umfan92

Thank you James. I appreciate it. I will be talking to a tax professional soon.

Thank you wrbtrader, that sounds like a good idea. Generally what happens though?

Ok well I've never realy dealt with taxes as I am only 19 years old. Can someone please explain or give a link about how to go about taxes and trading? I want to make sure I'm doing everything correctly. Thanks.

I just got the first edition of Japanese Candlestick Charting Techniques. Do you think they changed the second edition a good amount or would you say the first edition is still relevant and worth the read? Has it had a significant positive effect on your trading?

Alright Jackb, you say you didn't mean it to be insulting. So I apologize. I guess It just sounded that way to me.

It seems you prefer to get into a debate about religion, and that's not what we're here for. Clearly, Tradewinds was just trying to say that no one really knows the truth, therefore whoever is telling you they know everything, is lying to you. If you can't figure that out for yourself, why are you so quick to insult? Steve46, You replied to this thread with nothing but criticism and telling everyone how awesome you are that your students observe you "predict" every day. No one really wants to hear that. Rather than just criticize, I invited you to contribute. You can call it whatever you want, but this is basically what Do or Die was saying. For what reason did you put quotes around the word "predict"? Is it because you are saying that it isn't 100% accurate? Exactly. That is what I interpreted from Do or Die's post. To anticipate is less sure than to predict. You said the same thing as Do or Die with different words. If you make such a great living trading, why must you teach? You must be making millions by trading every day! Are you so generous that you willing teach for free? If so, then teach us here on this forum. If not, I will take it that you are not so skilled in trading and you need to teach to supplement your income. You have contributed nothing to this thread, except for your arrogant posts about how your students observe you being so awesome at trading. You have no intention of being helpful at all in this thread? I see.

Interesting. I have never heard of that before but I definitely think I'm going to do that with Ford. That sounds perfect. I don't want to miss out on the potential rally if the divergence is correct, so I could buy half the shares now, and if it rallies, then I won't miss out entirely. If it falls to meet my original buy price, I would just average down and let it continue as planned. That's perfect! I will continue reading about scaling in or out, but thank you for letting me know.

Thanks DD! I told you I've been practicing! I'm glad it's paying off and I seem to be learning properly. Do you think you could explain "scaling in" and "scaling out" because I don't really know what that means? Thanks!

Hey Do or Die, I've been practicing using the RSI now for a while and I believe I'm getting good at it. I would just like to ask you: How reliable is it? Would you base an entire trade on it? When I look for a company to trade, I look at their chart first, then the moving averages, then RSI then I look at the earning and fundamentals (although I know for short term technical analysis it doesn't matter what the fundamentals are but I still like to know that they're doing good). Specifically, I noticed that Ford Motor Company (F) has had strong support at around 9.90 and has been forming a bullish RSI divergence since August 8th. It seems to be a perfect textbook example of a bullish RSI divergence. What is your opinion?

Ok well I always thought that losses were in parenthesis and gains were left alone. But recently I was looking at GSS earnings on yahoo.com and it completely confused me. Here is a link to the income statement for GSS filed 8/9/11: http://yahoo.brand.edgar-online.com/displayfilinginfo.aspx?FilingID=8085022-28859-35535&type=sect&dcn=0001193125-11-215183 It says (gains)/losses. Does that mean that gains are in parenthesis and losses are not? And does that apply for the whole income statement or just those sections? What the heck? Thanks.

Thanks for the response. What do you mean very slow? And what happens when you use margin? You borrow money from the broker to trade right? Then what? Don't you get charged a percentage? How does it work?

Hey everyone. First of all, I would like to say that I have no intentions of acquiring a margin account for at least several months (mostly likely more than a year). I am just curious about it though. How does a margin account work? I know you have to have a certain amount of money in account, but that's not what I mean. What I mean is: Because you have a margin account, can you use it like a cash account? I know margin means that you're borrowing money from the broker to have more capital with which to trade. But do you have to use margin if you have a margin account? What about shorting? I know you have to have a margin account but does that necessarily mean that you have to use margin? And if you do, how does it work? Also, one more question. How does the VIX work and can I find the VIX by typing that in as if it were a ticker? Is that the actual VIX (volatility index). Thanks everyone, I look forward to your responses.

I would like to thank all of you that replied to this thread. I really appreciate when people take the time to help a beginner like me. I will answer to your responses individually later in the next posts. Thank you to everyone.

So you're saying there is no correlation between options, and future price? Thanks for the response! I just thought the idea was intriguing but I wasn't sure if it would work.

Now, I don't like watching anything about finance and the markets on tv. I never watch any of the usual channels such as cnn, msnbc, cnbc or whatever else there is. But recently I watched a little bit of cnn and it wasn't bad. I've hear many people say that you can't trust any of that because they all have biased opinions. I don't really know much about that but what do you guys do?

Thank you, Phantom. I'm not exactly sure I'm understanding it properly though. I think I may be interpreting it incorrectly. If there are more puts than calls, hedge funds are protecting long positions. So I guess that means that they are expecting prices to go up. Or does that mean they are worried prices will go down? So should I expect prices to go up or down? And the opposite goes for the scenario that there are more calls than puts? I know this is a stupid question but I just want to make sure that I understand properly.

I agree with you, ole. It's an interesting topic, though. I think I might make a new thread about it. Some people are very successful using just price and volume alone. In my opinion, indicators are very useful. I'm still new at this so I can't say that I use indicators successfully but I would prefer using indicators instead of just price and volume. I'm curious as to what other people think about this.

Ok that helps. That makes much more sense. I'm glad I asked that and thank you for the quick and thorough response.

Ok so in the case of the divergence: the price increased (the second peak is obviously higher) yet the indicator (in this case the RSI) decreased. So, since you drew a line connecting the highs, are you saying that when looking for divergences, the indicator is priority? What I mean is, normally ignoring indicators, if I were to draw a trend line of the price at the point of those highs, I would draw it at the lows rather than then highs. But in this case you drew the lines on the highs (up trend) so the RSI was the focus of the trend lines. I hope I explained myself clearly. Sorry if it's a little hard to follow.

Thanks for the reply. I see what you mean. I was looking at it on freestockcharts.com and it still gives incorrect values for the RSI. I thought they had corrected it. I looked on stockcharts.com and it was exactly like you posted there. I guess it all matters where you get your information. I do have one other question though. How is is that you connected the highs on the divergences, but you connected all the other lows on the previous up trend? I know that you connect lows for up trend and highs for down trend, but if you connect the peaks of the up trend just like the divergence, then the price constantly rises while the RSI falls.

Thanks for the reply SIUYA. That really helped a lot. I guess it's just one more thing to add to the technical analysis and fundamentals. I'll probably glance at it when I'm making decisions but I won't give it too much importance.

Yeah I read an article about it and it basically analyzed Friday's options to determine a hint of what to expect the following Monday, and I recently found another article that was more long term than just over the weekend. It sounds like it makes sense, but I was just wondering if anyone does this.

I say "predict" for lack of a better word since I know it is impossible to predict price. But I've read some articles about this and I'm wondering if any of you look at options to help determine where price is going. What do you look at?

Alright thanks. I'll just delete my post since I take your reply as sarcasm.

Well I'm embarrassed asking this question but I have not been able to find out the answer anywhere on Google for some reason and I don't know any experienced traders. I hear a lot of talk about Futures, and Forex, and other things that I have no idea what they are. So, what is futures? I know what forex is, currency trading right? So what's futures? I have no plans on trading any of that yet since I am very new to trading and I haven't even figured out stocks, but I still want to know. Also, since I'm already here, can someone tell me what the ES mini is? (or whatever it's called) I hear everyone saying it's much better yet I still can't find any info on it on Google. Thanks everyone. You don't have to give me a huge description (although I would really appreciate it) but if you could give me a summary and maybe a link to some educational material that would be great.