For the next interview in the StockTickr Interview Series (RSS feed), I spoke with Timothy Sykes, the somewhat controversial trader who was featured in the hit documentary Wall Street Warriors.

For those of you that know of Tim, you know how shy and reserved he is - it’s hard to draw out his true feelings. (OK, that was sarcasm.) Whatever your opinion of Timothy Sykes - he tells it like he sees it whether that gets him in trouble or not.

Tim is also the author of the bestselling book, An American Hedge Fund: How I Made $2 Million as a Stock Operator & Created a Hedge Fund.

Read on for more about how Tim trades, the way he trades the pump and dump schemes in penny stocks, and why he thinks controversy seems to follow him around.

Tim is looking for your questions in the comments of this post - so ask him anything you want.

Note: Are you losing money trading? If so, give StockTickr a try - we guarantee you’ll be able turn your trading around. There’s a 14 day free trial.

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Some of the most frustrating days aren’t when you lose a big wad of money. It’s usually days when you hesitate and miss good trades or see open profits evaporate and turn into losses. That’s what happened yesterday. In the long run, you have to tolerate those kinds of days to be in position to have very, very good days. That doesn’t make it any more enjoyable when it happens, though.

I ended up down 2.5R or so for the automated trades and down a little over 1R in the manual trades.

Here’s a chart in CSIQ that went from at least +3R to -0.33R. No fun!

Charts automatically generated by StockTickr

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For the next interview in the StockTickr Interview Series (RSS feed), I spoke with Jamie Hodge, the director of education at Trade-Ideas and an automated trader. He’s made the switch to almost completely automated trading these days. Jamie’s also the one you’ll be able to have a 1-on-1 training session with when you sign up for Trade-Ideas.

Read more about how Jamie trades, how he got started in the business, and how he lost a wad of money early in his trading career.

Jamie has agreed to answer questions in the comments of this post, so feel free to ask away.

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For the next interview in the StockTickr Interview Series (RSS feed), I spoke with Barry Burns of Top Dog Trading.

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It took me a while to get into Twitter. I gave it a whirl pretty early on and it seemed more like a fad that would fade. Obviously that’s not the case. I think that when I first started several months ago everyone was still figuring out what to do with it.

Andy from MyTrade has been on board for quite a while and others have as well.

The more I use it the more I’m fascinated by phenomenon and wondering what I did with all my “tweets” before Twitter - I guess they just stayed pent up in my psyche until they reached the “blog post threshold” or I just forgot about them.

Of course, there are those who say that Twitter is irrelevant minutia, but these are kinfolk of the people who dismiss the entire blogosphere because some dude blogs pointlessly about his cat. (Of course there are terrible blogs out there - just don’t read them.)

There are different ways to think about Twitter - replacing quick emails with tweets, a souped-up replacement for the IM status message, real time alerts (I first learned about the BSC $2 buyout on Twitter) - even stock quotes now. It’s certainly all of the above and there’s no doubt there are great uses for Twitter that no one has thought of yet.

If you want to follow my tweets, here’s my Twitter feed. Here are some folks I’m currently following: Brett Steenbarger (from TraderFeed), Howard Lindzon (of WallStrip fame - funny dude), Andy Swan (and his brother Landon), and Fred Wilson (his blog). I’m sure this list will change soon, but this is hitting the high notes now.

Also, if you’re on a mobile phone or BlackBerry, check out TinyTwitter which is a great little app that’s easy on your battery.

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For the next interview in the StockTickr Interview Series (RSS feed), I spoke with Joshua Hayes, the founder of BigWaveTrading.com and a free service called BigWaveTrading.net.

Read on for more about how Joshua trades, how he got started trading the markets, and the most valuable lesson he learned to improve his trading.

There are several great interviews on the way - have a recommendation for an interviewee? Drop us a line.

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The past couple of days have been quite slow for the automated trading system. This is the way I like it, though. Every time I look to add new systems or methods I make sure that the trade frequency is less than what I envision the final version to be.

It’s sort of like paper trading without the paper. Trade small and relatively infrequently and then slowly give yourself (or the computer) more rope as you determine real world performance.

I took four manual trades today and did pretty well. Here’s the best trade of the day in SKM and the worst trade of the day in WSM:

Charts automatically generated by StockTickr

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For the next interview in the StockTickr Interview Series (RSS feed), I spoke with Corey Rosenbloom of the Afraid to Trade blog. Corey has a background in psychology and touches on those topics on his site. Trading psychology is a popular theme in the interview series (see the interviews with Van K. Tharp and Brett Steenbarger).

Read on for more about how Corey trades, how trading is a balancing act, and a couple light-bulb moments for his trading.

(Corey mentions that he’s a TradeStation user - StockTickr has recently added excellent support for TradeStation.)

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I wrote an article on being your own trading coach for the Smart Trade Digest by the folks at Traders’ Library for the March issue.

Some of the topics I covered were:

• Tracking your trading performance
• Trading more than one strategy
• Reviewing charts of your trades
• Identifying hidden mistakes in your trading
• Improving your trading performance over time
• Why some traders perform better than others

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After the CEO of Bear Stearns did an interview on CNBC last Tuesday where he denied rumors that they had a liquidity problem saying their balance was solid with plenty of cash on hand, yesterday JP Morgan bought Bear Stearns at the fire sale price of $2 a share. Here’s a daily chart of BSC:

Here’s the interview with the CEO. Imagine being a buy and hold investor looking for the bottom in BSC over the last week. Unbelievable.

Hat tip to John for a link to the interview.

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