Expectations can be harmful to your trading. We ask all of our prop traders to set goals for themselves. I do for myself. Whether its for my trading or our trading firm. As John Wooden says,”make each day your masterpiece.” But goals often for the new trader are incorrectly results based and not process based. And I want to take … Read More
Answering A Couple of Questions
Stock Selection: Over the last few weeks I’ve been sticking mostly to trading AAPL, SPY, and almost any financial that i felt comfortable trading. Stocks that I have also been looking are S&P 500 stocks trading near 52 week lows. I’ve been focusing on trading them on the short side, since I want to short the weakest stocks in a … Read More
AAPL Earnings—Oy Vey!
As you gain more experience traders develop biases about stocks and where they should be priced. Often this is helpful. At times it can lead to potential rips. As an experienced trader I have learned that my biases must be verified by the Box, the price action in the stock. Who am I to decide where a stock ought to … Read More
Think About Your Trading
After the Close I was talking with two veteran traders. Both trade with us. Both are very wealthy from years of successful trading. You know how the NBA named its 50 best all-time players? Well one of these traders I describe as one of the 50 best day traders of all time. He actually taught me how to trade. Though … Read More
Weekend Preparation
The past few weekends, I’ve been coming into the office to prepare for the next week of trading. Generally I do this at home, but when I need to get a lot of work done, I’ll come into the office to do it. Since I feel like we’re at a turning point in the market, I’ve been doing some more … Read More
What to Trade These Days
As Bella pointed out, last Friday was difficult. There were so many reversals that it was frustrating to trade any stock. Market stocks overreacted to moves in their corresponding futures and levels were not respected. I lost on so many fade trades in which I would buy a stock that quickly retraced to a support level and continued going lower … Read More
Reversals, Reversals, Reversals
Friday was a very difficult trading day because the market reversed so many times. Into the Close the market reversed four times. I usually get caught in one reversal a week. I got caught in eight yesterday. I would make a bunch of profitable trades and then a stock would reverse. I got caught in the SPY upmove midday from … Read More
What is our Next Market Pattern?
As a trader I am like a WWII decoder. The market talks to us. It just does so in code. And often that code is challenging. But patterns always emerge such that we can understand the market and what she is saying. Yesterday after the announcement that the government would directly infuse cash into the big banks we sold off. … Read More
