Computer trading has become the largest part of our market’s volume threatening the profitability of many discretionary traders. Many traders/investors fear the bots. We shouldn’t. We should embrace their underlying technology and use it to help us find more of our favorite trading patterns. And even turn quant. Adding support to my thesis above was a recent blog post at … Read More
A Trade from a PlayBook Reader
An SMB reader, who is not on our desk (yet?), read The PlayBook and was inspired to co-opt a particular concept for her own trading. We encourage all our readers to develop a methodology for your trading. Building a PlayBook of the trades that make the most sense to you is that methodology. Here is her PlayBook trade. Mike Bellafiore … Read More
Bad Luck Boeing?
On Friday the news hit of a fire on a Boeing 787. Yes, that same plane that BA was forced to take out of service because of lithium battery fires during flight. I don’t know about you but I prefer my flights without fires on board. BA tweaked and fixed the battery issue and the 787s were back in flight. … Read More
The 3PM Bull Basket
I was sitting on our trading desk looking at SPY this Friday. I felt a very strange sense of déjà vu that it was 1998, the year I was relative strength trading semi-conductor stocks, and MSFT, INTL, DELL. This was before the Internet Boom but when these sectors were red hot. At 3PM we would add to our strongest-acting stocks … Read More
Real Companies Get Bought When They Gap Down… Except for UPS
If you sit near me on our trading desk you have heard me say, “In a strong market real companies get bought.” What I mean is when a real company gaps down, in a strong market, it is likely to find a big buyer and find a way to trade higher. But then there was UPS on Friday. This was … Read More
A Quant Test on a Trading Thesis
Hi Mike, I was halfway through typing my question when I remembered a blog post similar to my original question: http://www.smbtraining.com/blog/how-do-you-determine-how-far-stock-can-move I was wondering if you’ve found any statistical information by back-testing the above since then. For me personally, I first find important support/resistance levels on a stock & after that do I then consider the likelihood of those support/resistance … Read More
How Do I Stay Big for the Real Move?
Dear Bella, I can not wait for The Playbook! I started “eating” everything on the SMB Blog six months ago and went though key haha moments thanks to what I learnt, which suddenly made me a lot more profitable (kind of wasted 2 years with useless teachers). So I started to build a playbook ( my Iphoto app became full … Read More
Should I Run My Trading Strategy Live?
Hi Bella, I was in the same position for most of last year and early this year, trying to work out what it is I need to be before I could consider myself as a solid trader. Now I find myself in another mental predicament. Which is when do you start believing that as a trader you have found the … Read More