I mentioned last week my automated trading approach - the ol’ throw a bunch of strategies at the wall and see what sticks. So far so good. Yesterday one of my strategies made about 5R, today it lost an R or two.

The manual trades have started off slowly this month but have picked up steam over the past couple days. No time to post charts.

Hope you guys had a great day!

By the way, there is a bunch of new StockTickr stuff coming out soon on many fronts. Exciting stuff! Stay tuned.

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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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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

Read the rest of this entry »

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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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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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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I ended up not taking any discretionary trades yesterday. Everything seemed erratic with options expiration occurring.

I did end up giving the automated trading system a little rope and it found two trades to take. One stopped out for a 1R loss, but the other one was a nice 6.5R winner!

Even when you’re trading small 6.5R amounts to something.

I hope everyone has a good and relaxing holiday weekend!

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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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I’ve recently started using QuoteTracker as my charting platform to see how I’d like it. So far I think it’s fantastic - every bit as good as eSignal (for most things). Here’s a great feature that’s in QuoteTracker that, after using it for a couple days, makes me think it should be in every charting platform.

Before a candle completes, QuoteTracker displays the “projected volume” of the candle. So at the current rate of volume during the current candle it projects how large the volume bar will be when the candle completes. What a great, intuitive feature - I love it.

I’m still clinging to a couple different charting platforms, which I’ll discuss in a future post. For now, though, QuoteTracker is working well. Hat tip to Eyal for turning me on to this.

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