“Whatever trades don’t ruin my account only serve to make me a better trader.”

Leave it to me to mess up a perfectly good trade. Like the other day with Trimble Navigation (Nasdaq: TRMB), I saw a decent setup in Palm, Inc. (NASDAQ: PALM). It wasn’t the best setup I’ve ever seen, but I got short below the 6th 30 minute candle. I set my stop just above that same candle.

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For the next interview in the StockTickr Interview Series (RSS feed), I interviewed Will Fisher from dummyspots.com, a part time trader who posts some very insightful articles on his site. Here are a couple examples: Other People’s Money and It Ain’t So Easy.

Read on for more about who Will is, how he got started trading, and what trading styles he uses. Also, post questions to Will in the comments of this post and he’ll swing by and answer them. I continue to be pleased to see the useful discussion in the comments of the last two interviews: Tom C. and Jason of Mercado de Estocástica. I’m sure there’s something I forgot to ask Will, so ask it in the comments!

Also, check out StockTickr Pro – we continue to make improvements every day and traders are noticing!

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As some of you might remember, I’ve recently switched brokers to Cybertrader and haven’t looked back. I had used trading platforms before, but the flexibility that Cybertrader provides is great.

That said, it took me forever to figure out how to do something I always do before I start trading: hide those profit/loss numbers. One of the first features you notice the first time you switch from an online only broker to a “trading platform” is the real time trading status. The nice thing about that feature is that you see your account’s worth and open profit/loss numbers in real time on each tick. The bad thing about that feature is that you see your account’s worth and open profit/loss numbers in real time on each tick. Before long I realized that “cool feature” was harming my trading psyche! It’s like poison!

I created a video showing how to hide those numbers – trust me, you don’t want to be staring at those numbers all day!

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For the next interview in the StockTickr Interview Series (RSS feed), I interviewed the mysterious Tom C., a daytrader who frequently posts charts over at our friend Trader-X’s site.

Tom often posts charts of unusual setups such as these gap reversal plays he made.

Read on for more about who Tom actually is, how he got started trading, how he decides which charts to post, and how he answers to nobody (except his wife). Also, post questions to Tom in the comments of this post and I’ll see if he can answer them. I was pleased to see the useful discussion in the comments of the last interview with Jason of Mercado de Estocástica.

Also, check out StockTickr Pro – we continue to make improvements every day and traders are noticing!

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StockTickr Pro users have the ability to start their own investment club or advisory service right within StockTickr. Let’s say that I’m a super-duper stock picker and that every stock I select turns to gold (not the case for me!).

If I wanted to let only certain people access my picks here’s how I’d do it:

When you add a stock to StockTickr, StockTickr Pro users have the ability to mark a trade as “private”:

Marking a trade as private prevents anyone else from seeing that trade – unless you add them as one of your “subscribers”. To do that, go to your subscribers page and add their username.

Any users that you add will be able to go to http://www.stocktickr.com/private/ and see all private picks from any user that they are subscribed to.

All your private entries will appear with a lock beside them in your list:

I was ecstatic to see my copy of Brett Steenbarger’s new book Enhancing Trader Performance arrive last week. I was even happier to see StockTickr Pro listed as a recommended resource in the book.

I knew from reading Brett’s blog that he regularly exercises, but I didn’t realize the kind of shape he’s really in. Take a look at the picture of him on the cover of the book:

I’m a little over 50 pages into the book, and I can already say that it’s very good. Here’s a nugget that I hadn’t thought about before, but it makes perfect sense. Brett’s referring to a trader that can’t muster the discipline to stick with a certain trading style:

Their losses of discipline are intuitive gravitations to their natural trading styles.

… and a little bit later…

When you have found your niche, you don’t need discipline to do the right things; you won’t want to do anything else.

I’m getting a lot out of this book and I’d highly recommend it. I was also happy to read that his first book (review) is still selling well.

Congrats, Brett!

For the next interview in the StockTickr Interview Series (RSS feed), I interviewed Jason (a.k.a. estocastica), a daytrader that logs trades on his site, Mercado de Estocástica.

Jason takes an honest approach on his site by posting all the trades he takes where they’re wins or losses – an approach that I respect and wish others would do. It says a lot about a bloggers intentions if they only post winning trades like lots do. Jason is not that way – his site exists to give back rather than take from the trading community. That’s why it’s one of the first sites I’ll check in my RSS reader in the evenings.

Read on for more about how Jason got started trading, how much (or how little) he tries to trade with the overall market tide, and what type of setups he looks for. Ask Jason questions in the comments and I’ll see if he can answer them.

Also, check out StockTickr Pro – we continue to make improvements every day and traders are noticing!

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In your watchlist within StockTickr, there’s already links to a couple popular sites for stock research: Google Finance and Yahoo! Finance. Those links are formatted so that you go right to the stocks page when you click them.

We’re not going to pretend that we know the best links that you should be using, so we added the ability for you to add your own links to resources that you use for your own trading. You can now customize StockTickr to add two custom links that appear on every stock. Just look for the Custom Link Edit icon on any stock in StockTickr:

Click the icon to go to your StockTickr profile. When you edit your profile, you’ll see two fields for each custom link you can create. The first field is for the text that goes in the beginning of the link all the way to the position that the ticker symbol appears. The second field is for the test that appears after the ticker symbol in your custom link.

For example, I’ve added a custom link to the Investor’s Business Daily’s Stock Checkup page. Here’s the address to the checkup for GOOG:

http://www.investors.com/member/checkup/checkUp.asp?t=goog&ss=YES

So in the Custom Link A Start field, I added “http://www.investors.com/member/checkup/checkUp.asp?t=” and for the Custom Link A End field I added “&ss=YES” (the part after GOOG in the link).

After you’re done, the links will appear when you’re logged into StockTickr on every stock.

Related feature: Add a link to your site that everybody can see.