Tips Forex by Larry Williams - “Ease of execution, clarity and the art of keeping it simple.”

When not standing in front of an audience or writing a book, Larry Williams is usually a man of few words. But his reputation speaks volumes. In 1987, he became a household name in the trading world by winning the coveted Robbins World Cup Championship in Futures by turning $10,000 into $1.1 million in less than 12 months. (It’s a record that still stands, and his daughter Michelle still holds second place.) But his was no “overnight” success. Williams first began trading in the late 1960s and has been doing so full-time ever since. He has given hundreds of seminars showing traders around the world his basic, no-nonsense approach to making money in the markets. He is the only trading teacher of which this author is aware to trade $1 million in the market live, and in real-time during a three-day period, share a percentage of his winnings with students in his Million-Dollar Challenge seminars. He is the author of a more than a dozen books, the latest of which are The Right Stock at the Right Time—Prospering in the Coming Good Years

(2002) and Trade Stocks & Commodities with the Insiders—The Secrets of the COT Report (2005).

I first met Williams at one of his last Million- Dollar Challenges in St. Croix and was immediately impressed with his down-toearth approach to giving seminars and trading. One of my most memorable lessons was his counter-intuitive pessimistic approach to each trade. If the trader is overly optimistic heading into a trade, he or she will be less likely to get out when a stop is hit. However, by expecting a trade to lose, Williams won’t overstay his welcome when the trade turns against him. When it’s profitable, he is pleasantly surprised but tightens his trailing stops. Such an approach is essential in preventing catastrophic loss by staying in a losing trade. Williams sent me six powerful rules on emotional and money management, finding the system that is right for you and system adaptability to changing markets but here is what I believe to be the essence of his trading approach:

“Your trading system must be easy to follow, and by that I mean the rules and entries cannot be too complicated, and in this day of electronic tradin, should be able to be implemented with any standard trading platform. Part and parcel of this is that there cannot be conflict within a system regarding orders for the next trade. In other words, it can’t give a buy price and short price right next to each other. In order to pull the trigger, you must have clear entry and exit signals without conflicts. Clarity of your trading rules is also critical and the system must be back-testable. If you are not able to backtest it, it may be because the rules are not clear enough, but in any event, you don’t have a system.