Recent Posts
A Trade A Day
Return To Blog Listing
A daily source for swing and day trading ideas in the stock, futures, and forex market.
Recent Posts Tagged With 'Strategy'
Trading Success and Testosterone
Here is a story from Scientific American on trading success and testosterone. According to the story, the traders in the study had a higher level of testosterone in their saliva on days when they beat their daily average. The story goes on to state ...
Lazy Breakouts Part II
Jeff White from thestockbandit.net has an excellent video on trading those breakouts that seem to go nowhere fast. I routinely visit Jeff’s blog. The concepts discussed are always on topic and useful. I’ve never been a paid member of J...
Lazy Breakouts
I wanted to bring your attention to a concept that the wild1 wrote about at his blog. The article is entitled Shave the Losses and the key sentence that still is in my mind is “If you are holding on to an investment/stock and you aren’t makin...
Trader Death
Trader Death, by my definition, is when a trader’s career is ended financially. This can happen many ways, but typically it’s a big blowout ala my first big blowup. Or the “death by a thousand paper cuts” mode which seems to h...
My Life is Hopeless
A CEO buddy of mine has an excellent saying. He’s always telling his employees “Hope is not a strategy”. I think he’s a pretty good CEO, but I guess I might wonder how well his company is doing if he’s constantly telling...
Do Trading Ideas Help or Hurt?
I am re-reading one of my all-time favorite trading books “Trader Vic - Methods of a Wall Street Master“. Vic talks about a trading idea he had as the result of keeping the books at Lehman Brothers. In turns out that several of the partners w...
Did Anyone Make Money Today?
So, I’ve been getting sucked back into day trading. If I am honest with myself and my readers, I don’t want to do it. I think there’s a fundamental flaw with day trading. That flaw is the number of decisions a trader is forced to ma...
When Will This Recession End…
A little MSM for you reading pleasure: http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/03/17/poll.national/index.html Ok, so how do you know this Recession is going to end. Honestly, it needs to get worse. As far as sentiment goes, when it can’t get any darke...
How To Overcome Emotional Trading
It gets stated ad nauseam that successful traders control their emotions. Greed and fear cannot enter the decision making process. The reason why traders have trading plans is to mitigate the input of emotions into trading decisions. But I’m not a ...
Scared is Not an Option
I was having a conversation with another trader yesterday on the subject of trading ideas. What a surprise! Well, we were discussing the merits of a setup he was considering and I did my best to point out, what I considered, to be the merits/faults i...
Trading Traps
I have been lamenting the Fed’s insistence on playing to wallstreet. Sometimes I wonder if someone at the Federal Reserve has a personal vendetta against the value of the dollar. I know Mr. B and company are just trying to right this ship that...
Bucket Shops of the 21st Century
I have a love/hate relationship with the Forex “market”. I had always wanted to give forex a try, so about a year ago, I opened an account with Oanda.com, now fxtrade.com. The account size was very small, $300. I’ve been trying to see p...
What Goes High Must Go Higher
Have you seen the amazing bull market in commodities? Let’s take a look at a few charts: Been sleeping under a rock? Oil has been on a rampage! Gold looking good. Some experts are predicting $3500/oz! Soy! Soy! Soy! Even Milhouse could make ...
My First Blowup
I thought it would be interesting to share my first blowup with you. Since I was thirteen, I’ve had a love of the stock market. I’m not sure I can tell you exactly why. Maybe it’s the thought of making money out of nothing. Perhaps, it’s the...
All You Need is a Little Bit of Discipline
So, where I live in New York State, there’s an idiotic commercial running for the New York State Lottery. Don’t get me started on what a bane government-sanctioned lottery is to society. Sure you have to be mathematically challenged to p...
The Market Knows Something I Don’t
Seems like countless blogs are tracking the symmetrical triangle that has formed. I did a quick scan of the Dow 30 components and it’s interesting to see the bullish patterns forming in these stocks. CAT DIS JNJ MCD MMM I’m seeing cups, d...
There’s No Sure Thing But This is Close
Do you have a go-to setup? Something you know has a high probability of success. Something you know that when you see it, you’re going to make money. I have one setup that is my “money trade”. It’s hard not to get excited when...
Eagerly Awaiting Direction
It’s been a long weekend and I’m eager to see which way the indexes are going to break. In the meantime, here are a few of my own posts that I think are worth your time. Trading Traps is my primary intraday setup. It works well as a filte...
Trading Like I Don’t Care
Want to know how I trade the same setups day in and day out? How I consistently execute my trading plan? I trade like I don’t care. It’s really easy to do. All you need to do is trade small. So you say, “Well wait a second, I need t...
Here’s an Easy Way to Consistent Trading
My first attempts at trading were comical. Looking over my first journal makes me laugh out loud. The indecision, the myriad of trading methods, the money I lost. It was a farce. I tried anything and everything I could think of to be successful. I sh...
Superbowl Trading
I’m watching the Superbowl pregame and something struck me that I thought I would share… We see Tom Brady and Eli Manning play maybe 30 to 45 minutes over the course of a 3 hour Superbowl game. But what we don’t see are the hours th...
Everything’s a Flag
This part four of my five part series on the patterns I trade. The Flag Pattern is a common pattern in all trending markets. The frequency of this pattern combined with its ease of identification could lead one to believe that it’s predictive quali...
How to Trade Everything
It amazes me, the universe of ETFs that are available for trading. ETFs or Exchange Traded Funds are index funds that attempt to mimic the performance of a group of stocks or other financial instruments. They trade like stock, so you can buy and sell...
Thanks for Nothing Mr. B
Tuesday was a disappointment. I haven’t felt this let down since I was 17, sitting in the back of Dad’s car with Miss Mary what’s her name. Why can’t the Fed leave well enough alone. I wanted carnage. I wanted to see the marke...
An Appropriate Demotivator for Tuesday’s Impending Carnage
Sitting here watching futures trade when I should be writing a post for tomorrow. Thought this demotivator would be appropriate. Check out Despair.com for more. We’ve got a lot farther to drop. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but the US economy h...
Another break lower…time to sit.
Wasn’t it Livermore who said, “it isn’t your thinking that makes you money, it’s your sitting”. Something to that effect, but I think I didn’t get it quite right. The point is that the big money is made in the big ...
Love Triangles
My third installments in my five part series on the patterns I trade is Triangles. Or more accurately, my love of them. Once again, investopedia has an excellent definition of a Triangle. Academic definitions of triangles aside, what makes them so gr...
Trading 1-2-3’s
This is my second article in my 5 part series on the patterns I trade. In part 1 I discussed trading bases. In part 2 we’ll take a look at one of my all time favorite day trading patterns. It’s called the 1-2-3. I first learned this patte...
Trading Bases
This is the first part in my five part series on the patterns I trade. In technical analysis, there are 10’s of patterns, with 100’s of indicators and about a million ways to interpret what it all means. With all these options, it’s easy for a ...
Merge Time Frames to Make More Money
One method introduced to me that I find useful is syncing time frames to support my trades. In the past, I found myself looking at trades in a vacuum. If I was trading a pattern forming in the daily charts, I would only look at the daily charts, but ...
