What is money management

文章来源：  文章作者：  发布时间：2008-03-09

>> What is money management

Money management is the process of analyzing trades for risk and potential profits, determining how much risk, if any, is acceptable and managing a trade position (if taken) to control risk and maximize profitability.
Many traders pay lip service to money management while spending the bulk of their time and energy trying to find the perfect (read: imaginary) trading system or entry method. But traders ignore money management at their own peril.

The importance of money management can best be shown through drawdown analysis.
Drawdown
Drawdown is simply the amount of money you lose trading, expressed as a percentage of your total trading equity. If all your trades were profitable, you would never experience a drawdown. Drawdown does not measure overall performance, only the money lost while achieving that performance. Its calculation begins only with a losing trade and continues as long as the account hits new equity lows.

Suppose you begin with an account of 10,000 and lose 2,000. Your drawdown would be 20%. On the 8,000 that remains, if you subsequently make 1,000, then lose 2,000, you now have a drawdown of 30% (8,000 + 1,000 - 2,000 =7,000, a 30% loss on the original equity stake of 10,000). But, if you made 4,000 after the initial 2,000 loss (increasing your account equity to 12,000), then lost another 3,000, your drawdown would be 25% (12,000 - 3,000 = 9,000, a 25% drop from the new equity high of 12,000).

Maximum drawdown is the largest percentage drop in your account between equity peaks. In other words, it's how much money you lose until you get back to breakeven. If you began with 10,000 and lost 4,000 before getting back to breakeven, your maximum drawdown would be 40%. Keep in mind that no matter how much you are up in your account at any given time--100%, 200%, 300%--a 100% drawdown will wipe out your trading account. This leads us to our next topic: the difficulty of recovering from drawdowns.

Even worse is that as the drawdowns deepen, the recovery percentage begins to grow geometrically. For example, a 50% loss requires a 100% return just to get back to break even (see Table 1 and Figure 1 for details).

Professional traders and money mangers are well aware of how difficult it is to recover from drawdowns. Those who succeed long term have the utmost respect for risk. They get on top and stay on top, not by being gunslingers and taking huge risks, but by controlling risk through proper money management. Sure, we all like to read about famous traders who parlay small sums into fortunes, but what these stories fail to mention is that many such traders, through lack of respect for risk, are eventually wiped out.

Guidelines that should help your long-term trading success.
1. Risk only a small percentage of total equity on each trade, preferably no more than 2% of your portfolio value. I know of two traders who have been actively trading for over 15 years, both of whom have amassed small fortunes during this time. In fact, both have paid for their dream homes with cash out of their trading accounts. I was amazed to find out that one rarely trades over 1,000 shares of stock and the other rarely trades more than two or three futures contracts at a time. Both use extremely tight stops and risk less than 1% per trade.

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