For the next interview in the StockTickr Interview Series (RSS feed), I spoke with Doug Hirschhorn (site), a trading coach with a background in athletics and sports psychology. He is he author of The Trading Athlete: Winning the Mental Game of Online Trading. He occasionally blogs as well.

I would be willing to bet that a good percentage of traders are (were) athletes or at least take exercise seriously. (I was a collegiate athlete and am still somewhat serious about competing.) I also would bet that most readers believe that athletes are more apt to be good traders. Doug was involved with a trading firm that ONLY hired athletes, so he’s seen first hand how athletes and trading mix. His results will probably surprise you.

Read on for some tips on trading and what he believes is the number one reason traders fail.

Doug has agreed to answer questions in the comments – so ask away!

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As you might know, I switched to CyberTrader a while back and am loving it. It was a breeze to switch brokers and the trading platform is excellent.

What I’m really liking about CyberTrader right now is their Alert Templates. Read the rest of this entry »

StockTickr is getting a lot more useful. In addition to the stocks that users submit to keep track of in their own watchlists, there are several lists that get programatically entered into StockTickr that you can use in your own trading. You can always track these in your RSS reader using the RSS feeds that are available for just about everything in StockTickr.

For example, we’ve been entering stocks that have hit new highs (RSS) or new lows (RSS) on above average volume for some time now. It’s funny how these stocks are always popping up on the best performers list.

Recently, Richard from Move the Markets has been putting several of his lists into StockTickr. His weekly Best Stocks to Day Trade (RSS) list is now in StockTickr. Also, his daily near 20 day highs (RSS) and near 20 day lows (RSS) are being added nightly as well.

The High Alpha list (RSS) that Ugly likes to trade is now in StockTickr as well.

Here’s a couple interesting lists that Eric over at DeepMarket is adding using the StockTickr Email API. The top 10 Head and Shoulders Patterns (RSS) and Inverted Head and Shoulders Patterns (RSS) are being added at the end of each trading day. I asked Eric to explain a little about how his process works:

As an experiment I am trying simple correlation to help bring up a list of “possible” head and shoulders patterns. I describe it in more detail in my articles Oversimplified Method for Finding Patterns in Stock Charts and Correlation Pattern Matching Explained. The process is very simple and the results are mediocre at best – I get a lot of nasty email from technicians – but very little insight about how they find them. I standard case of “I know it when I see it” syndrome. What I was trying to do is show how programs can help humans reduce their work load (looking for patterns), but generally it is still up to the humans to determine if the patterns are valid or not.

My pattern matching process is written in Java, so I just used the Java mail API to construct an email with the top ten symbols (sorted by correlation) and then send them to StockTickr using the StockTickr Email API. I had not used the Java Mail API in years and had an awful time trying to connect to any of my normal emails accounts, but I finally got it working with GMail.

Do you have suggestions for other lists that you’d like to see in StockTickr? Let us know or go ahead and start using the StockTickr Email API.

Also, look for an announcement in the coming days about how you can seamlessly integrate these lists and any stocks in StockTickr into your trading workflow.

For the next interview in the StockTickr Interview Series (RSS feed), I interviewed the guys (and gal, apparently) over at the Highchartpatterns Group. They offer a newsletter which I currently subscribe to. Their forte is breakout trading. I’m actually not taking many of the trades in their newsletter right now – I’m watching their picks and numbers and seeing if their style fits my personality. Call it “Broadening my Trading Horizons.” As far as newsletters go, I think it’s fantastic. If I sign up for a newsletter, I expect it to teach me something and not just be a black box spitting out picks. HCPG doesn’t disappoint! I feel like I’m taking an in depth look at a something that’s a little out of my comfort zone – something that I know from experience is good for me. Also, I’m not being compensated in any way for this post – I just like the service and think they’re good, honest folks. After all, they post every single trade they make.

They started a blog not too long ago which is definitely worth a spot in your feed reader. Read their “Trader’s Narrative” series first – all the various entries are excellent.

Read on for more about how they started trading, what they look for in the markets, and how the bear market in 2002 was a wake up call for these traders. Feel free to ask questions in the comments of this post – the Highchartpatterns Group is watching and eager to answer questions you may have.

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

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For the next interview in the StockTickr Interview Series (RSS feed), I interviewed Zoomie who posts his trades over at Move the Markets. Zoomie trades with a style similar to mine, so I’m always checking his trades to see what he found that I wasn’t able to.

Zoomie is a retired fighter pilot, which certainly adds to the already diverse backgrounds of the interviewees in this series. In his first answer, Zoomie jokingly implies that he’s paying me to conduct this interview, which, of course, is a joke. (Just setting the record straight.)

Read on for more about Zoomie and his views of the markets, how a career as a fighter pilot helped him be a better trader, and his methodology on a trade “proving him right.”

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

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I’ve added another report that’s available to StockTickr Pro subscribers for getting the most out of their trading. It’s called Performance by Price Range and it shows how well your system performs based on the price of a stock. For example, does your system perform better with lower priced stocks or higher priced stocks?

Here are the results for about three months of my trading. For some reason, it looks like $40 stocks are my sweet spot. As always, comments and analysis are welcome.

Performance by Price Range

For the next interview in the StockTickr Interview Series (RSS feed), I interviewed Gavin from Trader Gav. I follow Gav’s blog because I think he has an interesting style – he dummy trades futures contracts.

Since Gav sent me his responses, he’s started going through what appears to be an intense scrutiny of his trading methods. He is currently attempting to backtest his methods and he’s posting regular updates on his progress – it’s great reading and definitely worth following.

Read on for more about Gavin and his views of the markets, his evolution as a trader, and how he started using profit targets instead of simply trailing a stop in his trades. Feel free to ask Gav questions in the comments.

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

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What hour of the day is your most profitable to initiate a trade? We’ve added a few new reports to the StockTickr Pro Trading Journal that will give you a performance report by time of day. There are reports by hour, by half hour, and by quarter hour. It will take a decent sized sample to be able to start drawing conclusions from reports like this. However, l was surprised to see that I have a negative expectancy when I enter trades during the 11 AM hour and yet that’s the hour that I initiate the most trades. Not sure why that is yet, I’m still digging through the Chart Review of my trades to see. A glance at my half hour report and quarter hour report shows that trading between 11:00 – 11:30AM has a negative expectancy, but between 11:30 – 12:00PM has a positive expectancy for me. My current thinking is that the kind of setups I’m looking for are commonly approaching potential resistance (usually the opening range high or low) at this time of day and often fail. Perhaps I should wait for confirmation before entering setups like this.

If anyone has any other ideas, I’m all ears. Here are my most recent trades during the time of day in question.

StockTickr Pro users can find these reports under the reports tab.

Performance by Hour

Well, November turned out a good bit better than October for me. I credit that to ridding myself of a bias I had to trade earlier in the day. I think a couple trades where I entered after the 10:00 30 minute candle that turned out really well back in September (like this one) instilled an unhealthy bias towards trading off that candle. For a while after those successful lucky trades, I would aggressively look to be in something shortly after 10:30AM.

I’ve tried to rid myself of that bias and I think it worked in November. I’ve always thought of myself as a picky trader, but I’ve worked on trying to be even pickier. In fact, I give myself the hardest pat on the back on the days where I see several okay setups where I’m able to resist the urge to trade and not trade at all. It’s those days that in many ways, ironically, I feel like I’ve traded my best.

Here’s my calendar for November:

Here are my monthly trading results since I started dummy trading back in August. Those links will take you to the calendar view for each month.