Hi mike In your book and in many of your posts and lectures you compering a day trader to a professional athlete. because of the need of showing perfect performance in each game/match/contest and you are right of course. But i think there is also a big difference. Most professional athletes have to compete for a few days a month at … Read More
Traders Ask: About that SYY Trade
Hi Mike, I just read your blog post on the SYY trade you guys made the other day. It was basically a play for an opening drivethat you wanted to add to your traders’ playbook. Just a quick couple of questions, if you don’t mind: 1) Would you be more aggressive if you see the bid hold at 30.63, drop, … Read More
Trade the Trade
A trader sent me this review of his work of yesterday: I made ~$250-300 right on the open which I was fairly happy with considering the stock I was trading didn’t move exactly how I wanted it to. I was trading actively, controlling my risk and in the trades I needed to be in. Most importantly, I was involved. None … Read More
Making it worse
Bobby Curtis was a world class distance runner who developed insomnia (NY Daily News article). He had to quit competitive running. He tried and considered every solution. And then…… It was on one of his innumerable Internet searches that Bobby Curtis finally found a deceptively simple approach, one that counseled him to follow his normal schedule of activities, no matter … Read More
The SMB PlayBook: Compiling our best trades
We have been doing an exercise with our traders that I thought I would share. We ask our traders to create a playbook. Plays and patterns that make sense to them that they want to trade more of. At the end of the day the trader considers a best trade they made, details this trade in our SMB PlayBook template … Read More
Refresh Refocus
From The Economist, a piece studying judicial rulings: Decision making is mentally taxing and that, if forced to keep deciding things, people get tired and start looking for easy answers. As active intraday traders do we hit a point where we want easy trades? Do we stop thinking as thoroughly as we should after a series of trades on the Open? … Read More
Dimes for Dollars
The second reason many traders fail to “stay with the move” is the fear of giving some profits back. The overriding emotion of having to get every penny in every trade causes them to get jumpy as soon as the stock does a stutter step. That’s fine if you are willing to get right back in if the trend resumes, … Read More
Confirmation bias and the trading this week in SLV
From Ian Leslie in his blog why is reasoning really all about winning: It’s been shown again and again in studies that we have a very strong ‘confirmation bias’; once we have an idea about the world we like (Obama is un-American, my girlfriend is cheating on me, the world is or isn’t getting warmer) we pick up on evidence … Read More