Here’s what I see from my seat as the managing partner of a proprietary trading desk in NYC with underperforming experienced traders. Add four ingredients to your trades. They do a wonderful job of developing trading ideas. They have many of them and many of them work. But too many of them do not work. And they mostly just trade … Read More
Building a Once Per Month Trade Plan
In our SMBU Daily Video, Andrew shows you how a simple, once per month, trade plan on the SPX could have generated a 43% annual return over the past 8 years (when the market averaged less than 5%) Andrew discusses the importance of finding the key (and simple) elements that provide edge. He shows you how to systematically eliminate the complexity that may … Read More
One trade, five reasons it failed
During our 11AM mentoring session today a good trade was presented and failed for 5 reasons. Let’s review this trade and those reasons, with the hope that it will help you think through future trades. FXCM has been In Play into the end of year, rising from 11-25, as you can see from the chart below. The trendline broke below … Read More
Trade Triage- Damage control techniques for poor entries
In this discussion, we’ll discuss the example of the incorrect entry using an option strike with lots of time to expiration -and different ways we can employ damage control on a trade that looks to be upside down for a time. All commentary is hypothetical, and solely my opinion and what I might potentially do if I had this position. … Read More
Inside The Trading Vault – Trade Review -DLTR-
SMB will be hosting a free webinar on October 6th where I will outline several trades based on techniques taught in the Vault. In my last post, I mentioned the Power of Mechanical Process – Today, we’ll discuss the Power of Trade Reliability by this trade review One of the byproducts of strong mechanical process is Trade Reliability. When a chart builds a … Read More
Three Ideas to Trade China (SMBU Daily Video)
In our SMBU Daily Video, we take a deeper look into trading China. In this video, Mike Bellafiore outlines 3 ways to trade China as a trader or investor. China ETFs Chinese individual stocks Volatility We hope this video helps you improve your trading skills. * no relevant positions
Enhancing Probability: A Guide to Index Mean Reversion Pairs Trade
With RUT accelerating to new highs and the SPX lagging — is there an opportunity for a mean reversion pairs trade? I believe so. The probabilities are high for mean reversion. But, the danger of a mean reversion trade is the possibility of being too early. That is where options can give us additional edges. With options we can “lean” one way … Read More
Broken Wing Butterfly Trade Example on LNKD
For decades, expert options traders have been relying on a variation of the ever popular butterfly trade to enhance their monthly income and allow them to safely include a directional bias to their trading. The Broken Wing Butterfly (BWB) is a more advanced trade, not because it is difficult to understand – but because there are more nuances that require … Read More