To Clear a Trader’s Head: Just Flip It

On the topic of Perspective: Lady Astor: “If I were your wife, I would poison your coffee.”Winston Churchill: “If you were my wife, I would drink it.” Captain Kirk reveals a great technique for changing one’s perspective that eliminates opinions and sticks to strict objectiveness in trading decisions: flip the chart. Flip the chart and…

Read More

What’s Above the 20 Day SMA and Up 5 Days?

Not everything went off a cliff this week. Some stocks are still above their 20 day moving average and are up each day of the week (as of Thursday’s close). TickerSense points out it’s important to look for stocks that weather the storm rather than what got hit hardest. So here is a custom scan…

Read More

When Subscribers Talk: Don’t Stop til You Get Enough

The truth is – it’s never enough. Keeping customers talking about a product or service in a positive, constructive way means delivering on the features that customers ask for and fixing or changing what they dislike. Fortunately we keep the conversation ratio tilted to the positive. The 3 latest improvements to the service fall into…

Read More

Trade-Ideas In Your Town: Chicagoland

Last week we announced the dates of our 2nd annual Trade-Ideas user’s conference we call the Learning Curve Seminar: June 19-20th in downtown San Diego, CA. If you can’t make it there for those dates, come and visit us during the upcoming Scottrade ELITE User’s Summit scheduled for Saturday, March 24 in Chicago, IL. The…

Read More

Daily Ticks: P&L Management

One item that’s got our attention today: it is Dr. Brett Steenbarger’s column from over the weekend regarding his series on trading Best Practices. In the article Brett considers one practice used by new traders (about eliminating emotion) we’ve seen put to good use in offices across the country. P&L Management: A Best Practice in…

Read More

Strategy Session: Persistent Strong Closes

Let’s leave it up to good karma that after reading today’s post from Dr. Brett Steenbarger, “Persistent Strong Closes: The Personality of This Stock Market“, I field an interesting support IM (Note: list of support IMs here) from “a Brooklyn Trader” that produces a good strategy based on Brett’s observations – a Strategy Session we…

Read More

2 Elements of Good Backtesting Results

We’re not the only ones on the subject of backtesting in the new year. Today Price Headley points to the benefits on a trader’s psychology and confidence of backtesting and helps frame how a trader should evaluate the system to which s/he is about to commit capital (thanks TraderMike): How will your system react to…

Read More

Odds Maker versus TradeStation, Wealthlab, CyberTrader and Other

Since we launched the Odds Maker beta in September many have asked the question. Why are you guys so excited about back-testing? It has been around for a long time and other software products like TradeStation, Wealthlab, Metastock, and CyberTrader all have their own back-testing modules. What is the big deal? Here are the real…

Read More