In this blog, we will talk about Descending triangle – How to trade it?
A descending triangle is a bearish chart pattern that is formed when the price of an asset creates a series of lower highs and a flat support line. This pattern is typically seen as a sign that the asset’s price is likely to decrease.
The descending triangle pattern is formed by two trendlines. The first trendline is a horizontal support line that connects the lows of the asset’s price and it can be an area of support too instead of the trendline. The second trendline is a downward-sloping line that connects the highs of the asset’s price. As the price of the asset approaches the support line or support area, it is unable to break through and instead bounces off, creating lower highs.
One of the key characteristics of a descending triangle is the decrease in volume as the pattern forms. We can see that in the chart of Tata motors, the volume has nearly died off. This decrease in volume is a sign that there is a lack of buying pressure and that the bears are in control.
Descending Triangle Pattern – Tata motors
It is often considered a bearish pattern and it is believed that the price of the asset will eventually break through the support line, leading to a significant price decline.
Traders often use the descending triangle pattern as a signal to enter a short position. It is important to note that the descending triangle pattern is not always accurate and it should be used in conjunction with other technical analysis tools to confirm the price direction.
Ascending triangle is by far the most reliable pattern, out of multiple continuation patterns. In this blog, we will learn to identify an Ascending triangle pattern, and will also try to learn How to trade Ascending triangle Pattern. Let us understand the pattern in brief. Lets learn How to trade Ascending triangle Pattern.
An ascending triangle is formed when the price is restricted between an upward sloping trendline (support) and a horizontal trendline or area (resistance).
Look at the picture below.
Godfrey Phillips – Ascending Triangle Breakout
The green trendline is upward sloping trendline and it acts as support. The price bounced up several times from this trendline and is demand zone.
The Rectangular highlighted area in the chart acts as resistance or the supply zone. Price tried to cross this area several times, but it had to face rejections.
As the upward sloping trendline(support) comes closer to Rectangular area (Resistance), we are nearing a possible indecision zone. Whenever support and Resistance zone converge, the probability of breakout increases.
Since Ascending triangle is a continuation pattern, the price keeps moving in the same direction as before the formation of Ascending triangle. The patten might not always give decent breakout, but we can combine Ascending triangle with other indicators like Volume, MACD, RSI to improve the win probability.
Depending on the risk appetite, stoploss can be placed either below upward sloping trendline or below the breakout Candle.
We should stick to buy trades after breakout on the higher side. This will improve our win probability, as the momentum before the breakout was on the same direction. Always trade in the direction of momentum, and you will end up on winning side in longer run.
I am often asked, how did I pick up trading and how did I learn trading? At the end of conversation, I would forward some link. The links often depend on the questions asked. I will update this blog with all the questions possibly asked and answers to them.
Q. How do I select a broker to open my account.
The answer to this question varies depending on what the person is looking for. For beginners, Zerodha is great. I would also recommend Fyers since it has some cool features for advanced traders.
I started trading in 2016 and back then we had very few reliable sources to learn. I had put my time into multiple youtube videos but I found zerodha varsity blog to be complete and concise. Please check this out.
Q. Where from one can learn about Options, Premium, Put Call etc?
You can learn about basic terminologies from on of the youtube video here. His language is simple and easy to understand. You can also read this article here.
Q. What are tradable patterns and how do I learn about them?
Today I would like to write about a useful but less talked about topic today. The post will talk about “trading index futures with minimal margin”. It is useful for new traders, as well as someone who is working on improving their hit ratio. Hit ratio is the percentage of trades that go in your favour as compared to the total trades that you take.
As a beginner, it is normal that one cannot take a trade in the Index futures just because the lot size is big and the losses can run huge if we keep a decent stop loss. If we keep a small stop loss, we will mostly get it hit since futures and options are highly volatile.
What if I tell you that you can trade futures and options with a lot size of your own, that is you can scale your lot size according to your stop loss. I have described in an earlier post, how to scale your lot size according to your stop loss.
However, we can only trade in Nifty and Banknifty and not other stocks listed in the futures and options segment, and we are not trading in nifty and banknifty futures but an equivalent of nifty and BankNifty futures. Let us jump into the topic right away.
The equivalent of Bank Nifty is bankbee. However, we have to follow the spot chart of the Banknifty index but buy/sell Bankbee as per the quantity of your choice. Remember to keep a stoploss as per your judgement. One can check index price and decide a stoploss in bankbee.
It is not a straightforward thing to do, but a simple suggestion is to check the time at which price had touched stoploss last time in the Index chart and check the price in Bankbee at the same time. The candle close in the 5-minute time frame in bankbee can be a decent stoploss price.
Bankbee and banknifty move in the same direction by almost the same percentage. The benefit of trading in bankbee is that we do not need to buy a full lot to take a position. Instead, we can buy a single bankbee just like buying a single stock of ITC or Reliance. The problem with buying bank Nifty futures is that even a hundred rupees stop loss a stop loss of 2500 rupees per lot.
If we make the same position in by bankbee which trades at almost 400 rupees nowadays, we can virtually take the same trade with smaller stoploss. It reduces the amount that is risked in a trade as well as the amount that can be gained in the same trade. Let me tell you how to take a trade in bankbee.
Let us look at today’s chat of bank Nifty index. We found a buying opportunity at 11:45 a.m. and the trade hits take profit at 12:45 a.m. Remember to make an entry and exit following the index chart.
Nifty Bank 5 min chart – 18th October 2021
We can buy bankbee at 11:45am and wait for stoploss or target. We can see that the target is hit at 12:45
Let us look at bankbee chart for the same day, and how it progressed during the same time frame.
Bankbees 5 min chart – 18th October 2021
Entry and exits are shown by blue arrows in the bankbee chart. The entry price would be near 400.29 and the exit would be at 402. For intraday trades, you get leverage of 5X in Zerodha for Bankbee and the effective buy price would drop to 80.08. You end up making 1.7 rs by buying one quantity for 80.08 rs. This turns out to be 2.1 per cent for the day which is quite good.
The equivalent of Nifty is niftybee and you can virtually trade nifty futures by making a position in Nifty bee.
One point to be noted is that the niftybee and bankbee often have a small gap in best buyer and seller price and one must use a limit order to enter and exit to the extent it is possible. Once you are confident in trading bankbee and nifty bee, you can try out nifty and banknifty futures.
What are your thoughts on this post, let us know in the comments.
How to pick long term stocks? This question puzzles every investor during their initial days in the stock market. No set of filters can work always in the stock market. The market is very dynamic but following few basics goes a long way. Let us look at some of them.
The bussiness should be profitable, quarter after quarter, year after year. Positive EPS is desirable.
Beginners should stick to businesses that are profitable. To check if a business is profitable, we can quickly check a ratio EPS which stands for Earnings per Share. you can read more about EPS here in this blog. A positive EPS number is advised. Positive EPS shows that the company is making profits. We can check EPS of any stock by looking at google or visiting websites like Moneycontrol etc.
PE ratio
PE ratio helps us to filter a stock out of its peers for investment. The IT sector has multiple companies listed on the stock exchange, which one is relatively underpriced? We can answer this question by looking at the PE ratio of every stock listed in the IT sector. As a rule of thumb, the lesser the PE ratio, the more it can grow to reach the P/E of its peers. P/E is nothing but the current price of stock/EPS.
PEG
PEG stands for PE / Earnings Growth. This ratio goes a long way to indicate how the business might perform in future. The lower the PEG ratio, the better the stock is. Negative PEG is a warning that the business is either making losses or expected to make losses in future. A very insightful explanation of the PEG ratio can be read here.
Debt to equity ratio
Suppose you have to start a business and you need some working capital. You can use some of your own savings but if you run short of capital, you ask your friends/banks to fund your business and promise to pay back. The amount that you have to pay back, is a liability. Debt to equity is a simple measure of the amount you have to pay back/Your own capital infused in business. Even if your business doesn’t perform well, you will be under pressure to return money to friends/banks. But if you did not ask for any help from friends and banks, you have one less issue.
Ideally, debt to equity of 0 is desirable. This simply means that you do not have to pay back anyone.
Mutual fund holdings
Mutual funds have very qualified fund managers at the helm of affairs. They are vastly experienced and usually are early and fast movers. They know when to enter a stock; if they should keep buying it, if they should book partial profits and if it is the right time to exit the stock. We can take a clue from the activity of mutual fund managers in a particular stock. We can check mutual fund activity by clicking this link here and inputting the scrip name. Suppose we entered CDSL, we can see how the holdings of funds houses change over time.
Change in Funds holdings over time
Dividend yield
The dividend yield is a ratio in percentage, which conveys how much dividend is paid that year/Current market price of the scrip. Higher the dividend yield, the better it is. Zero or low dividend yield should not stop us from buying a stock though. Dividend yield should act as one of the last filters when one is confused between two businesses with very similar potential.
One of the questions that I often come across is, “How to place a stop loss? What should be the maximum loss that I should take before closing the position in a losing trade?“
Money management is one of the most important skills that a trader should possess in order to become successful in the stock market. Stop loss is what helps us in managing our capital in an efficient way. Proper money management ensures that one can take multiple Trades without wiping of our entire capital.
You should always make sure that the maximum loss you should take in a single trade should not be more than five per cent of your capital. So if you are starting with a capital of 10000 Rupees, you should not lose more than 500 rupees in a single trade. Similarly, if your capital is 100000 rupees, you should make sure that you do not lose more than 5000 rupees in a single trade.
The initial capital will vary from person to person so would the maximum loss that a person can take. If you follow proper money management, you can take 20 trades at a time. I do not suggest you take 20 trades at a time, I am just pointing out that you should be wrong 20 times to lose your entire capital.
What if you did not follow money management with a maximum 5 % stop loss? You let your losses run huge and maybe after 4-5 wrong trades, your entire capital will be wiped out. Let us learn to place a proper stop loss and preserve our capital.
Once you have decided how much maximum loss you as a trader can take in a single trade, now you have to decide the quantity that you can buy or sell. How can you decide the quantity? Quantity would be nothing but the maximum loss you can take divided by the maximum loss per share that you have decided based on your analysis of support, resistance, EMA, 200 EMA, trend lines etc.
Suppose ITC is trading at 200 rupees and has strong support at 198 rupees. You are hopeful that ITC would not breach 198 rupees level on the downside. This can act as good support and your stop loss could be placed below 198. That would be a stop loss of 2 Rupees per share.
A person with an initial capital of 10000 can lose a maximum of 500 if 5% rule of money management is kept in mind. The trader has also noted that he can place a stop loss of 2 rupees on a buy trade in ITC. So the trader can go into the buy trade with 250 quantity.
Similarly, if a trader has an initial capital of 100000 rupees, he can go into the buy trade in ITC with 2500 quantity.
Have you ever thought of what you will do after your retirement from work generally at the age of 60? This question will have different answers for many people. Some people will just stay away from any work and enjoy the time with their families, children and grandchildren. Some will keep running small errands to earn their living and the rest might have to depend on their children for their various needs that might arise in their old age.
Nevertheless, whatever the answer might fit your case, it is always better to remain financially independent even after the retirement.
National Pension Scheme(NPS) was started in 2004 by the Govt of India for the Govt Employees but in the year 2009 onwards it was thrown open to all the individuals who are in between the age of 18-60 years. It is regulated by the Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority.
For more information on regulations you can check out here – NPS
Futures and options are derivative products. The value of the derivative product is determined by an underlying asset. The underlying asset can be stock, index or commodity. We will restrict the discussion to the equity market as the aim of the blog is to give a clear understanding of options and how good is option buying. Those who have some idea of Futures and options would find this blog really helpful. If you are a beginner, and interested in learning about futures and options, I would urge you to go through these two posts and return to this post later.
We would learn about options from an option buyers standpoint in this post. We would cover option selling in a later post.
When would you want to buy a stock or an index option
A. We can buy an option when we want to trade a directional move
After some analysis, you feel nifty can show a sharp up move and you want to make some gain out of the would-be movement. What are your options? We would restrict ourselves to buying option. You know you have to but a Call option. Let’s see this chart for our test case.
Nifty Breaking trendline resistance at 14:45 on 2nd June indicating a potential for up move
Let us go for buying a call. Here we have three choices, buying deep in the money call option, buying at the market call option and buying out of the money call option. All these scenarios are analyzed and we see that all these turn profitable. We can clearly see that choosing the best strike price has the potential to affect your profitability. Although when one buys deep in the money option, he pays less for the time decay and pays mostly for the intrinsic value of the option. Small reversals do not affect the Profit and loss in such a position. You can go through this blog to understand time decay and intrinsic value.
Entry Price
Price per lot
Lot Size
Lots you can buy with 5 Lakh
Exit / Day Close Price
Profit at day close
Nifty 15200 CE 3rd June 2021
342
25650
75
19
395
75525
Nifty 15500 CE 3rd June 2021
74.85
5613.75
75
89
108.05
127158.75
Nifty 15800 CE 3rd June 2021
6.85
513.75
75
973
8.20
98516
Profitability table for call buy
B. We can buy an option when we want to hedge a cash Position
Let us understand this with an example. Suppose you are very bullish on ITC in long term. You have bought 3200 shares of ITC at an average price of 200₹. You sense that in short term ITC may correct by 20 per cent, and it might go to 160₹ per share. In spite of that, you don’t want to exit the cash position since there is always a chance that it might not correct much and maybe rally up.
In such a case, you can still protect your holdings against the suspected correction of 40₹. This can be done by buying at the Money put or Deep in the Money Put. Note that the Put option can be bought in multiples of lot size. Right now the lot size of ITC is 3200 and one lot of ITC put can help in hedging 3200 ITC shares. We can buy ITC Put of 200 strike price and we are protected against any downside in ITC beyond 200₹.
If the ITC closes at 170₹ at end of the contract period, you can make a gain of 96000 (minus the premium paid) in Put option. Though you will see the value of the holdings of ITC has decreased by 96000, but you have not exited the holding value and booked no loss in it. You can still close the holdings position at 170₹. In such a case you will end up making no loss as the gain in the put option is same as the loss booked in cash holdings. This way we can hedge our positions in cash segment.
C. We can buy an option when we want to hedge a Futures position
This is similar to hedging a cash position, except that we have gone long in futures and bought the Put option to hedge long position. Suppose you are very bullish on ITC and bought one lot of ITC futures. The average buy price is 200₹. You sense that the price can dip a little in the next few days. You can either exit with a predefined stop-loss or hedge the position by buying at the money or in the money put option of a suitable strike price. Any loss in futures position will be covered by put option. In case of upside, the gain would be ideally infinite. So you can make a limited loss, unlimited gain strategy using this.
D. We can buy an option when we want to hedge an option sell/short Position
We can sell options as well. You can read more about prospects of options selling here in this blog. Options selling requires good capital and money management skills. If one is not active enough, the losses can be infinite. To protect yourself against infinite loss, you can buy an option too. This will ensure that the loss is finite.
ITC has been trading rangebound for quite some time. We suspect that it cannot go any lower than 200₹. We can sell PUT option of strike price 200₹. We can track trading price live at NSE website here. Suppose 200₹ strike price PUT is trading at 1.2₹. If we sell this option, we get a credit of 3840₹. This credit amount is product of lot size and trading price.
Maximum loss in selling this option is almost 6,40,000₹ if ITC price goes to zero. if we do not want to take a risk of 640000₹ to gain 3840₹, we can buy a PUT option of lower strike price in this case. One can buy 190₹ strike price Put option and limit the losses. We can make various options strategies using buy and sell combinations. Although option selling has a higher probability of success, it comes with a risk of huge losses. We can limit these losses by buying an option.
Are you an office going person, or doing work from home(WFH) these days from morning to evening and do not have much time to look for what is going in the market, and are looking to find some avenues for investing your funds/savings/assets in some asset classes for excepting a better return, then this the right place for you. After reading this page, you will understand the basics of Mutual Funds and how you can invest in mutual funds of various categories.
What are Mutual funds ? Mutual Funds is a mixed bag of various asset classes or financial instruments. Based on the type of the asset class or the financial instrument, mutual funds can be classified into different types-
Equity Mutual Funds
Debt Mutual Funds
Hybrid Funds ( Equity + Debt Funds)
Let us check out in detail about these funds.
Equity Mutual funds – In these funds, the fund managing company also know as the Asset Management Company(AMC) takes the amount from the customer, and invests the amount in the equity shares of various companies of different sectors. The percentage allocation in different shares is decided by the fund manager of that fund to maximize the return on investment for its customers. These funds are High Risk and High return funds as they are susceptible to the fluctuations in the market, but in the long term, they can generate a good return for your wealth creation and future lifestyle goals.
Debt Mutual Funds – These mutual funds are the low risk, low return funds usually preferred by the conservative investors who wish to invest their savings in some safe instruments which are always increasing. In such type of funds, the fund manager invests the amount into various Debt instruments such as the Govt Securities issued by RBI, Reverse Repo Rate Instruments, State/Central Govt Treasury Bills, Bonds etc. These funds move slow and steadily but at a constant pace and are considered as the most safe funds.
Hybrid Funds – These are not a separate category fund but it is a mixture of the above two funds in certain ratio such as 50:50 or 60:40 or anything chosen by the AMC or the fund manager of the fund. They are the most popular funds for those type of investors who want a high return but also don’t want a high exposure for risky funds.
We will be updating this section with stock for the month for swing trades. It will also explain in detail the reason for picking it and risk to reward ratio. We will also upload an excel sheet with returns and loss updated and other details, which will in a way act as a trading journal.
