Last month I wrote a post about SMB Fundamental #7–Reviewing Your Important Trades. Today I would like to discuss #1–Proper Preparation. All trading success begins with proper preparation and that is why it is #1 on our list of trading principles that must be followed for each trade. Part of my morning pre-market preparation is to review the price action … Read More
Technicals Trump The Tape in Financials
We consider three things when making an intra-day trade: The Tape, The Technicals, and the News. How each of these factors is weighed depends on the particular setup, the type of stock and current market conditions. JPM was the first large financial to report numbers on Friday. The numbers were not particularly good and it was showing weak price action … Read More
Try This to Reduce Your Trading Frustration
I received this comment in a review from a trainee: Really frustrating day…Over traded the junk out of MS and C and made hardly any money. MS and C : Was trying to fade them in the morning but they were the really strong up until about 1pm. This is when the short started to work, but I traded so … Read More
Using Prior Days’ Price Action–NFLX
Prior to the Open of Friday’s shortened trading session there was not much in the way of fresh news catalysts. So my first trading choices were second and third day plays. For those of you who are new to the SMB Blog you can use the “search” feature on the blog to review posts explaining how and why we trade … Read More
Adapting to This Market as a Day Trader
What are you doing as a day trader to adapt and succeed in this tape? This market can be rough for novice day traders trying to figure out a way to find consistency. The bots are alive and well, the volatility remains high and headline risk abounds. Trades that worked only a few short months ago are now being piled … Read More
Hurry Find the Band Aides!
As children we all used to enjoy putting our parents’ big shoes on our little feet and trying to walk. It was an awesomefeeling until we tried to go a bit too fast. The problem was we just weren’t big enough to handle those big shoes at high speed! I guess we all have an innate desire to grow up … Read More
Fear–Not So Much
(This post was written on November 2nd) I spent a good amount of time during Tuesday’s AM Meeting discussing how when fear comes back into the market you need to adjust your trading style very quickly. I was particularly demonstrative on this point as my experience has shown me over the years that traders, especially less experienced traders, are very … Read More
Why I Was Long NFLX
The other day I tweeted that I was long NFLX and short SPY and that it felt kind of “weird”. I wrote “weird” because the easy money trading NFLX had been on the short side for over a month and at the time the SPY was in a multi-week uptrend. As an intraday trader I often will take trades that … Read More