People Still Hate The Stock Market
Back in July 2013, I wrote a blog post titled The Main Reason The Stock Market Keeps Going Higher. Back then, I stated the main reason driving the market higher is "A Complete Change in Investor Psychology." Basically, the majority of people HATE the stock market...and that still hasn't changed. 1) Of course Quantitative Easing has something to do with the market's success, but ever since the Federal Reserve announced the unwinding of their QE [...]
Don’t Short Addictions
When humans stress, we all have the need to reach for something. For some it's food, a cigarette, alcohol, coffee, drugs, gambling or anything else that might put us in a different state of mind so we don't have to deal with our problems. This isn't an article about psychology because I am not a shrink. I simply want to make the point that the stocks of many of these companies have performed very well [...]
7 Things You Need As A Trader
This is in no particular order, as they are ALL important. 1) Strategy - There are so many different strategies: value, growth, momentum, short selling, etc. Find one that fits your personality and do your best to master it. The fastest way to learn is to study success. In other words, find someone who is successful at the strategy you like, and then mimic them with your own style. Another key is to recognize when [...]
Don’t Get Discouraged
I am writing this blog post to offer words of encouragement and to hopefully help people learn from my past mistakes. Most people don't like to admit their mistakes because we all want to pound our chest and let the world know how great we're doing. I have no problem admitting that I used to struggle tremendously in corrective markets JUST LIKE THE ONE WE'RE IN NOW, until I made one simple adjustment. If you've [...]
Don’t Be Afraid To Make Money
Last August, I wrote a blog post titled 5 Stocks That Could Be Higher By Year-End. From the time of the post through year-end, here is how the stocks performed: $NFLX +41.7% $SPLK +37.3% $CMG +32.0% $HLF +26.4% $EOG +9.9% During the same period, the S&P 500 was up +12.3%. I am writing this post to stress a few points: 1) Many people say it's impossible to beat the market by picking individual stocks. While I [...]
The Master Manipulator
The stock market is a master manipulator. It conditions us to think a certain way over and over and over. Then, just when we are convinced of a pattern, the market magically changes character. How does this apply to our current market? For the past year or so, the pattern has been "shut up and buy the dips." In other words, whenever the market flashes warning signs, we get conditioned to buy because the selling [...]