Trading

U.S. stocks rose today, with equities regaining some footing after the prior day’s rout that shaved more than 300 points off the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Equities maintained their gains after data had factory orders falling 1.5 percent in December after a 1.5 percent gain in November. But some market strategists felt Monday’s plunge may…

U.S. stocks were hammered on Monday, with benchmark indexes falling through key support levels after a gauge of factory activity disappointed, heightening concern about the economy before Friday’s monthly jobs report. Stocks had wavered ahead of the report that had U.S. manufacturing expanding at a substantially slower pace in January, driving overall factory activity to…

Good riddance to a cold January, and I’m not just talking about the weather! U.S. stocks closed steeply under water today, with Wall Street recording its worst month in years and first monthly loss since August, as investors compiled a list of worries that now include emerging markets. The S&P 500 slipped more than 3%…

I am not a big fan of intra-day trading. The reasons are pretty simple; there is more random price movement or market ‘noise’ on the intra-day charts, and they thus contain more ‘clutter’ and are just more difficult to trade than the daily charts. For a skilled trader who is already successful, intra-day trading might…

I was at a Chinese buffet restaurant recently as my youngest son turned 3, it happens to be his favourite restaurant.  Anyway, after we had finished we all received our fortune cookies, mine was the following: “Luck sometimes visits the fool, but it never sits down with him” What a great proverb when it comes…

Don’t you wish you could look into the future and see where your account would be if you stuck to a particular strategy or system without fail for the next 10 years? This is the magic of back testing: Pretending it was 10 years ago and you are about to embark on an odyssey to…

In 1975 a study was carried out at Yale by Ellen Langer on the ‘Illusion of control’.  Ellen demonstrated that we have a tendency to assume we are more in control more than in realistically possible.  Her work focused on gambling studies, but has relevance in the trading and investing world. In one of the…