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. [...]
2014 Outlook
First of all, this is NOT a prediction post. I used to post them for fun in the past, but that's all they were...for fun. I'm not a big fan of predictions because 1) NO ONE knows where the market it going and 2) We are all allowed to change our minds based on the information the market gives us. As Scott O'Neil says: "We are not in the prediction business, we are in the interpretation [...]
Profit Taking In January?
90% of your success as a trader should come from the work, research and effort you put in OUTSIDE of market hours. That's why I recommend traders do post analysis of their work and study market history. Since 2013 was a very strong year for the markets, we could possibly see some profit taking in January as investors put off 2013 tax gains by selling in January 2014. I remember this happened in other recent strong years. [...]