Monthly Archives: April 2011

Trading the odds has always hurt my trading.

I will never tell someone how to trade, if it works for them do it.  But I have always had a problem trading the odds. The last 4 times X has happened the market has done Y. It never tells the whole story. It is like looking at a chart and expecting to learn something….

4 Things I would do differently if I was a new trader.

I would not change how my trading career has gone but if I had to do it all over again these are the things that I would do differently: Pick an objective sooner. I first was placing trades through my mentor. That meant that I could trade may be 2-3 times a week. He was…

Are you the Ron Burgundy of tweeting?

This is not directly related to trading but I have thinking about how I gather information. Some of you are retweeting things without reading them. We are all busy, I understand, but do not be a Twurgundy. Twurgundy- A person who retweets something just because it showed up in their timeline. I just pulled a…

Did the $VIX signal what the $FED was doing next?

The FED today said they were going keep rates the same and finish out QE2. Part of trading is noticing when things are out of place. Anthony Crudele has been all over the VIX displacement, he wrote about it on March 17th.  The market and the $VIX were both making lows.  They “should” move in…

I don’t give a f#%& if I miss a trade.

There are several things you have to get over as a trader.  They are the cost of doing business. Missing a trade is one of them. If I am fortunate enough to be in a position to miss a thousand more trades it means I am still a trader. That statement is obviously a bit…

Email: How do I get confidence in my system?

The short answer, you cant. You cannot ever have confidence in a system alone.  A trader makes the system, the system does not make the trader. A working system/good market makes everyone money, a badly working system/bad market only makes a few traders money. I think it is important to have some diversity in your…

Telling someone how to trade is like telling someone how to grieve.

You can’t tell someone how to grieve and you cannot tell them how to trade. Every person absorbs information and reacts differently.  Each person comes with a different set of circumstances, objectives, risk capital, and obligations. There are three types of people that seek information about trading. People who want another person to trade for…

Hedgers are to blame for rises in commodities.

It is always easiest to blame something you do not understand.  My job as a speculator is to provide price discovery/liquidity/hedging.  I get an opportunity, the key word is opportunity, to make money for providing this service.  I am not different than any other business. What is a future? A future is a contract between…

Lies, damned lies, and a chart: Are you committing chart abuse?

“Lies, damned lies, and a chart“   You know how I feel about charts and I could argue my opposition’s side, too. My main point is that a chart records, that cannot be argued.   Charts can even be self fulfilling prophecies. Charts are very useful and they need to be studied. There is not…

Announcement: What I am doing next.

In what may be one of the worst kept secret I am announcing a partnership with Anthony Crudele and E-mini Executors Inc. The blog will still continue as is.  There may be an ad off to the right but this blog will not be an extended sales pitch.  I am still committed to helping you…