New Year's Eve Readings
HAPPY NEW YEAR!! Thanks to readers for a great 2009; Let's do big things in 2010! * Managing risk and maximizing trading opportunity ; ...
The Most Important Trading Goal for the New Year
As we come to the end of 2009 and a holiday weekend, it's a great time to reflect on trading performance for the past year and goals for...
Attributional Style and Trading Performance
When positive or negative things happen in life, we tend to attribute them to causes. This helps us make sense of the world. A robust line...
Mental Flexibility vs. Sticking to Trading Plans: Which is Correct?
Reader George raises excellent questions concerning my recent post on mental flexibility and trade planning . Citing Henry Carstens' id...
How Volume Determines Intraday Volatility and Opportunity
How much movement can you expect during a trading day? As I've stressed in past posts , this is very much related to the volume of busi...
The Trading Process: Day Structure
In the first post from this series that describes how I trade, I emphasized the importance of understanding the market's context: whet...
Tuesday Evening Reading
* Here's a very interesting site that tracks the odds of market indexes hitting particular price levels during the day; * Becoming th...
Nice Way of Organizing Price and Technical Signal Data
I notice that the beta version of Barchart.com (for subscribers) has a new "Trader's Cheat Sheet" feature that plots prices f...
More On Planning Trades and Mental Flexibility
My previous post outlined how I use price levels to set targets for trade ideas. Note how, in the opening minutes of trade, we could not m...
The Trading Process: Key Price Levels and Targets
In this series of posts, I am outlining my trading process to help traders think through what they are doing in markets and why. The first ...
Adapting to High-Frequency Trading Algorithms
Hats off to Mike Bellafiore of SMB Capital who has written one of the few insightful articles I've read on how traders can adapt to the...
Lessons From a Recent Trade
In my recent post , I walked readers through a short-term trade, explaining how I used an understanding of market context to help frame an i...
A Window on a Short-Term Trade: Integrating Context and Real-Time Market Action
So here is an example of a good trade idea gone wrong. Please note that in this example I am trading a very short-term time frame, not look...
Evaluating the Market's Trading Context
The previous post took a look at how I assess market context as an initial step in framing, executing, and managing trades. Let's take...
The Trading Process: Context
In this series of posts, I will outline the steps I go through in the trading process. I want to stress that there are other ways of tradin...
Indicator Update for December 27th
This past week, we broke to bull market highs across most of the major U.S. stock market indexes. Let's see how our major indicators be...
Market Awareness, Self Awareness, and Trading Expertise
A very perceptive reader recently asked a question regarding the post on sustaining self-awareness during trading . If traders are self-awa...
Posts on Trading Techniques and Stock Market Indicators
As many readers are aware, I use the Become Your Own Trading Coach blog as an archive for TraderFeed posts across a variety of topics. Mos...
Tracking Trading Results for 2009: A Worthwhile Trading Review
Some of the best traders I'm working with are not only reviewing their 2009 returns, but breaking those down by the strategy/setup/marke...
What I See Among Many of the Best Traders
Here are four qualities I observe among winning traders and portfolio managers. These can be great areas for self-development in the coming...
Happy Holiday Readings
* Stress and performance in trading; see also posts on handling the stress of trading ; * Very interesting project at Market Rewind to tr...
Human Performance as a Lifestyle
The best performers in any field of endeavor approach their work from a performance vantage point: they are mindful of their development an...
Looking at the Correlation of Trend and Volatility
Note how volatility (average daily high/low range for SPY over a moving five-day period; red line above) has been coming down during the lea...
Why Quiet Markets Reveal the Best Traders
Following my recent post highlighting a few difficult realities for traders , several readers questioned the following generalization: Quiet...
The Psychological Importance of Paths of Returns
In my post on risk and return , I showed how shifts in volatility and the size of a trader's edge greatly affect the path of returns ove...
Musical Interlude: Visual Kei
When I begin new projects, I generally immerse myself in new reading and fresh music. These days, the music is coming from bands influenced...
The Power of Uncertainty
Losing confidence in your trading is not necessarily a bad thing. Many times, we lose confidence when we sense that our edge in markets mig...
Sustaining Self-Awareness During Trading
One important element of working on trading performance is sustaining self-awareness during trading, so that you know which strategies (setu...
