This post was contributed by a guest author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of Richard or MovetheMarkets.com
Babak has written an interesting article about the Cook Cumulative Tick Indicator. Be sure to enter his first Trading Blog Contest while you are there.
This post was contributed by a guest author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of Richard or MovetheMarkets.com
In the always excellent TraderFeed blog, I just read about a trading exercise that I would love to try for a few days. It’s about midway through the linked article. Here’s an excerpt with the gist of it:
Select a time frame to practice. You can do this by trading in simulation mode and setting your charts to 1 minute, 5 minute, 15 minute, 30 minute, or 60 minute bars. You have to stick with the setting you choose throughout the trading session. No toggling to shorter or longer time frames. Then set your alarm clock for a random time in the next few minutes. When the alarm rings, you have to enter the market within the next bar period (i.e., if you’re trading 5 min bars, you must enter in the next five minutes). You can either sell or buy the market, but you have to enter, and you have to manage the trade at your chosen time frame. Moreover, you have to hold your trade for at least one entire bar period (i.e., if you’re looking at 5 minute bars, you hold for at least 5 minutes, etc.), but no more than two. That means being prepared, in advance, with support/resistance levels or indicator levels that can serve as stops and as profit targets.
Sounds like an interesting experiment… I am often watching for patterns to show up, and say to myself “I could make 10 cents easy if I just went short right here.” But, I never do it, because I always want to see a defined setup. It does seem like I’m often right, though. Maybe that’s just how it seems… by doing a bit of a structured exercise I could gather some stats…
Only problem is I would prefer not to waste trading days sitting in demo mode making scalps at (literally!) random times. And, I don’t use a broker that does an after-hours replay of the markets like Cyber and others do. So… maybe I will just be on the lookout for a day when I’m pretty sure I won’t be making normal trades. Don’t know yet.
This post was contributed by a guest author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of Richard or MovetheMarkets.com
No gap plays for me again today. I didn’t see any really great setups. I am being very choosey, and it is paying off the last couple of weeks. Unfortunately, I had my first losing month in 8 months, down R 2.9. It is good I had a losing month, as it improved my trading by forcing me to look for the BEST setups. Today I traded SPY as per Oscar’s recommendation.
SPY Trade Short:
This post was contributed by a guest author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of Richard or MovetheMarkets.com
Was I profitable? Oh yes. If you look at my StockTickr calendar view, you’ll see that I only lost money one day this month. Also, until the last week of the month, I was making trades at least three days a week. Pretty good, for me, though I’m always trying to improve in that area.
What happened the last week? Well, I rarely trade Thursdays anyway, and I had connectivity issues on Wednesday, so that hurt. Also, I think I just (for whatever reason) was too slow to hit the big moves in time. I probably need more sleep!
I hereby declare March the “Month of Twitter“! Once I put their badge on my blog, several others quickly followed. Now, we have a pretty thriving community of twittering stock bloggers. I think it’s a much more efficient way to exchange thoughts and ideas than instant messaging. It’s less “chatty,” though it does degenerate into chat-like atmosphere at times. If you haven’t joined the fun, please do! Yes, they are overwhelmed by their sudden popularity, but have some faith that they will fix their server issues soon enough!
As I mentioned previously I’m going to report performance along each trade type from now on. So, that means lots more tables! Hopefully you’ll find it interesting, but if not the overall summary table is still here like always. I’m also going to start doing year-to-date alongside the monthly numbers. All of this is pulled right out of StockTickr, by the way…
Let’s get started! (If you want to know more about what the trade types mean, check out the post about them, which has the definitions I’m using) Here are the tables:
Here are a few prevalent misconceptions that didn’t deserve full articles:
Trading is simple. You are complicated.
No, you don’t.
No, you don’t.
No, they won’t.
Yes, you do:
This post was contributed by a guest author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of Richard or MovetheMarkets.com
I have been following trades from Oscar Carboni’s website. He is a 24 year trading veteran. The initial protective stop in this trade is far wider than I am used to compared to the target in this trade. I am going to trade SPY along with him as he trades the futures contract. I subtract the fair market premium from the futures price to get the SPY price. I get that at indexarb.com. One more thing…..STOPS ARE IN, EMOTIONS ARE OUT!!
SPY Trade:
This post was contributed by a guest author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of Richard or MovetheMarkets.com
There are two flavors of this misconception:
Let’s look at them in a little more detail…
Many tales of woe on beginning trader blogs start like this:
The markets were tanking, so I looked for short plays, and …
This post was contributed by a guest author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of Richard or MovetheMarkets.com
No trades yesterday. Two trades today in this crazy market.
Trade 1: OXY
Trade 2: GME
This post was contributed by a guest author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of Richard or MovetheMarkets.com
I’m thinking about doing a series of posts where I address what I feel are the most common misconceptions among new (and even established) traders. I see these again and again when reading books and blogs. I feel kinda funny using that angle, since I’m not a wise (or filthy rich) trading guru.
But, I do have strong opinions, and a website… so… here’s the first article :-)
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I closed out both of my swing positions this morning. My task now is to finalize my swing system and set up the plan. Here’s how the trades turned out: |
This post was contributed by a guest author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of Richard or MovetheMarkets.com
This post was contributed by a guest author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of Richard or MovetheMarkets.com
Trader Gav often quotes great traders - both past and present. Here are a few quotes you will never see there, but have helped me achieve mediocrity in my trading and life in general.
The first quote really shouldn’t require an explanation. Many people live their lives paralyzed by fear. Its that fear that won’t allow them to take risks. If you never try, you can’t fail. The very fact that you are reading this blog, you are setting yourself up for failure. Statistically, most of us won’t make it. Personally, I would rather try and fail, than to wonder if I could have achieved greatness. Btw, if you read the posts by the other MTM contributors, you actually may stand a chance of success. :-)
No crap, no crop. It takes plenty of fertilizer to grow a bountiful crop. To reap a harvest in our life, we often have to put up with a ton of crap. I edited that remark to maintain the family rating of this site. You get the picture.
Its a faith walk, not a cake walk. Whether your faith lies in God, yourself, or a combination of both, any journey worth pursuing takes faith. Nobody said it would be easy — especially trading.
This post was contributed by a guest author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of Richard or MovetheMarkets.com
I’m suffering through an internet outage right now. That means no Buzz Out Loud, no twittering, and no scans. I’m typing this on my blackberry, which is a powerful device, but it can’t run my market scans.
I’ll be dumping all my VZ stock as soon as I get reconnected, so you might want to short it in front of me, while you can ;-) (since I am not an investment advisor, you should probably laugh at that suggestion and go long instead) (especially since I seem to recall that the telecom index was one of the few up sectors today)
Called VZ this morning, and they say it’s a Dallas-wide outage that they’re working on. From my trusty Blackberry it appears I’m missing out on a fair amount of action today.
So, I’ve given the house servants the day off, and am doing my own shopping for once. And even getting the oil changed in my car! It feels good to be out among everyday folk. I’ve been considering putting a miniature village on the eastern lawn, so that I can “get away” like this whenever I want.
Hopefully by this evening I’ll be back online. I would go trade from Starbucks but I can never remember my T-mobile hotspot password….
This post was contributed by a guest author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of Richard or MovetheMarkets.com
I traded D.R. Horton, Inc. (NYSE: DHI) as an OR breakout short. I saw all of the homebuilders getting whacked after news of Lennar’s 73% profit decline. I used my trade box limits as I discussed yesterday. This one set up early, so I only had a bit over an hour for the trade to move. I didn’t have to wait that long, though: Read the rest of this entry »
| Stocks Mentioned In This Article | |
|---|---|
| Stock | Links |
| DHI |  |  |  |
This post was contributed by a guest author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of Richard or MovetheMarkets.com
I love twitter (have you seen twittervision? It just mesmerizes me… I keep telling myself I’ll stop watching after just a few more). But today, I was almost too twitter-happy for my own good! As I was posting about AMLN and GME, damn it if I didn’t miss my entry on GME! But, countless hours of chart-watching taught me how to get in, anyway (ok, and a smidge of luck) (but mostly skill) (but if it hadn’t worked out it would have been entirely bad luck).
Here’s the 15min chart, where I’ve thoughtfully pointed out the dummy candle that I planned to play against:
So, when I looked back from my twitter screen to my chart, it was already at 31.20. My desired entry was 31.10. Since I wasn’t going to bet that it would actually break the OR high, I didn’t like the Risk:Reward ratio getting in at that 31.20 level. So, I watched, and two minutes later got what I was wishing for… a brief drop down to my entry level. I saw the bid hit 31.11, and the trade frequency dropped way off for a couple seconds.
That often happens, and I imagine it’s because a lot of traders who weren’t distracting themselves surely got in the stock at 31.10ish. So, when the bid gets there, they all have to think for a second about whether they want to risk being in the red or not. Or maybe I’m completely off base. But whatever is actually happening at these points, I’ve seen them a huge number of times, and I felt the odds of a run back up to at least the 31.20 level were good (and then you have another decision point, as people that did buy in up there are now breaking even… do they get out or stay in the game?).
1-minute chart of the trade:
This is the type of decision you really can’t hesitate about. As soon as I got my order in, prints started going off, and I was filled at 31.135. And, about 20 seconds later, I got out at 31.32. I reported on twitter that it was 1R, but when I added it up the partial fills later it turned out to be only 0.95R. Still, not bad for ugly days like we’ve been having lately!
If you glance back up at that 15min chart, you’ll see that it never went more than 1 or 2 cents higher than my exit point. That always feels spectacular. You might ask why I choose that point for my exit. After all, isn’t the OR high closer to 31.45? Well as I wrote waaaaay back in July of 2006, I like to drill down to low-level charts to see what’s really going on. I don’t always do it, but especially when I’m trading long on a down day, for instance, I’m more apt to think about that.
Anyway, on that 1-minute chart, you can see that the stock was never above 31.30 for more than a fraction of a single 1-minute candle (all the prices above 31.30 are just wicks). So, for my purposes, 31.30 felt more like the true price to beat. And, today, I wasn’t going to bet on it.
I wish I were seeing more trades to take, but I’ve been making pretty consistent trades every couple days, anyway. It adds up, but doesn’t have the thrill of a big winner. Would be nice to have one of those this week. We’ll see!