Evening Briefing for July 26th
* THEMES FROM FRIDAY'S SESSION - Friday saw a consolidation of Thursday's breakout gains, with afternoon strength kicking in after early weakness. As of this writing, we are trading at fresh bull highs in the S&P 500 Index. Thursday's strength d...
Building Trading Strengths, Correcting Trading Weaknesses
In my recent post, I highlighted several features that distinguish great traders from the rest. A 19-year old reader from Brazil asks the perceptive question of how to deal with trading weaknesses when you are solution-focused? Is it really enough to...
Great Traders: Five Distinguishing Features
* Everyone is wrong in the markets at times. The difference between the great traders and the unsuccessful ones is in how long they stay wrong.* Addictive traders get high from action; great traders get high from mastering markets--and mastering the...
Site Seeing Tour: Investment Postcards From Cape Town
I'm looking forward to getting back to Cape Town in August; it's been a few years and lots has happened since then. Note (chart above; EWZ) how stocks were cut by about two-thirds in the bear decline and have doubled since that time.One particular tre...
Weekend Reading for July 25th
* Perspectives on high-frequency trading and whether Wall St. is picking the pockets of traders and investors;* Turning trading problems around. Literally.* Could sovereign wealth funds be destabilizing influences for markets?* Vulnerabilities in ...
Becoming the Best You Can Be as a Trader
Suppose you're a baseball coach and your team has bases loaded in the last inning with one out. Your team is losing by one run, and it's the playoff game that will determine who will go the World Series. Who would you want to send to the plate?You'd ...
Market Context: The Importance of Non-Confirmations
One of the great values of Twitter is the ability to comment on the market in real time (follow comments here). Here is the comment from earlier this morning:9:55 AM CT - Note that recent ES lows not confirmed by NQ and Russell; 13 stks up from open, ...
The Importance of Tracking Where Volume Trades
Notice how we are beginning to build volume and accept value below the volume-weighted average price (red line) early this morning in ES trade. I like to see how many contracts are executed at various prices during the day (histogram at right) to show...
Thoughts on High Frequency Trading and Stock Market Manipulation
This article from the New York Times does a nice job of giving an example of how high-speed trading algorithms can front run markets. It helps to explain why traders who only buy or sell after strength or weakness has been manifested are often the one...
When Market Strength Follows Market Strength: Shout Out to Market Tells
On Thursday, we saw a very strong market performance that was preceded by significant market strength. I was going to take a historical look at what to expect when strength has been followed by strength, but I see that the excellent Market Tells servi...
Evening Briefing for July 23rd
* MARKET THEMES FROM THURSDAY - Upside breakout lifts stocks to bull market highs. Those highs were well confirmed by such indicators as advance-decline and new highs/lows, with over 3000 new 20-day highs. Bullish themes dominated across asset class...
Tracking an Upside Breakout in the Stock Market
The recent post looked at how we were trading in a compressed range; above we see how the upside breakout materialized early in the day. (Here's a post on identifying upside breakout moves that was relevant to today's trade).One thing to look at in br...
