Yesterday I made a silly mental mistake on the open that cost me my morning. I was expecting a small downtick on the open before the rally so I tried to get too cute. I shorted GS on the open. I was trying to catch the first down move so I could have plenty of leeway for my long for … Read More
Reloaded and Ready to Trade
I struggled for a couple of weeks and found myself going back to my old emotional habits. Bella reminded me at the expo a couple of weeks back that I tried quitting the firm after struggling after my first five months trading live. Steve helped me turn things around by working on my emotional rants: banging, cursing, bitching, etc. The … Read More
The Impact of Computer Programs on Short Term Trading
One of our readers asked a great question recently in response to our blog posts. Our reader, Sandor, pointed out that we have the tendency to write about the computer programs that populate most active stocks in the market. But we haven’t really explained fully what they do or their impact on us short term traders. So I want to … Read More
Learning to Grind it Out
Last Thursday after the close I was reading through our newswire service and saw that their in-house traders posted comments about their trading and saw something that caught my attention. Most of them said that they had traded lightly this week given the current market conditions. Further, I have heard from traders on the street that they have found the … Read More
Revenge Trading: Just Walk it Off, Friend
A few weeks backs I wrote about catching yourself before disaster hits. In that entry I discuss what happens when you make a couple of mistakes in a row that lead to complete disaster. Then, a couple of weeks back we got a comment in one of our blog posts that touched on this subject. I would like to expand … Read More
Trading Multiple Asset Classes
From time to time I get asked during interviews if I trade other asset classes during the trading day. My answer is always yes and no. I do longer term swing trades in the FX market but no, I do not trade both FX and equities intraday very frequently. When I do I tend to lose my focus and do … Read More
System Writing Without Trading Skills
Every now and then we receive emails from new traders seeking capital to trade their systems. Their academic backgrounds are impressive. They all have worked very hard at fine tuning their strategy based on historical data. They tend to be avid technical analysis students. Most have crunched statistics on their systems to support their claims. However, most lack the trading … Read More
Picking Your Tier Size, Part II
In my last entry last week I presented an simple yet powerful approach to picking your tier size based on the risk you take on a play. Furthermore, the blog entry describes how to go about picking a tier size that works well independently of what kind of stock you are trading any minute of your day. In this entry … Read More