Welcome to the third and final part of this chapter.
Thank you all for the 100s of comments and upvotes - maybe this post will take us above 1,000 for this topic!
Keep any feedback or questions coming in the replies below.
Before you read this note, please start with Part I and then Part II so it hangs together and makes sense.
Part III

• Squeezes and other risks
• Market positioning
• Bet correlation
• Crap trades, timeouts and monthly limits

Squeezes and other risks

We are going to cover three common risks that traders face: events; squeezes, asymmetric bets.

Events

Economic releases can cause large short-term volatility. The most famous is Non Farm Payrolls, which is the most widely watched measure of US employment levels and affects the price of many instruments.On an NFP announcement currencies like EURUSD might jump (or drop) 100 pips no problem.
This is fine and there are trading strategies that one may employ around this but the key thing is to be aware of these releases.You can find economic calendars all over the internet - including on this site - and you need only check if there are any major releases each day or week.
For example, if you are trading off some intraday chart and scalping a few pips here and there it would be highly sensible to go into a known data release flat as it is pure coin-toss and not the reason for your trading. It only takes five minutes each day to plan for the day ahead so do not get caught out by this. Many retail traders get stopped out on such events when price volatility is at its peak.

Squeezes

Short squeezes bring a lot of danger and perhaps some opportunity.
The story of VW and Porsche is the best short squeeze ever. Throughout these articles we've used FX examples wherever possible but in this one instance the concept (which is also highly relevant in FX) is best illustrated with an historical lesson from a different asset class.
A short squeeze is when a participant ends up in a short position they are forced to cover. Especially when the rest of the market knows that this participant can be bullied into stopping out at terrible levels, provided the market can briefly drive the price into their pain zone.
​
There's a reason for the car, don't worry
Hedge funds had been shorting VW stock. However the amount of VW stock available to buy in the open market was actually quite limited. The local government owned a chunk and Porsche itself had bought and locked away around 30%. Neither of these would sell to the hedge-funds so a good amount of the stock was un-buyable at any price.
If you sell or short a stock you must be prepared to buy it back to go flat at some point.
To cut a long story short, Porsche bought a lot of call options on VW stock. These options gave them the right to purchase VW stock from banks at slightly above market price.
Eventually the banks who had sold these options realised there was no VW stock to go out and buy since the German government wouldn’t sell its allocation and Porsche wouldn’t either. If Porsche called in the options the banks were in trouble.
Porsche called in the options which forced the shorts to buy stock - at whatever price they could get it.
The price squeezed higher as those that were short got massively squeezed and stopped out. For one brief moment in 2008, VW was the world’s most valuable company. Shorts were burned hard.
​
Incredible event
Porsche apparently made $11.5 billion on the trade. The BBC described Porsche as “a hedge fund with a carmaker attached.”
If this all seems exotic then know that the same thing happens in FX all the time. If everyone in the market is talking about a key level in EURUSD being 1.2050 then you can bet the market will try to push through 1.2050 just to take out any short stops at that level. Whether it then rallies higher or fails and trades back lower is a different matter entirely.
This brings us on to the matter of crowded trades. We will look at positioning in more detail in the next section. Crowded trades are dangerous for PNL. If everyone believes EURUSD is going down and has already sold EURUSD then you run the risk of a short squeeze.
For additional selling to take place you need a very good reason for people to add to their position whereas a move in the other direction could force mass buying to cover their shorts.
A trading mentor when I worked at the investment bank once advised me:
Always think about which move would cause the maximum people the maximum pain. That move is precisely what you should be watching out for at all times.

Asymmetric losses

Also known as picking up pennies in front of a steamroller. This risk has caught out many a retail trader. Sometimes it is referred to as a "negative skew" strategy.
Ideally what you are looking for is asymmetric risk trade set-ups: that is where the downside is clearly defined and smaller than the upside. What you want to avoid is the opposite.
A famous example of this going wrong was the Swiss National Bank de-peg in 2012.
The Swiss National Bank had said they would defend the price of EURCHF so that it did not go below 1.2. Many people believed it could never go below 1.2 due to this. Many retail traders therefore opted for a strategy that some describe as ‘picking up pennies in front of a steam-roller’.
They would would buy EURCHF above the peg level and hope for a tiny rally of several pips before selling them back and keep doing this repeatedly. Often they were highly leveraged at 100:1 so that they could amplify the profit of the tiny 5-10 pip rally.
Then this happened.
​
Something that changed FX markets forever
The SNB suddenly did the unthinkable. They stopped defending the price. CHF jumped and so EURCHF (the number of CHF per 1 EUR) dropped to new lows very fast. Clearly, this trade had horrific risk : reward asymmetry: you risked 30% to make 0.05%.
Other strategies like naively selling options have the same result. You win a small amount of money each day and then spectacularly blow up at some point down the line.

Market positioning

We have talked about short squeezes. But how do you know what the market position is? And should you care?
Let’s start with the first. You should definitely care.
Let’s imagine the entire market is exceptionally long EURUSD and positioning reaches extreme levels. This makes EURUSD very vulnerable.
To keep the price going higher EURUSD needs to attract fresh buy orders. If everyone is already long and has no room to add, what can incentivise people to keep buying? The news flow might be good. They may believe EURUSD goes higher. But they have already bought and have their maximum position on.
On the flip side, if there’s an unexpected event and EURUSD gaps lower you will have the entire market trying to exit the position at the same time. Like a herd of cows running through a single doorway. Messy.
We are going to look at this in more detail in a later chapter, where we discuss ‘carry’ trades. For now this TRYJPY chart might provide some idea of what a rush to the exits of a crowded position looks like.
​
A carry trade position clear-out in action
Knowing if the market is currently at extreme levels of long or short can therefore be helpful.
The CFTC makes available a weekly report, which details the overall positions of speculative traders “Non Commercial Traders” in some of the major futures products. This includes futures tied to deliverable FX pairs such as EURUSD as well as products such as gold. The report is called “CFTC Commitments of Traders” ("COT").
This is a great benchmark. It is far more representative of the overall market than the proprietary ones offered by retail brokers as it covers a far larger cross-section of the institutional market.
Generally market participants will not pay a lot of attention to commercial hedgers, which are also detailed in the report. This data is worth tracking but these folks are simply hedging real-world transactions rather than speculating so their activity is far less revealing and far more noisy.
You can find the data online for free and download it directly here.
​
Raw format is kinda hard to work with
​
However, many websites will chart this for you free of charge and you may find it more convenient to look at it that way. Just google “CFTC positioning charts”.
​
But you can easily get visualisations
You can visually spot extreme positioning. It is extremely powerful.
Bear in mind the reports come out Friday afternoon US time and the report is a snapshot up to the prior Tuesday. That means it is a lagged report - by the time it is released it is a few days out of date. For longer term trades where you hold positions for weeks this is of course still pretty helpful information.
As well as the absolute level (is the speculative market net long or short) you can also use this to pick up on changes in positioning.
For example if bad news comes out how much does the net short increase? If good news comes out, the market may remain net short but how much did they buy back?
A lot of traders ask themselves “Does the market have this trade on?” The positioning data is a good method for answering this. It provides a good finger on the pulse of the wider market sentiment and activity.
For example you might say: “There was lots of noise about the good employment numbers in the US. However, there wasn’t actually a lot of position change on the back of it. Maybe everyone who wants to buy already has. What would happen now if bad news came out?”
In general traders will be wary of entering a crowded position because it will be hard to attract additional buyers or sellers and there could be an aggressive exit.
If you want to enter a trade that is showing extreme levels of positioning you must think carefully about this dynamic.
​

Bet correlation

Retail traders often drastically underestimate how correlated their bets are.
Through bitter experience, I have learned that a mistake in position correlation is the root of some of the most serious problems in trading. If you have eight highly correlated positions, then you are really trading one position that is eight times as large.
Bruce Kovner of hedge fund, Caxton Associates
For example, if you are trading a bunch of pairs against the USD you will end up with a simply huge USD exposure. A single USD-trigger can ruin all your bets. Your ideal scenario — and it isn’t always possible — would be to have a highly diversified portfolio of bets that do not move in tandem.
Look at this chart. Inverted USD index (DXY) is green. AUDUSD is orange. EURUSD is blue.
​
Chart from TradingView
So the whole thing is just one big USD trade! If you are long AUDUSD, long EURUSD, and short DXY you have three anti USD bets that are all likely to work or fail together.
The more diversified your portfolio of bets are, the more risk you can take on each.
There’s a really good video, explaining the benefits of diversification from Ray Dalio.
A systematic fund with access to an investable universe of 10,000 instruments has more opportunity to make a better risk-adjusted return than a trader who only focuses on three symbols. Diversification really is the closest thing to a free lunch in finance.
But let’s be pragmatic and realistic. Human retail traders don’t have capacity to run even one hundred bets at a time. More realistic would be an average of 2-3 trades on simultaneously. So what can be done?
For example:

• You might diversify across time horizons by having a mix of short-term and long-term trades.
• You might diversify across asset classes - trading some FX but also crypto and equities.
• You might diversify your trade generation approach so you are not relying on the same indicators or drivers on each trade.
• You might diversify your exposure to the market regime by having some trades that assume a trend will continue (momentum) and some that assume we will be range-bound (carry).

And so on. Basically you want to scan your portfolio of trades and make sure you are not putting all your eggs in one basket. If some trades underperform others will perform - assuming the bets are not correlated - and that way you can ensure your overall portfolio takes less risk per unit of return.
The key thing is to start thinking about a portfolio of bets and what each new trade offers to your existing portfolio of risk. Will it diversify or amplify a current exposure?

Crap trades, timeouts and monthly limits

One common mistake is to get bored and restless and put on crap trades. This just means trades in which you have low conviction.
It is perfectly fine not to trade. If you feel like you do not understand the market at a particular point, simply choose not to trade.
Flat is a position.
Do not waste your bullets on rubbish trades. Only enter a trade when you have carefully considered it from all angles and feel good about the risk. This will make it far easier to hold onto the trade if it moves against you at any point. You actually believe in it.
Equally, you need to set monthly limits. A standard limit might be a 10% account balance stop per month. At that point you close all your positions immediately and stop trading till next month.
​
Be strict with yourself and walk away
Let’s assume you started the year with $100k and made 5% in January so enter Feb with $105k balance. Your stop is therefore 10% of $105k or $10.5k . If your account balance dips to $94.5k ($105k-$10.5k) then you stop yourself out and don’t resume trading till March the first.
Having monthly calendar breaks is nice for another reason. Say you made a load of money in January. You don’t want to start February feeling you are up 5% or it is too tempting to avoid trading all month and protect the existing win. Each month and each year should feel like a clean slate and an independent period.
Everyone has trading slumps. It is perfectly normal. It will definitely happen to you at some stage. The trick is to take a break and refocus. Conserve your capital by not trading a lot whilst you are on a losing streak. This period will be much harder for you emotionally and you’ll end up making suboptimal decisions. An enforced break will help you see the bigger picture.
Put in place a process before you start trading and then it’ll be easy to follow and will feel much less emotional. Remember: the market doesn’t care if you win or lose, it is nothing personal.
When your head has cooled and you feel calm you return the next month and begin the task of building back your account balance.

That's a wrap on risk management

Thanks for taking time to read this three-part chapter on risk management. I hope you enjoyed it. Do comment in the replies if you have any questions or feedback.
Remember: the most important part of trading is not making money. It is not losing money. Always start with that principle. I hope these three notes have provided some food for thought on how you might approach risk management and are of practical use to you when trading. Avoiding mistakes is not a sexy tagline but it is an effective and reliable way to improve results.
Next up I will be writing about an exciting topic I think many traders should look at rather differently: news trading. Please follow on here to receive notifications and the broad outline is below.
News Trading Part I

• Introduction
• Why use the economic calendar
• Reading the economic calendar
• Knowing what's priced in
• Surveys
• Interest rates
• First order thinking vs second order thinking

News Trading Part II

• Preparing for quantitative and qualitative releases
• Data surprise index
• Using recent events to predict future reactions
• Buy the rumour, sell the fact
• The mysterious 'position trim' effect
• Reversals
• Some key FX releases

***
​
Disclaimer:This content is not investment advice and you should not place any reliance on it. The views expressed are the author's own and should not be attributed to any other person, including their employer.

​
Immediate Edge Review: Is This Crypto Robot Legit or Scam
Immediate Edge Review and investigation 20twenty. The Immediate Edge app is a crypto, forex and choices trading robot utilized by folks to automatically obtain and sell Bitcoin and create profits. Wanting at the website, many people claim it helped them move from rags-to-riches trading Bitcoin. Further, some claims linked it to Ronaldo and Sir Alex Ferguson
​
https://preview.redd.it/rttn3i4hohm51.jpg?width=1280&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8f0dc345c3ace4032d571d44fabe356f13ff1a33
Is Immediate Edge app legit or scam? Whereas the claims of its linkage to the higher than celebrities are unverifiable, we tend to can verify that the app is not a scam and permits individuals to trade Bitcoin using the Fibonacci strategy with ten minutes time frames
The app, that allows people to deposit at least $250 through mastercard and Sofort, scores 88% rate and a 5 stars as a real software
Since there are several scam cryptos, forex and options brokers who trick individuals to depositing money, and then they run away with the funds, we have taken time to review this software to determine if it is real or a scam.
Is Immediate Edge scam or legit
High success rate is reported by users with this software.
The Immediate Edge web site provides truthful claims about the service though it will not mean the crypto trading risks are eliminated with its use.
Customers should start with the minimum investment and increase it when satisfied with the utilization of the app.
Click the link to access Immediate Edge official web site or keep reading to understand more
This software will not seem to be a scam and users report that it helped them make real money trading on it.b site
What is Immediate Edge App?
Immediate Edgecould be a robot or auto-trading software that allows folks to trade forex, crypto and binary choices. A user deploys the algorithm-primarily based bot, which relies on a trading strategy that's automatically executed on a broker trading platform once deployed.
The strategy is coded or set like to permit the user to automatically get and sell crypto, stock or choices on the broker platform at favorable prices, to form profits. It can do automatic market analysis by analyzing a vast amount of knowledge from completely different sources, at intervals seconds and with high accuracy, then use the data to predict the costs. It can then come up with a transparent buy or sell tradable signal and then execute it automatically by shopping for and/or selling on the broker platform.
The software can, therefore, save a trader thousands of manual hours and labor they might have spent analyzing information to form trading choices and to follow the markets and to position and close trades. You conjointly do not want to understand anything concerning crypto, stock or option trading to use this auto trading app, although it is suggested to possess this information to keep improving on trading.
Trading bots will achieve high success rates of more than 90p.c and have been tested to work. You may be searching for Immediate Edge scam but the website can tell you that you can expect to earn between $950 and $a pair of,two hundred per day using the software but that depends on your expertise. As a newbie, you'll not start making that a lot of immediately and conjointly it depends on how a lot of you invest. With an investment of $250, you'll be able to expect to form a lot of lesser although some people claim to own made $12a pair of in a very few hours using this software.
That will not mean Immediate Edge is error-free. There still is a heap of unpredictable high volatility in crypto and bots will make mistakes and errors to create losses. Auto trading robots are better employed in combination with manual trading strategies.
​
https://preview.redd.it/1zkt9v3johm51.jpg?width=1280&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=85f7e7f5d0e9d6b60b4a8a6e37bb344dbbb8305c
Immediate Edge Review
How will Immediate Edge work?
All a user has to try and do is join up at the Immediate Edge web site, then deposit funds to have access to the robot, when which they can begin trading by switching on the bot. It will would like no control or intervention from humans, beyond beginning and stopping it.
You additionally need to stay checking, daily, to observe the performance of the software in doing its job and ensure that it is earning any returns needless to say. From there, you can confirm whether or not to extend or decrease your investment towards crypto, options or stock trading using this robot.
You'll be able to also monitor performance to be ready to regulate the trading settings from your dashboard and optimize totally different features of the trading bot for instance set amount of trades or amount to invest in every trade.
Founder of Immediate Edge
In line with the Immediate Edge website, this trading bot was founded by Edwin James. Reportedly, he created billions with forex, crypto, and binary options trading and still shares his strategies on the way to trade the assets on the app.
He founded the app to create it potential for brand spanking new traders to create cash in less than 3 minutes of signing up.
How to sign up on Immediate Edge:
Registration: Registering or signing up on the website is free but to start trading, you want to deposit no less than $250. You discover a registration type on the top right of the page, on that you type in your email, full names and phone numbers and country code. Create a password to be used for logging in later.
Deposit funds: Depositing funds allows you to connect to a robot broker and then you'll begin the bot to start out trading. You'll deposit with Visa, Wire Transfers, Klarna or Skrill. The currencies supported are Swiss Franc, British Pound, US Greenback, and Euro and using a credit or debit card limits deposits to less than $/£/€/?10,00zero in one day and $/£/€/?40,000 in an exceedingly month.
Immediate Edgeisn’t licensed to handle your funds, it works with brokers to handle the cash once it's deposited.
Demo trading: Relying on the broker you're connected to, you can begin to practice trading with the Immediate Edge software. Some brokers do not have this feature on their platforms. Still, with the latter, you can test their options before you deposit cash to try and do live trading. With the demo options, you'll be able to familiarize yourself with the trading house before beginning to use real money to trade.
Trading: Before and when you've got switched on auto-trading, you would like to check the trading settings daily. You'll regulate some things including stop-loss orders and when to try to to them, amount to speculate per trade and how several trades to try to to per day. You'll be able to also choose that cryptocurrencies to trade, and you'll be able to select all the most in style ones together with Bitcoin and Ethereum. You also get to observe the profits/losses and decide if to continue and/or when to prevent.
​
https://preview.redd.it/c9scw5fkohm51.jpg?width=1280&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3d127be2887c4c8960023a8cf1b1f55297dbf250
Withdrawals, user verification, cost of using the app and alternative options
​
The payouts or withdrawals are made by filling letter of invitation type on the funds’ management page and it can take two operating days to replicate in your checking account. No fee is charged on withdrawals. You'll withdraw your cash including the capital while not a lot of problem on this app, that is better than several that don't enable withdrawals at any time
While some bots need verifications by asking for your ID and statements, this one will not. You are done once uploading your payment details. The bot charges a commission on profit. Besides, you get twenty fouseven client support on Immediate Edge
Immediate Edge may be a legit, secure, user-friendly trading application for crypto, stocks, and choices. It has a zealous customer service and reports a high success rate. Another smart robot we have recently reviewed is Bitcoin Professional
We tend to hope that this review helped you to make a decision concerning this trading app. Additionally, subscribe to our web site to be invariably notified concerning new software from this industry. For live reviews subscribe to our Youtube Channel or FB Page.
​
https://www.immediateedge.org/
https://www.facebook.com/immediateedge/
https://www.pinterest.co.uk/immediateedge/
https://twitter.com/EdgeImmediate
https://www.instagram.com/immediateedge/