General Comments
Yesterday's post ended with a look at some of the effects and benefits of meditation, and some recent studies that show meditation is able to change your body and your brain--effects going far beyond mind or attitude. The lesson here is that meditation is real and it is
Psychology
Talking about meditation seems to be the current rage in investing/trading circles. Everyone is writing and talking about meditation, maybe taking some courses, reading a few books, but there are many misconceptions. For one, many people casually write about meditation without having actually experienced it, so there is considerable
Market Math
This is another post in the small series on tracking, understanding, and trading relative performance. In previous posts, we looked at two ways to track relative performance as a percent change from some previous point in time, considering that previous point either as a structurally significant swing point or an
General Comments
My previous post looked at the concept of comparing relative strength of two assets by comparing returns from a specific point in time. In that post, I suggested using a previous, structurally important, pivot as the comparison point, but there are some potential issues with that idea. Today, I will
Market Math
Yesterday, I discussed some reasons why traders might want to consider looking at, or trading, the relative performance between markets. Today, let's look at a simple way to display that relative performance, and consider some things that can go wrong. Tracking relative performance simply means we want to
Spreads
Today I begin a short series of posts looking at the tools and techniques of relative value trading. For some traders, this is intuitive; currencies are always valued relative to another currency, and many futures traders focus on spread relationships between different commodities or months of the same commodities, and
General Comments
Well, looks like 2015 is here with a bang, and markets kick off the year with some volatility. Though we often focus on short term patterns and flows, it pays to keep an eye on the big picture. My friend Andrew Barber, wrote a piece this morning in which he
Trading tools
One of the complaints leveled against technical analysis is that tools are primarily visual and subjective, rather than being true analytical tools. There certainly is some truth to these complaints (and I have often been a critic of traditional technical analysis), but the best technicians work toward consistency and logic
Trading tools
Trendlines are useful. For the uninitiated, it may seem odd to draw lines on charts and to expect them to work, but what we are actually doing here is to create a shortcut (a heuristic, if you prefer.) A properly drawn trendline will reflect both the trend and the volatility
Individual Traders
This could, perhaps, be the shortest blog post ever. I could simply answer the question with: follow your rules. Get out. But let's dig a little deeper. Before we really begin, it's important to remind ourselves that there are many ways to trade and invest successfully.
Individual Traders
The marketplace is constantly evolving. One of the biggest changes over the past decade is the proliferation of Exchange Traded Products (ETPs) that allow stock traders to trade commodities (and other financial instruments) in a stock account. Much of the traded universe of financial products is now available just by
General Comments
Markets are complicated. Market analysis is complicated. Developing a trading system certainly can be complicated. But trading cannot be complicated. The act of placing trades and evaluating results must be as streamlined and simplified as possible. Here are a few suggestions for things you can do today, with investing an