintering. When everything shoot to all-time-high then it's time to review again and prepare a prepare-for-crash strategy. Maybe then cash will be king again?

By the way, I was a terrible trader. My trading portfolio is still in the red.

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