I have been long VMW since I bought it yesterday at the Open around 79.50. It closed near its high so I held it as a swing position. This morning I bid for more stock about $1 below where it closed yesterday, which had been the prior day’s morning resistance (see chart below). My bid got hit before the market … Read More
A Trade from a PlayBook Reader
An SMB reader, who is not on our desk (yet?), read The PlayBook and was inspired to co-opt a particular concept for her own trading. We encourage all our readers to develop a methodology for your trading. Building a PlayBook of the trades that make the most sense to you is that methodology. Here is her PlayBook trade. Mike Bellafiore … Read More
Mike Bellafiore Goes to Singapore as a Phillip iFest Mentor
Well-renowned trader and author, Mike Bellafiore, will be in Singapore for one weekend only to share his trading methods at the Phillip Investment Festival (iFest) 2013. Bellafiore is the author of the “trading classic” One Good Trade, and co-founder of SMB Capital, a proprietary trading firm in New York City. Bellafiore is also the co-founder of SMBU, an educational company that … Read More
Bad Luck Boeing?
On Friday the news hit of a fire on a Boeing 787. Yes, that same plane that BA was forced to take out of service because of lithium battery fires during flight. I don’t know about you but I prefer my flights without fires on board. BA tweaked and fixed the battery issue and the 787s were back in flight. … Read More
The 3PM Bull Basket
I was sitting on our trading desk looking at SPY this Friday. I felt a very strange sense of déjà vu that it was 1998, the year I was relative strength trading semi-conductor stocks, and MSFT, INTL, DELL. This was before the Internet Boom but when these sectors were red hot. At 3PM we would add to our strongest-acting stocks … Read More
Mastering Breakouts: Do You Have a System to Identify and Trade Breakouts?
I read a statistic several years ago that the majority of what traders call “breakouts” fail. For this very reason there are algorithmic trading programs that fade breakouts. And there are some manual traders who love to fade all breakouts as well. There are many others who like to load up in the direction of the breakout 100% of the … Read More
Real Companies Get Bought When They Gap Down… Except for UPS
If you sit near me on our trading desk you have heard me say, “In a strong market real companies get bought.” What I mean is when a real company gaps down, in a strong market, it is likely to find a big buyer and find a way to trade higher. But then there was UPS on Friday. This was … Read More
A Quant Test on a Trading Thesis
Hi Mike, I was halfway through typing my question when I remembered a blog post similar to my original question: http://www.smbtraining.com/blog/how-do-you-determine-how-far-stock-can-move I was wondering if you’ve found any statistical information by back-testing the above since then. For me personally, I first find important support/resistance levels on a stock & after that do I then consider the likelihood of those support/resistance … Read More