I noticed on Dr. Van K. Tharp’s site a few days ago that he’s coming out with a new version of the book that changed the way I look at my trading forever, Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom. I emailed Van and company and wanted to get the scoop on the changes that were in store. Here’s what Melita from the IITM office wrote back:

Basically Van has changed about a third of the book to reflect the beliefs that he has now compared to what he thought 7-8 years ago when the other book was written. He discusses the big picture and why it’s important. Shows a much easier version of expectancy, has included information on evaluating your system as R-Multiple distributions, does an analysis and review of other people’s newsletters, and added some revised position sizing material and gotten rid of some parts that are no longer relevant.

Sounds great. I’m a buyer. I actually saw the updated cover on Amazon the other day, but I can’t seem to find it now. Here’s the current version’s cover:

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Have you ever placed a buy order when you were supposed to place a buy to cover order? My short position in GES hit my trailing stop just now and I realized that I made this exact mistake.

It took me a few seconds to figure out what the heck I had done! I was on the phone when I was putting my stop in, so I’m sure that had something to do with it. Whatever the reason, this was a wake up call for me. I’ve always heard about how easy it is to screw up an order, but this is the first that I can remember. Luckily no damage was done. My broker negated the positions and everything is exactly the same as if I entered the order correctly to begin with.

I guess this is another reason I should have taken today off. Is there wind in anybody’s trading sail today?

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StockTickr has always been a one person show. That is until now.

Many of you probably know Richard Todd from his site, Move the Markets and, in fact, I interviewed him a while back, too. He posts regularly on his site and always had something insightful to say about trading the markets. He is a great writer and it comes across in just about everything he writes and does.

Richard has used StockTickr for a few months now. He signed up for StockTickr Pro a few weeks back and since then he has been a constant nag (kidding, of course!) source of ideas and improvements to the site. It was obvious from the suggestions he was making that he “dug” StockTickr and realized how he could use StockTickr Pro to improve his own trading. He even created a Wordpress plugin for StockTickr (and other sites) without any coaxing from me!

We communicated regularly over GTalk and bounced ideas off of each other. He provided some fantastic feedback on almost every aspect of StockTickr and most recently on a new StockTickr Pro feature that we’ll be announcing shortly. It just seemed like a logical next step to see if Richard wanted to help out. He was interested and we discussed some details about how it might work. We finally agreed to an arrangement and I’m thrilled that another motivated trader is helping out! There are a ton of new features in the queue and this will help them get implemented much faster.

Welcome aboard, Richard! (Here’s the announcement from Richard.)

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After I interviewed Trader-X (site) a few weeks back, I became interested in Fibonacci trading and the way he trades it. I contacted Kernan from TRADEthemove.com and got a copy of his two e-books (and subsequently interviewed him).

I’ve since incorporated into my trading some of the information from his two e-books, Using Moving Averages and Fibonacci Retracements to Help Predict Price Movement, and Fibonacci and Fixed Timeframes. It’s been quite helpful in my trading which I’ll write a post about at some point.

Don’t get me wrong - it’s not a magical indicator for you holy grail seekers in the crowd. However, I did find that this type of trading fit my personality quite well and is improving my win rate. I liked it so much that I contacted Kernan to see if we could run some type of promotion on StockTickr. He graciously agreed.

So for the next few weeks, new StockTickr Pro subscribers will receive a copy of each of his e-books for free. Yet another reason to sign up for StockTickr Pro.

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I’ve made it no secret that Stan Weinstein’s book Secrets for Profiting in Bull and Bear Markets is one of my favorite trading books of all time. As I interview more traders, it’s apparent that this book has had an impact on others as well. The approach that he talks about in his book is simple and effective. It’s been a while since Stan wrote this book and I would love to catch up with him for a quick interview.

After I posted my interview with Bruce Brotnov, I received a couple messages from some of you with some information about how I could get in touch with Stan. I sent Stan a note in the mail telling him what SFPIBABM meant to me and kindly asking him for an interview for the StockTickr Interview Series.

If you’ve read the book or would just like to see an interview with Stan, please leave a comment below - perhaps together we can attract his attention or someone might point it out to him.

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A couple months ago, I drove down to Atlanta to meet with Trader Mike. (A popular thing to do nowadays.) My primary motivation was to meet Mike in person and watch him trade and see if I could come up with some cool tools for short term traders for StockTickr. Little did I know that I would leave a full-fledged dummy trader.

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Today I added some links that you can use to drive users to YOUR site. With all the hubbub recently about content aggregation, I want to make it clear that StockTickr is NOT an aggregation play. If you follow the Interview Series I’m doing, you probably realize this already.

There are so many awesome blogs out there writing about stock market content. Just look at them in the Netvibes ecosystem that TraderMike put together. Brett Steenbarger put a great list together this morning, too. I think people should get credit for what they’re doing!

However, I don’t want to just say “StockTickr is not an aggregation play.” I’ll be adding some features over the next few days that demonstrate this.

Here’s the first one. If you’ve added the URL for your own site in your StockTickr Profile, everyone that views your watchlist will see an icon like the one below that links to a search of the current ticker symbol at YOUR site.

Here’s a perfect example. The great (and I do mean great!) Chairman MaoXian posted something on his site about ICT Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:ICTG). When you look at his watchlist in StockTickr, an icon () appears that links to a Google Search of http://www.maoxian.com for ICTG.

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For the next interview in the StockTickr Interview Series (RSS feed), I spoke with Brian Shannon from Alpha Trends. Brian’s site caught my eye when he wrote a post comparing his training for a triathlon with trading. Being a competitive runner myself, I took an interest in that article and his site. Many of you probably know Brian from his daily market video commentary (here’s the one for today). If you haven’t seen his daily commentary, I can hear you saying, “Well how great can it be?” - it is surprisingly good! Brian keeps the pace fast and looks at the overall market and individual stocks from the technical side and on different timeframes. If you can find an extra ten minute in your day, it’s worth watching.

I think freely available market commentary like Brian’s but also TraderMike’s and recently Brett Steenbarger’s provide such a valuable service - they analyze the markets so you and I don’t have to. (And they do a better job than I could anyway!)

Read on for more about how Brian got started trading, how he trades the markets, and what you should do when you first start out trading. Brian has agreed to answer questions in the comments, so ask away!

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For the next interview in the StockTickr Interview Series (RSS feed), I spoke with Jamie from Wall St. Warrior. He posts quite frequently showing examples of his trades and gives some analysis of the overall market. He’s also not scared to put his neck on the line by posting a daily watchlist. Jamie’s also not afraid to go long for some profit and then immediately reverse and go short for some more.

Read on for more about how Jamie got started trading, his favorite technical indicator, and what you should do when you first start out trading. If you have questions for Jamie, leave them in the comments and hopefully he’ll answer.

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Another One Question Interview, this time from Smita Sadana, the female trader I interviewed some time ago.

Reminder: feel free to submit your own answer and I’ll post it, too!

What trading lesson(s) have you learned from the downtrend that started in May?

Smita:

I had been anticipating this downtrend since March. Even though the indices had been making highs from January to March, there was a lot of underlying weakness as evident by narrowing stock leadership and non-confirmation by semiconductors and biotechs, both of which attract speculative money. However, the volatility and viciousness of the downtrend in such a short time was certainly unexpected. Market would seem to gap up and close at the highs, then gap down and close at the lows of the day. The frustrating lack of consistent follow through in either direction caused most traditional technical setups to fail.

I learned that in whipsawing markets, it is best to have reduced exposure to individual stocks and have positions in indices instead. After all, the indices are hanging close to unchanged, while most of the leading stocks are down considerably for the year. In turbulent times like this, it is advisable to have smaller than usual stock positions (if any) and have some portfolio in cash. When the fog starts clearing up, trading can be back on track with the usual position sizes.

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