Do Or Die

I read the book first time when starting to trade... it seemed to be a good reference book, but nothing more than that. Try google search and EL communities. Should be easily available.

See it this way... strategy B has been validated in a better way by keeping (managing) the trader's capital for a longer time.

Usually the strategy which takes the larger number of trades is better assuming other performance metrics are same. Say a Strategy A keeps the trader in market for first two hours while Strategy B keeps the trader in market for full day. Both take same number of trades and have the same performance metrics. In this case Strategy B is better because it is validated for longer time in the market. If there is a regime change in opening session of the market, B is less likely to be effected.

Pa, this is exactly the kind of belt I was looking for! It is available through FLABeLOS | Massage Chairs | Massagers | SASAKI - www.sasaki.co.uk

This is a great idea! I already have a treadmill... just needs to make some adjustments to bring it closer to the desk.

such 'clarity' of thoughts... :rofl:

Must be in profit... 360s for the stock look quite possible as well. Updated chart

I know exercising is good, but sometimes when the day is busy I tend to spend 4-5 hours in front of computer without a break of single minute. I'm thinking of getting a belt to massage on abdomen/shoulder/back for 20 mins or so. Does anyone has experience with these? There seem to be very few FDA approved and most are particularly designed for slimming, while I just want to get right blood circulation towards the end of day. thanks, DD

XLB,XLF and XLI have already broken down from their past month's range. Technology has shown relative weakness over this week (http://www.traderslaboratory.com/forums/stock-trading-laboratory/10662-stocks-model-2.html#post128956) so it may be the best bet when the market breaks down.

I thought I blabbered way too much about trading regimes to bore people. Good to see the mods didn't notice it

Actually I meant in the short term. AAPL was outperforming market since last month or so... and Technology sector as a whole on up days. This relationship has changed; the markets apparently bounced this week from important 'trough', but this stock does not shows bull enthusiasm. I do not particularly like a stock opening significantly up but closing in red On daily charts, it closely resembles a classic exhaustion, ending with wide range bar. I also do not like the media attention the stock has been getting lately, everyone wants to own it.

Time to short AAPL? anyone else tracking this stock?

Hi Derutrade. I prepared for around 8 months before taking even my first trade... essentially I wanted to be positive from the first month itself. That didn't happen, but such approach helped me a lot in being objective towards trading as a business. IF you plan to trade stocks, maintaining a proper watchlist will be 50% of the task... you will essentially find some stocks a lot easier to trade than others.

TL is a much advanced site (technically, the features it offers). One of my friend started a niche forum, so I know what goes in building a site like this. Also I do not see any error message while accessing blogs.

http://finance.yahoo.com/banking-budgeting/article/113566/day-steve-jobs-saved-apple-marketwatch?mod=bb-budgeting Turn Enemies Into Allies On Aug. 10, 2011, exactly 14 years and four days after Jobs announced the deal with Microsoft, Apple's market capitalization hit $365 billion — making it the world's most valuable company. Today, it's worth $375 billion. For those of you who are counting, that's more than a 100-fold rise in shareholder value. Meanwhile, Microsoft's market cap sits at about $210 billion, less than half of where it topped out in early 2000, yet not far from its value at the time of the Apple deal.

Traderwinds, you have posted a lot of good information. Thanks!

Such times tend to be the best times for daytraders particularly. The most profitable (%) year so far in my career remains 2008.

S&P trading below 1140 is very bad. The best weekly gains for this year was in last week of June which marked the end of bull market as well as was shadowed by monster sell-off in mid-July (see first post). We've just seen the second best week of the year (past week) and it may be 'engulfed' today- one hell of a engulfing bear pattern.

During bull markets, all indicators tend to trade with a bias to the high end of the range, while in bear markets indicators tend to shift to new, lower extremes. This is what I call indicator scale shift, and where truly major market moves are involved, it will happen. In addition to gauges of breadth and volume, we also see the scale shift phenomenon at work in more classic gauges like the nine-day Wilder Relative Strength Index (RSI), which is a common momentum gauge. The classic RSI scale suggests that values above +70 are overbought and readings below +30 are oversold. In reality, in strong uptrending bull market moves, the nine-day RSI will often move up to record readings in the +80 area and end up a subsequent correction in the low +40 zone. This upward scale shift away from the traditional +70 and +30, to +80 and +40 parameters, is the bull market “80/40” rule for the nine-day RSI. Alternatively, in bear markets, we often experience a downward scale shift to parameters of +60 overbought and +20 oversold. This is the bear market “60/20” rule for the nine-day RSI. --- Frank Barbera

Europe, Hange Seng, Indian Nifty have been badly hammered. I remember vividly the scene in Rogue Trader where Nick Leeson tries to support the falling market with his buying. Obama government seems to be in Leeson's shoes, but they of course have much larger power to influence the market.

Precarious Predictions "Spam will be a thing of the past in two years’ time." Bill Gates, 2004 "Everything that can be invented has been invented." Charles H. Duell, Director of U.S. Patent Office, 1899 "Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?“ Harry Warner, Warner Bros. Pictures, c. 1927 "Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote." Grover Cleveland, 1905 "There is no likelihood man can ever tap the power of the atom." Robert Milliken, Nobel Prize in Physics, 1923 "Heavier than air flying machines are impossible." Lord Kelvin, President, Royal Society, c.1895. "A late-1970's market research study commissioned by Bell Labs .. predicted a (cell phone) subscriber base of only 800,000 by (the year) 2000, and concluded there was no market at any price.'" "...by next year (2000) there were in fact be an estimated 80,000,000 subscribers in the U.S. alone.." "In 1876, a Western Union internal memo predicted, this 'telephone" has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication." Magazine, January 2000, page 64 "Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau." Irving Fischer, Yale Economics Prof., 1929 "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." Watson Sr., President of IBM, 1943 "With over 50 foreign cars already on sale here, the Japanese auto industry isn't likely to carve out a big slice of the US market." Business Week, August 2, 1968. "We are probably nearing the limit of all we can know about astronomy." Simon Newcomb, astronomer, 1888.

Yes, I took your post with the same intent... actually I just took the chance to explain if the same thing is going in anyone's head.

Phantom, I have lots of respect for you and it's good to see your post here. I was daytrading for premier prop firm (not prop 'shop' which provides leverage) with 50 floors worldwide. I was actually paid a stipend with decent profit sharing. On a day when most traders on our floor were down, they would connect us to some other floor with a 5-10 min interview of a trader who made money. So I learned trading in a very different environment. Trading has never been glamorous for me, even though the size I swing will shy most people here. I was barely trading for a living, most have no idea what it means so there is nothing 'exciting' I can talk about. Currently I trade only on EOD timeframe, so I cannot give examples of intraday trades even though they are sought because I cant write about what I'm not trading. My style is more of 'matter of fact' because of my background. I'm pretty sure it will be hard to find on internet OR in a book all concepts that I discussed about Relative Strength or Trading Regimes. RS is *very* common concept in professional world but rarely discussed on forums. So 'matter of fact' comes naturally to talk about such basics from absolute scratch. Similarly heatmaps and custom visual plots from Panopticon are very common in the professional world, yet I find myself isolated to talk the same here. Adding to this 4 of my consecutive threads were hijacked by a vendor who claims to 'predict' tops and bottoms every day. I don't think I will be able to shift approach from "information" to "storytelling" manner because that will effect my psyche as trader. I definitely have no intention to become a writer or teach for a living... if the market kicks me out I can get one of those institutional analysts job anyways. I disliked grammar classes in school anyways lol. Hopefully my writing will help site owner atleast with traffic because I've written about things not found elsewhere on internet (called 'keyword niche'). So for the time being I would just chose to go slower.

Is it just me or the forum has gone slow over past week? There seemed to be few postings on weekend.

Heatmaps give you a clean visual representation of what sectors are hot, where people are selling, or how the overall market is reacting. These allow you to view the entire market at a glance and provided by major exchange websites. Many people tend to overlook the convenience of a stock market heat map, but they can be the single most important tool for Relative Strength based strategies. Heatmap is a visual representation of the entire market, indicating by use of colors the performance if important market components. They are represented as a big grid that breaks down individual sectors and stocks. Each stock is given its own rectangle or square. You can draw a lot of information by just watching which areas are going red, which are going green and which remain close to white: Heatmaps are great for spotting what is moving in the market. For example, in the Excel heatmap you can see that most often Financials lead the market; i.e., if the market is up, Financials outperform and if the market is down, they underperform. Similarly Utilities/Healthcare lags the market; they tend to advance the least on up-days and decline the least on down-days. Using this information you can trade Financials on days which you want to be aggressive, while trade Healthcare on days when you want to be defensive. Heatmaps allow you to see trends that are developing. For example, in the Excel heatmap you can see that market turned bullish supported by all sectors on 4 days back (Day-4). Similarly in Dow components map you can see in a glance that INTC, GE and IBM are top performers. You can also see PG shooting up hysterically and hence has increasing probability of retracement. Such observations allow you to avoid buying at the top of a spike or buying in a stock which hardly moves up. Within a stock group you can easily determine which move fastest, which are more trending and which move little with respect to the market. For example, say you have decided to trade in Healthcare and come down to major drug manufacturers. It is easy to see that BMY, ABT and MYGN are stronger candidates for buying. JNJ and PFE moves hardly on up-days but goes down with the market on down-days, so they are candidates for short. Drawing Heatmap in Excel: Click on ‘Conditional Formatting’ in the ‘Home’ tab on the top ribbon. Next go to ‘Highlight Cell Rules’-> ‘More Rules’. Here you can ‘format all cells based on their values’ by using a 3-color scale. Heatmaps can also be drawn in Ninjatrader and Amibroker.