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 [...]
My Favorite Stock Market Service
About 3 years ago, I met Joe Kunkle and he described his OptionsHawk service to me. I decided to sign up and I've been hooked on it ever since. In interest of full disclosure, I am not affiliated with his service or company. I simply want to pass along a great resource that I use and describe its main features: 1) The website is www.optionshawk.com. You can also follow him on Twitter @OptionsHawk 2) The [...]
It Happened AGAIN This Week!
Here are some notes from this past week: Sunday - Coming into the week (1/12/14), I was fairly aggressive long equities. When I ran my screens over the weekend, I found SO MANY setups. It was almost TOO scary how bullish I was getting on many individual stocks. Monday - Pre-market, I saw very positive news on 3 of my stocks. I was expecting a great day, but unfortunately we had a high volume selloff in the market. [...]