War and Financial Markets: Things to do and NOT to do

24 בפבר׳ 2022

Given the current fundamental situation - Russian-Ukrainian conflict - we would like to remind some good practices for the small investor and retail trader taking inspiration from the excellent book by Cosimo Natoli and Stefano Natoli "Terrorism, War and Financial Markets" published by Trading Library. In this interesting book the authors analyze how financial markets have reacted to important events such as terrorist attacks and wars.

As we know one of the principles of technical analysis described in the very famous "Technical Analysis of Financial Markets" by John J. Murphy is that: "the market discounts everything" and that is that the price movement already incorporates all those factors of fundamental, political, psychological etc.....

Let's go back to the above advice for the trader and the retail investor - assuming that the professional trader already has strategies and procedures to handle this type of situation (one of all derivative hedging):

Things NOT to do:
- Do not panic, normally markets bounce back and therefore don't close the position immediately as a panic selling
- Do not be influenced by news - that tend to amplify events - by "experts" that you do not know or by friends
- Do not trade intraday if you cannot follow real-time positions (this is always true) and if you do not have experience, in general do not take positions in moments of uncertainty and do not mediate at a loss
- Don't be disheartened by losses (possible stop-losses).

Things to do:
- Remain calm and have a positive attitude
- Inform yourself appropriately from different sources about the situation, keeping a critical spirit about what you read and listen to
- Continue to follow your plan and strategy
- Keep a note of lessons learned and the emotions and feelings you have, including lessons learned from losses, take the opportunity to study and learn something new.