Take account of ecology. Where does the other side live? What does he eat? Does he respond best to slow or fast lures? Always consider the rhythms. Try to synchronize your activities with how fast or slow the currents are moving.

Everything is booked together. To get good results, pay attention to language, science, economics, literature, religion, and art. Remember Hamlet, “A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.”

If you must know how good you are, enter a contest or tournament, but remember that completely different techniques are appropriate here from those that win in the normal day-to-day fray. The winner of a contest has nothing to lose and therefore takes much more risk than would be appropriate for you or I even to consider in the usual course of events.

Above all, be a contrarian. Once you hit a winner you’re very unlikely to find a winner in that same place. The best fisj swim deep and all fish are not caught with he same flies.

Everything is affected by the weather. When the moon is full the easiest pickings are often nearest at hand. The wind is your friend but often the direction of the wind changes the play and the response of the prey.

The weakest preys are the easiest to catch. When you see red on the battlefield, prepare to reel in the bigger winners.

Stay calm. Keep your emotions in check. A loud voice can upset your concentration and give away your position. The time for exhilaration is after you’ve bagged the winner and you’ve gone home to reflect on what you did right or wrong. Adapt a scientific approach. Keep records of what’s working and what’s not. Once you analyze the record you will be able to see what changes have the best likelihood of success. Especially if you’re doing badly, change something. Try another tack - change your bait. But be humble enough to know that there are many others better than you at the game and try to learn from these legends. Many of the greats offer seminars for “reasonable” fees and are happy to share their wisdom with you.

The cycles are always changing. Winning techniques for the morning are completely different from those at noon or the close.

Position Sizing is the part of the trading system that determines how large a position you will put on throughout the course of a trade

Professional gamblers have long claimed that there are two basic position-sizing strategies - martingale and anti-martingale. Martingale strategies increase one’s bet size when equity decreases (during a losing streak). Anti-martingale strategies, on the other hand, increase one’s bet size during winning streaks or when one’s equity increases.

If you’ve ever played roulette or craps, the purest form of martingale strategy might have occurred to you. It simply amounts to doubling your bet size when you lose. For example, if you lose $1, you bet $2. If you lose $2 then you bet $4. If you lose $4, you bet $8. When you finally win, which you will eventually do, you will be ahead by your original bet size.

Casinos love people who play such martingale strategies. First, any game of chance will have losing streaks. And when the probability of winning is less than 50 percent, the losing streaks could be quite significant. Let’s assume that you have a streak of 10 consecutive losses. If you had started betting $1, then you will have lost $2,047 over the streak. You will now be betting $2048 to get your original dollar back. Thus, your win-loss ratio at this point - for less than a 50:50 bet - is 1 to 4,095. You will be risking over $4,000 to get $1 in profits. And to make matters worst, since some people might have unlimited bankrolls, the casinos have betting limits. At a table that allows a minimum bet of $1, you probably couldn’t risk more than $100. As a result, martingale betting strategies generally do not work - in the casinos or in the market.

If your risk continues to increase during a losing streak, you will eventually have abig enough streak to cause you to go bankrupt. And even if your bankroll was unlimited, you would be commiting yourself to risk-to-reward strategies that no human being could tolerate psychologically.

Anti-martingale strategies, which call for larger risk during a winning streak, do work - both in gambling arena and in the investment arena. Smart gamblers know to increase their bets, within certain limits, when they are winning. And the same is true for trading or investing. Position-sizing systems that work call for you to increase your position size when you make money. That holds for gambling, for trading, and for investing.

The purpose of postion-sizing is to tell you how many units (shares or contracts) you going to put on, given the size of your account. For example, a position-sizing decision might be that you don’t have enough money to put on any positions because the risk is too big. It allows you to determine your reward and risk characteristics by determining how many units you will risk on a given trade and in each trade in a portfolio. It also helps you equalize you trade exposure in the elements in your portfolio.

Some people believe they are “doing an adequate job of position sizing” by having a “money management stop.” Such a stop would be one in which you get out of your position when you lose a predetermined amount of money - say $1,000. However, this kind of stop does not tell you “how much” or “how many,” so it really as nothing to do with position sizing. Controlling risk by determining the amount of loss if you are stopped out is not the same as controlling risk through a position-sizing model that determines “how many” or if you can even afford to hold one position at all.