Market Wizard, Steve Clark on Trading: Grow Your Equity Curve

Trading wisdom recap: Steve Clark, founder of Omni Partners, was featured in Jack Schwager's 2012 book, Hedge Fund Market Wizards.

Clark's interview with Schwager provided us with some valuable trading insights; "Lessons from Hedge Fund Market Wizards: Steve Clark" was one of our most popular posts ever.

If I had to pick my favorite sections from Clark's chapter, it would be boiled down to these two concepts: "Do more of what works (and less of what doesn't work)" and "Manage your equity curve".

Here's his full quote on the supreme importance of growing your equity curve:

"Your job as a trader is to make the line of your equity curve go from bottom left to top right. That's it. Don't get hung up on other supposed "mandates". Protect your capital and the direction of that equity line."

I will leave you with one last series of quotes from Steve Clark's interview with Jack Schwager. When asked about the characteristics of traders who succeed, Clark replied:

"They all work hard... Nearly all the successful traders I have known are one-trick ponies. They do one thing and they do it very well. When they stray from that single focus, it often ends in disaster."

"Really good traders are also capable of changing their minds in an instant. They can be dogmatic in their opinion and then immediately change it. If you can't do that, you will be caught in a position and be wiped out."

If you'd like to read more, just click on the Amazon links in our Hedge Fund Market Wizards post series and buy the book!

Related posts:

1. Your Job as a Trader: Manage Your Equity Curve

2. Maximize Your Trading Gains, Not Wins: William Eckhardt Interview

Subscribe to the Finance Trends Newsletter - you'll get actionable trading ideas and valuable market insights sent to your inbox. You can follow our real-time updates on Twitter.

Seth Klarman: Margin of Safety (pdf)

Welcome, readers! Signup for free email updates at the Finance Trends Newsletter . Update: PDF links removed due to DMCA notice. Please see our extensive Klarman book notes below. New visitors, please check the Finance Trends home page for all new posts. Here's something for anyone who has been trying to get a look at Seth Klarman's now famous, and out of print, 1991 investment book, Margin of Safety . My knowledge of value investing is pretty much limited to what I've read in Ben Graham's The Intelligent Investor (the book which originally popularized the investment concept of a "Margin of Safety"), so check out the wisdom from Seth Klarman and other investing greats in our related posts below. You can also go straight to Ronald Redfield's Margin of Safety book notes . Related posts: 1. Seth Klarman interviews and Margin of Safety notes 2. Seth Klarman: Lessons from 2008 3. Investing Lessons from Sir John Templeton 4.

Slate profiles Victor Niederhoffer

Slate's recent profile of writer/speculator, Vic Niederhoffer has been getting some attention from traders and finance types in recent days. I thought we'd take a look at it here too, to offer up some possible educational value from Vic's experiences with trading and loss. Here's an excerpt from Slate's profile of Victor Niederhoffer : " I've enjoyed getting your e-mails. It sounds like you've thought a lot about being wrong. Well, the reason you contacted me, to call a spade a spade, is that I'm sort of infamous for having made a big, notorious, terrible error not once but twice in my market career. Let's talk about those errors. The first was your investment in the Thai baht, which pretty much wiped you out when the Thai stock market crashed in 1997. I made so many errors there it's pathetic. I made one of my favorite errors: "The mouse with one hole is quickly cornered." That is key. There are certain decisions you make in li

Clean Money - John Rubino: Book review

Clean Money by John Rubino 274 pages. Hoboken, New Jersey John Wiley & Sons. 2009. 1st Edition. The bouyant stock market environment of the past several years is gone, and the financial wreckage of 2008 is still sharp in our minds as a new year starts to unfold. Given the recent across-the-board-declines in global stock markets (and most asset classes) that have left many investors shell-shocked, you might wonder if there is any good reason to consider the merits of a hot new investment theme, such as clean energy. However, we shouldn't be too hasty to write off all future stock investments. After all, the market declines of 2008 may continue into 2009, but they may also leave interesting investment opportunities in their wake. Which brings us to the subject of this review. John Rubino, author and editor of GreenStockInvesting.com , recently released a new book on renewable energy and clean-tech investing entitled, Clean Money: Picking Winners in the Green Tech Boom . In Clean

Finance Trends Letter

Search This Blog