General Comments
As we head into the US holiday of Thanksgiving, I want to share a practice that has made a real difference for me--for me as a trader, and also for me as a human being. It's a simple thing, but it has to be done right--the practice of
General Comments
Take a look at this picture which I took a few years ago, on a Friday afternoon, on a New York / New Jersey ferry. After a long and stressful work week (it was 2008), the gentleman in the photo was more than a little inebriated (i.e., could barely stand
Podcast
So much emphasis is placed on where to get into a trade, entry signals, entry patterns... but the decisions we make after we are in the trade are at least as important (and maybe far more important) for overall profitability. In this episode, I dig into some of the ideas,
Volatility
Just a quick post to remind you of a technical tool you probably already know about. Like so many things that work, it's not exciting or sexy on the surface. It might seem overly simplistic or just not that interesting--but this is a powerful pattern that demands attention.
Podcast
In this episode, I look at basic technical tools that anyone, regardless of background or previous experience, can use to enhance his or her trading program. Important concepts and tools are covered, along with some ideas for how to expand your learning and learn to do this yourself. Technicals vs
Trading tools
My goal was to put simple, but powerful, tools into your hands so you can start doing the work to understand how the market moves. In this, the last, post in the series, I will do two things. First, we'll wrap up some unfinished business from yesterday'
Trading tools
So this is what we've been waiting for. We finally have the tools to ask simple market questions and to ask some critical questions. If you are new to backtesting, please go back to the beginning and work through the posts carefully. This is a learning process and
General Comments
We, all of us, tend to be overconfident and make too many assumptions. Consider this case: a few years ago, it seemed the TA landscape was swept with the idea of trading failed patterns. There was a lot of hype about trading patterns in which traders were trapped and had
Trading tools
Pat yourself on the back if you've come this far in the little backtesting mini-course. After many posts, we've basically gotten data into a spreadsheet and calculated some moving averages. You probably aren't blown away by what we've accomplished, but think again:
Technical Patterns
A few months ago I wrote a post on a certain kind of trending pattern I have called "slide along the bands." This pattern is characterized by a market that pushes into either the upper or lower Keltner channel, and trends against that channel with relatively few pullbacks.
Trading tools
Continuing on with the short series on backtesting in Excel, let's look at some tools to visualize data and make some simple calculations. Excel is a good tool for quick and dirty data visualization in some cases--basic Excel graphs can be made quickly and show the relationships between
General Comments
If you've been following along with the short Excel course, you've created a spreadsheet using SPY daily data, and added daily TLT data to the sheet in another column. I received a few questions about why we needed to match the two series with a VLOOKUP