Trading Lesson #2: Do not trade stocks that are purchased in an all cash transaction. There is very little intra-day movement. Here is the chart for BCSI on December 9th 2011. It spent almost the entire day in a 5 cent range. Not exactly a treasure trove of opportunity for directional traders. Steven Spencer is the co-founder of SMB Capital … Read More
Trading Lesson #1: Buying A Strong Stock At Prior Day’s Afternoon Support
New blog format: Short trading lessons with charts for illustration. Trading Lesson #1: Second Day Play–Buying A Strong Stock After It Pulls Back To Prior Afternoon’s Support Area INHX was on our radar yesterday after another fresh news drug catalyst. As you can see from the two charts below INHX is trending higher on multiple time frames. Here is the … Read More
Using Prior Days’ Price Action–NFLX
Prior to the Open of Friday’s shortened trading session there was not much in the way of fresh news catalysts. So my first trading choices were second and third day plays. For those of you who are new to the SMB Blog you can use the “search” feature on the blog to review posts explaining how and why we trade … Read More
The Continuing Saga of December’s $RUT Bearish Butterfly Trade: Insights and Analysis
Last Thursday’s rally, probably a dim memory at the moment, was so strong that our trade methodology called for us to add a third butterfly and roll the original two butterflies up 60 points each such that the new position is comprised of three 50 point wide butterflies centered at 720,740 and 760. As of last Thursday, the position was … Read More
Avoiding Indicatoritis
Would-be traders all tend to focus on indicators. The sense, I suppose, is that if there’s just some magic indicator to be added to the chart, then trading becomes easy. They’re way off. Personally, I don’t rely on indicators. I am price-and-volume based when making decisions on trades, and although I might occasionally glance at a moving average or something, … Read More
Understanding The Volatility
We are about two months in since the market broke its longer term uptrend. With the break of that uptrend has come a sizable increase in the market’s volatility. There are trading opportunities up the wazoo. But one thing we have noticed about this volatility versus what we saw in the fall of 2008 is the time stocks spend trending … Read More
Looking for a Bounce
When a momentum stock makes a misstep the market is very unforgiving. A few weeks ago we saw NFLX get hammered dropping around 80 points in a four-day period. This caught the attention of many short term traders. When a stock moves that far that quickly there is a lot of money to be made on the short side but … Read More
So Simple Yet Missed By So Many
I have been inspired to write a quick post from a tweet sent out earlier from @apextrader. He mentions that he got long YOKU around 32.50 and that it has gone back up but been a fairly bumpy ride. Why did he make that trade? And why are so few able to execute this trade? YOKU recently was beaten down … Read More