General Comments
The videos for week 8 of my free trading course, dealing with pattern failures and the importance of discipline, are now online, and can be accessed from the course menu. (Registration is required, but is completely free.) For those of you who do not know, some time ago I began
Individual Traders
[dc]I[/dc] recently received a few reader questions asking the same thing: what would my advice be to new traders? This is an important and daunting question (and I've written on it before), but let me share a few thoughts today. Please don't be discouraged
General Comments
Industrials are running into some trouble. This could be significant for the broad market, or it could be noisy sector rotation. (I'd bet on the latter, at this point.) Here's a (admittedly crowded) chart that shows how important Airlines are within the sector. Seeing Airlines falter,
General Comments
Video blog looking at setups in the S&P 500 (SPY), Russell 2000 (IWM), Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL), Alcoa (NYSE: AA), Delta Airlines (NYSE: DAL), Wells Fargo (NYSE: WFC), Bank of America (NYSE: BAC), Coca-Cola Co (NYSE: KO), BlackBerry Ltd (NASDAQ: BBRY), and Twitter (NYSE: TWTR). A few additional points:
Pullback
[dc]I[/dc] want to share a brief look at longer-term market structure in the Canadian dollar today. We have a situation in which a few timeframes appear to be in conflict with each other. Perhaps there is a trading opportunity, but there certainly is a good lesson. There are
Relative Strength
[dc]L[/dc]ast week I shared a new data visualization that looked at short and long term performance of sectors in context of volatility. This week, I'd like to share another tool that we use in our analysis for my Waverly Advisors weekly research reports. For many
Individual Traders
[dc]B[/dc]efore I was a trader, I was a musician. In my career as a musician, I discovered the value of teaching—that I enjoyed teaching, I was good at it, and that teaching helped me refine my own skills and thinking. (The same is true of teaching
Psychology
[dc]P[/dc]eople talk about "learning how to lose" and "losing gracefully". Truth be told, that's a concept I've always had trouble understanding. Though I know there is some wisdom in the idea of losing gracefully, I am a terrible loser.
General Comments
A quick look at stock market performance by market cap slices. Simply put, smaller cap stocks (e.g., Russell 2000 (IWM)) tend to outperform larger cap stocks (S&P 500 (SPY) used in the video) during "risk-on" market cycles. This is probably driven by investor psychology and
General Comments
I haven't done this before, but I thought it might be interesting to share some of the links I read each week. Many other writers do this, and they seem to (quite logically) cluster them near the beginning or end of the week, so I thought I'
Individual Traders
[dc]I[/dc] had an interesting conversation a month ago with Ian, a trader who I mentored a few years back who has continued to work on his trading skills and now trades on a professional level in the Philippines. He shared some thoughts about how developing patience and avoiding
Relative Strength
Understanding sector strength and weakness is an important part of the investment process. Here is one way to look at short and long term performance relative to current volatility within each sector.