An email I recently received: Hi Mike, Thanks for your beautiful blog. I am one of your many blog followers and find it very insightful. My question is this: from your experience, what is the best Personality type (Myers-Briggs – MBTI test) for the pursuit of trading ? Is there a type that have the biggest potential for success at … Read More
Are You A Conventional Trader?
As a trading mentor, I speak to many up and coming traders who are looking for guidance. There are a number of things that I ask to gauge where the trader is in their learning curve. One of the main pieces of information that I like to learn about a trader is what strategy or strategies are they executing within … Read More
Traders Ask: What is a Competitive Trader?
Question: I hear a lot about the value of a competitiveness in trading success. Analogies are made with the striving for peak performance seen in athletes and entrepreneurs. One thing about this puzzles me, and I’d appreciate the thoughts of others with more experience and success. When I trade I am trying to get better: to make good trades and, inhibit … Read More
I felt a rip coming
I caught a scalp for the first downmove in DSW. I caught the upmove from above 52.12 to near 53. And I caught the downmove from below 52.50 to 51.65. I looked at my PnL and I was barely positive. How is that possible? I was not trading DSW on the open with size as it was so early and … Read More
One day on the street with a professional trader
In the article Book Takes a Look Inside Professional Day Traders, national columnist Joel Stein is spotted $100,000 to try his hand at professional intraday trading for one day. Matt Nadell, @tradecrushers, a guest blogger at SMBU Blog, in Chicago gives Joel a taste of the nerve-wrecking excitement that trading can offer while teaching him basics along the way. Highlights: … Read More
The Pro’s Process – Mike Bellafiore
Richard Chignell from Embrace the Trade on the fourth of his series of posts has been asking Pro Traders about their psychological processes. From Mr. Chignell: The fourth in my series of posts asking Pro Traders about their psychological processes. Delving a little into how it feels to them when trading. The good and the bad. How this has changed … Read More
Stopped Out!
I was writing this before the close because I stopped trading and I walked out to clear my head. After I came back and saw how FB and GRPN traded into the close I am very upset with the way I handled my trading today. Both stocks traded right to my target but I was stopped out of both. My … Read More
Finding Repeatable Patterns
After the close we discussed some plays from Stocks In Play yesterday. When we look at a stock we search for patterns. Patterns that repeat. Patterns that make sense to us. Patterns that we can work at to master. So for these three stocks we are making risk/reward trades with the patterns we see. We have a full playbook of … Read More