Technical Patterns
Financial markets are confusing--there's no doubt about that. Sudden reversals, spikes, dull dead periods exploding into panic, fakeouts and fakeouts of fakeouts... the list goes on, but traders and investors quickly discover that reading the market is far from easy. Wouldn't it be great if there
Pullback
One of the key challenges for discretionary traders is balancing short-term and longer-term information. Err too far on either side, and bad things will happen: Focus too much on short-term, and we are overly responsive to every jiggle of the market, constantly stopped out by market noise. Focus too much
Trading tools
We all focus a lot of attention, perhaps too much attention, on where to buy and sell a market, on where to enter trades. Today, let's spend some time looking at the other side: where are you getting out? Some categories are useful here, and they are not
Individual Traders
This week, I'm writing a series of short posts on very practical, applied things that you can add to your trading toolkit. I'm trying to select these so that they work for a wide range of trading styles, timeframes, approaches, and instruments, but think carefully about
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
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:
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
General Comments
Today, we will add another data series to our file we created yesterday that had daily SPY data in it. It's not quite as simple as pasting the new data into the sheet; we need to make sure they line up correctly. Tomorrow, we will take a little
Trading tools
Continuing from yesterday's post, let's roll up our sleeves and get into the process of managing data in Excel. The purpose of this short series of posts is to give you tools to look into the market's motions and begin to tease out some
Trading tools
I've received many questions about how to do basic backtesting in Excel. I think I wrote in my book that we all have a love/hate relationship with Excel: it's a good way to do some quick and dirty tests, it is on practically every computer