Articles

A Trader’s New Year’s Resolution for 2012: Become More Like a Psychopath

New Year’s resolutions are often made and broken within the first days of January. The most popular resolutions, things like losing weight or quitting smoking, require will power and action. Traders can succeed with a simple resolution to act less often in the year ahead and to buy or sell only wh

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Netflix – Is the stock traders love to hate finally recovering?

And three compelling reasons to buy it By Matt Blackman, CMT It’s been a rough ride for Netflix investors. Without much warning, the stock began to drop in mid-July 2011 after the company divided its DVD by mail and online streaming services into two separate offerings, effectively doubling the pr

Seasonality: Do Stocks Really Go Up In January?

Many Wall Street pundits have been talking about the Santa Claus rally and the January Effect. In both cases, stocks are expected to go higher based upon a seasonal pattern. This is an appealing idea to trade because if there are reliable seasonal patterns then traders can boost their returns by tak

Spotting Stock Market Winners

Traders like to shoot for big wins and are willing to accept small losses along the way. In the stock market, big winners unfold over years and could be a valuable core holding in a trading account. Stocks can be traded on margin and many brokers allow traders to margin stocks, futures and options i

Are Stocks and Bonds Really Different?

In the long-term, investors in stocks and bonds have different goals but the performance of the two investments has been about the same over the past thirty years. Given the similarity in long-term performance, it is worth looking at the question of whether or not stocks can be traded with the same

Backtesting to Build Confidence

To make the trade or not to make the trade? That feeling of indecision before enacting a trading strategy can paralyze some traders, but fortunately, backtesting offers an excellent way to build confidence about a trade’s statistical chances. Knowing how the same strategy would have performed in h

Do Stops Work?

One of the first lessons that new traders are taught is that one of the keys to success is to cut losses and let winners run. This almost always leads traders to believe stop loss orders should be used to cut losses and are a valuable part of any trading strategy. Individual traders also seem to pla

The 10 Key Differences Between Bull and Bear Rallies…

…That You Need to Recognize to Make Money Legendary trader Dan Zanger and host of ChartPattern.com, who holds the stock-trading record with an annualized return of more than 29,000%, makes no bones about which type of market he prefers. “What motivates me to be at my trading desk no matter what

My Best Idea for Small Investors

Stocks are a wonderful investment but they will not be the right choice for small investors looking at trading for a living. A widely cited figure is that stocks return about 10 percent a year in the long run. If a successful trader can triple that, a 30 percent annual return will not amount to a si

Trading Without Software

When just starting out, some beginning traders will want to use all of their available funds to trade rather than buying software and data feeds. In this article, we’ll look at how that can be done, using free end of day data and indicators. Trading software allows traders to design and back test