Statistics show that in a bull market about 75% of the stocks will follow the general trend and go up, and in a bear market 75% will also go down. Trading with the trend is the best way to trade as 9 out of 12 stocks will follow the trend and give you the best chance of making gains on your stock purchases.

But what if you own some nice stocks and don’t want to sell when the market is clearly going down, or about to go down?. There are a few tactics that you can consider, both of which involve the use of options, CALL options and PUT options. There is the well known strategy called Covered Calls, and the much lesser known one called the Married Put.

If you are going to trade options it is important that before you start trading you get the best option trading education that you can. You should also practice stock trading until you are comfortable with the process. This is a very important point that must be taken seriously, if you don’t understand the terminology and theory then you should not be trading options. If Put option, Call option, Married Put and Covered Call are new to you then don’t trade until you have studied sufficiently.

Selling calls against your stock in 100 share increments is the basis of the covered call strategy and it can provide about a 2-7% buffer against the loss in stock price. However a bigger drop in the stock price will not be compensated for using the covered call strategy, in general.

Stocks in a bear market, and even in a bull market, can drop quickly on news or earnings releases, as much as 15 to 45% within a month. Using covered calls to protect your stocks will only provide limited protection of less than 7% at best and so will not save you if the stock takes a 40% tumble.

The better solution to providing downside stock protection is the option strategy called the Married Put. As the name suggests the PUT that you buy is used to provide protection when the stock goes down because Put options increase in value when the stock decreases in value. The term married is used because the option that is selected has to be very compatible with the stock, in other words a good match, if the strategy is to work.

The selection of the best Put option is not straight forward and involves several criteria which are listed below:

1. The strike price of the option

2. The current share price

3. Choice of options, in or out of the money

4. Put expiration time

Even though the married Put protection only has a short life span if offers much more protection than the covered call. It can provide as much as 95% loss recovery in the event of a significant drop in the stock price.

The downside of the good protection is that you have buy the Put which is a cash debit whereas the covered call is a credit. But there are ways of off-setting this expense and there is much more to this strategy when executed correctly. The Married Put can be made to just about pay for itself and used to generate very good gains if the market, or stock to be specific, moves a lot.

The general idea of the Collar Trade is to combine the covered call and married Put strategy into one, this is what is called the Collar Trade. In effect you put a collar around the stock, sell a call and buy a PUT. If you do this correctly most of the cost of the Put can be offset by the credit from the covered call so you can protect your stock at almost no cost. Yes this is a great strategy which the general public is unfortunately ignorant of, and most brokers don’t understand.

The strategy that I have outlined above is unknown to the average stock market trader but is one of the best trading systems you could have.

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Marsh’s company, E-mini Trading Strategies offers a  30 Day Double-Your-Money-Back-Guarantee which states The Tick Trader Method will achieve a minimum of 1 point a day.

If you are or haven been interested in day trading and the possibility of trading for a living, take the time to research this course. David Marsh makes himself availabe to speak with potential students, so ask as many questions as you like.

Visit his website and read everything especially his daily blog in which he recaps every single trading day. It will also give you insight into the type of person that he is.

His emini trading strategies are not difficult to learn.Day trading is not for everybody and you must have the discipline to follow the rules. The eminis can be traded from home or anywhere that you have a computer and high speed internet connection.

If you have a basic understanding of the futures market and trading, you can begin trading this method in less than a single day.

You should have a basic understanding of charts, technical indicators, and order placement. You should have a decent knowledge of the markets before taking the course.

If you do not he does offer a Beginner’s Course.

The system’s goal is to make a one point profit each day. A daily income is the goal.This is a consistent and conservative approach to earn daily income.

The system trades the same way each and every day, and it is usually done for the day early in the morning. The rest of the time is yours to do as you please.

Most people work 40 or more hours at a job or business and have very little time for themselves and family. It simply does not have to be that way

It is possible to spend 30 to 90 minutes a day trading the e-mini markets to earn your living. Day trading is a wonderful way of life.

This trainingcourse offers you the opportunity.

1. The Buck Stops With You

Whether you are looking round for a day trading programme or developing your own, remember that whatever you do is your responsibility. Ask for recommendation and help by all means, but don’t believe everything you hear. People are different and their trading styles can alter very, so never follow advice blindly.

Equally, you can buy in a system but do not neglect to test it. Whether or not the guy who designed it asserts that it’ll double your money in 2 months for certain sure, you must test, because there are three possible Problems with that. One, he might be lying. Two, perhaps it used to work great but it doesn’t work any more. Three, perhaps it works for him but for some unusual reason to do with your spread or whatever, it doesn’t work for you. Your cash is your responsibility and yours alone, so put the system to work on a demo account until you are sure.

2. Be Calm

The most important enemy of any trader is their own feelings and this is especially true for the individual that wants to learn day trading. If you are the sort of person who makes bad choices under stress, you might want to think again about choosing day trading as your system. This is a fast moving world where seconds can count in thousands of bucks, so you must keep a particularly cool head.

Now just about everyone likes to think they seem to be a calm sort of person who would react way below pressure, so even if you are convinced you are going to be the planet’s number one ice cold trader, test yourself as well as your system in that demo account. If you curve off the system even once or start changing your position size, closing out early, waiting too long etc in demo mode, sorry but you aren’t prepared for real life trading when things will be much more hairy. Keep working on it.

3. Track Everything

Even though you have got to work fast when you’re using day trading systems , it is worth making the effort to scribble everything down. This is a skill you can train yourself of while in demo. You’ll be dazzled how much it helps you to understand why things went wrong or right when they did. This can enable to to tweak a marginal system into a profitable one and make all the difference to your bottom line. A simple spreadsheet recording your position, the signal(s) and the opening and closing costs is sufficient during trading. Afterward you may need to add a comment.  

4. If You Doubt, Stay Away

This is a widely known trading and investment rule. Don’t take a chance on something that nearly fits your system but not really. It may work once but over the long term this may lead to disaster. There is probably a reason why the system is set up for the signals that it has and if the market does not fit, do not force it.

Equally if you’re sick or under stress about another area of your life, it can be better to keep away from the market, particularly while you’re still a relative beginner. There will be other and better opportunities to learn day trading when you are feeling in top condition.

The 50 simple moving average, or 50 SMA, is simply the sum of the last 50 values for each period, divided by 50, this is a moving window, as time moves on so does the average. Notice that I used the term period because this indicator works on any time period in exactly the same way.

It can be used on monthly, weekly, daily, hourly, 30 minutes, 15 minute and on whatever time period you want to monitor and trade. Although the SMA is the most commonly used there is also the exponential moving average or EMA. This is a weighted version of the formula using the mathematical exponent function to give more weight to the more recent values, this has the effect of making it a slightly faster average that many traders prefer.

The truth is that it probably does not matter if you used the SMA or the EMA, what does matter however is that you use one or the other and then be very consistent with it. Do not switch between them, it is more important that you learn to trust your chosen indicator then a slight difference in its value.

The simple moving average is primarily used to determine what the current trend of the stock is, depending on the value used it could be a short term, medium term or long term trend. An important point to note is that moving averages are really only useful when the stock is trending, if the moving average is flat, i.e. horizontal on your chart it can become very choppy, this is a good time to not trade.

The general rule is that if the current price is above the SMA the trend is up, if below the trend is down. This is very important to understand because it forms the basics of trend trading and trading with the trend.

For the short term trend many traders like using a 5-8 SMA or EMA, here is a trading secret, never trade again the direction of the short term tend, actually this is really just common sense when you think about it.

Moving averages often act as support or resistance, many traders use the 15, 21 or 30 SMA for this purpose.

There are a number of other very important moving averages that you need to know about, these are the 50, 100 and 200 SMA, and this mainly applies to the daily and weekly charts. A lot of big players in the markets, the mutual funds, investment banks etc use the 50 and 200 SMA as support and resistance, if they decide to buy or sell based on these you need to follow suite, the 100 to a lesser extent. These are very useful averages to watch if you trade EFT’s like an Oil ETF.

A useful tip is that when a stock breaks through one moving average it will often move all the way to the next, for example, if a stock breaks the 30 SMA it may move to the 50 before finding some support or resistance.

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In the USA stock market there are 3 major indexes which are each made up of a basket of stocks, they are the S and P 500 (also known as the S&P500), the DOW 30 and the Nadaq 100. These stock indexes generally only contain major blue chip stocks, as long as you buy from these 3 groups you will at least know that you are getting a well known solid stock.

For example the DOW 30 contains major industrials and large multinational stocks such as Home Depot (HD) and Johnson and Johnson (JNJ) whereas the Nasdaq 100 mainly contains techical companies such as Apple (AAPL) and Miscrosoft (MSFT).

Always buy a stock that is liquid, this means that it is a highly traded stock, this will enable you to quickly buy and sell at the price you want without having a delay. You will also get a lower spread, thats the difference between the BID and ASK price of the stock. For a stock to be considered highly liquid it should trade at least 500,000 shares per day, ideally even more.

It is best to aviod stocks that are bellow as this usually means the company is in trouble, although with the bear market of 2008/9 there have been a lot of good stocks at bargin prices between and . Avoid buying a stock below at anytime.

Another consideration is options, does the stock has options?, this will be important if you want to trade options around your stock, such as a covered call, or you may want to buy a PUT option in order to protect your stock.

Be very cautious about buying a stock just before it’s earnings release, stocks often drop significantly if you come out with a poor report. Earnings releases are 4 times a year with one of them being the annual report.

If you are going to trade options make sure that you learn how to trade by getting some good education. There are many swing trading strategies that work well with stocks in todays volatile markets.

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There’s also a lot of hype about how complicated it is and why you need to spend thousands of dollars on options trading education before you get started. Needless to say this last statement usually comes from trading seminar companies trying to sell your their trading course on options.

Lets cover a few of the basics about options and set you straight about a few important points. Firstly yes it is true that you can make a lot of cash trading options, but of course you can also lose just as fast.

When trading stocks your leverage is 1:1, if you go on margin you can get get 1:2 leverage, but thats about it. With options it is not as straight forward to calculate the leverage but generally speaking you can get between 1:5 and 1:10 when you buy an option on a stock, or ETF.

So with 1:10 leverage, when the stock increases by 5% your option can increase by approx 50%, and this can happen in just a few days, this is why swing trading strategies using options on stocks is so popular.

However the downside is that a big loss can also happen, if the stock drops by 5% your option can also drop by 50%, at which point you may want to close the trade and save some of your option value, it really depends on what your stop loss and risk.

What I’ve just described is called directional option trading where you are betting on the getting the direction of the stock movement correct, this is highly speculative. Options can also be used in option strategies which are much more non-directional, such as covered call trades, credit spreads and Iron Condors. In these trades there is much less dependance on getting the stock direction correct, but it still matters.

So should you learn to trade options?, in my opinion you should not do directional option trades until you become an expert stock trader 1st. This is because you really need to be very precise with your entry and exit strategy and trading plan, and be very good at technical analysis.

Whereas if you want to do non-directional option trades you don’t need to be such an experianced stock trader to be successful, but of course it does not hurt either.

Learning how to trade options is a very useful skill you have, but don’t rush into it and blow out your account. Make sure that you get a good options trading education before you start, and also make sure that you have a very solid stock trading education as well, such one from Top Dog Trading Review.

The SEC or Securities & Exchange Commission classifies penny stocks whether those that sell for less than $5 a share. Of course other exchanges consider those selling for fewer than three dollars or though one to be penny stocks. Essentially, penny stocks are those that are not exchanged on the prime stock exchanges for instance NYCE, AMEX, are NASDAQ.  It actually depends upon the exchange in which you’re trading. Penny stocks are a little extra unsafe than many of the rest by the way for great reason. Just as they are very risky on the other hand, they are also quite profitable for those who manage to trade penny stocks successfully.

The risks in penny stocks go well beyond the obvious and are part of the reason that payoffs are so rewarding for those who are fortunate. There is extremely little skill that goes into successfully trading penny stocks but many luck. If you’re a gambler at heart then this’s definitely your sort of investment. It is tremendously principal on the other hand that you enter into penny stocks trading through the firm understanding that you aren’t likely to be winning. In fact, probability are best that you will lose whether lots of as you produce from the prospect. There are those by the way, who have managed to defy the odds & win quite handsomely in the game we have come to know as penny stock trading.

Some things you will seek to keep in mind before you begin trading in this highly volatile market include the following. First of all, penny stocks aren’t love normal stocks where they’re heavily traded & there’s almost usually someone waiting in line to purchase. When you decide to sell it could be a when before a buyer comes along. This means that penny stocks are not the lots of liquid stocks on the planet & when you need quick entrance to your money this’s definitely not the stock for you.

One more item to remain in mind while it comes to penny stocks is that there is often extremely little info on these companies. Unless you have good research skills & the occasion and energy to put them to reason for your trading endeavors you’re really unlikely to discover lots of history and financial statistics on these companies as opposed to numerous publicly traded companies that are pretty much required to open their books to investors. This is unsafe to investors because knowledge is vital and schemes are plenty.

Every penny you invest in penny stocks should be a penny that you’re tremendously well prepared to loose & perfectly happy to earn a refund through. You can hit the lottery on your penny stock investment and earn exactly three to four (or more) moments what you invested in your stocks. Chances are that the opposite would be the case by the way and you would lose your investment. Whether long as you are prepared to deal with the consequences and let yourself to be pleasantly surprised when your trades pay off you might be the perfect people to trade in the penny stock market. When creating your decisions about the types of stocks, bonds, or funds you seek to include in your portfolio you may aim to include some penny stocks for the sake of diversity & to risk a small sum of money on a long shot. You never know when those long shots will pay off. Find more other useful articles about child term life insurance, term life insurance calculator and cheap term life insurance quote

David Jenyns and Stuart McPhee, well known, experienced traders, discuss the merits of keeping part of one’s trading float back from active trading.

David: We have a question: do you recommend having all your trading capital in active trades or should some be kept as cash, and if so what percent?

Stuart: For example, my super fund I always have roughly ten percent in cash because, and this is probably more specific to Australian taxation law, during the year you have an obligation to pay tax, pay as you go.

But having said that, if that isn’t a requirement for you and trading opportunities present themselves, there’s no reason to keep some cash set aside. Using nearly everything in active trading is a great idea in the trading system.

David: I’m in a similar frame of mind about that. If you’re looking to trade the markets and you’ve set aside your trading float that’s your intended purpose for the money assuming you have appropriate trading candidates. My gut feeling would be you should have, whenever possible, all your money invested. Obviously, it comes back to your system, making sure you are getting the signals. You don’t want to put your money in just for the sake of having all your money in.

But I don’t see any reason to limit, oh, I’ll keep ten percent of the trading float just sitting in the account, just accruing interest, not involved in active trading. It’s part of how you structure your wealth creation; you’ll have a certain amount allocated for your trading float, you’ll have a certain amount allocated for your real estate, you’ll have a certain amount for cash in the bank. I see that separate from my trading float.

Also with regard to backtesting you can see the utilization of your trading float. You can enter your trading float in before. You can see over a set period of time whether you’re fully utilizing or partially utilizing your cash and I always try to get as close to the top of that band as possible. So I’m as close to being maxed out as possible without being maxed out all the time.

If you’re maxed out all the time and new trading opportunities pop up and you don’t have any capital available, it’s going to throw out your backtesting a little bit because with trading opportunities or investment trading you may not have been able to open.

What is the least profitable scenario and the most profitable scenario and you find that gap widens the more you fully utilize your cash.

You don’t want to be maxed out as possible when you are doing backtesting. But definitely the major part of your float should be used for active trading or trade entry.

On starting my foray into trading Share markets, I realised that fundamental analysis was out of the question, but interpreting share charts was something I could get my head around.

What helped my decision to take the Top Dog Trading course to learn Share trading?…. A number of things besides the desire to trade better and to stop depleting my trading account with losses; was that I understood what Dr Barry Burns was imparting on his website and much or the instruction is explained on the detailed videos which makes it much simpler to get your head around. A further qualifier was Barry’s CV; it is impeccable, a business man who trades professionally, he is also a accomplished speaker and writer.

So I subscribed to his free 5 video course on learning to trade to see if I could learn from his teaching style.

Prior to this, I had already done several other courses on technical analysis covering Share trading but still did not feel confident in my analysis that would allow me to become a successful trader, all this changed once I came across Dr Barry Burns, I now feel confident that I can make the business of share trading, a success.

You will find Barry explains the principals simply and clearly, then gives upto date chart examples with all their un-predictable moves showing how to turn the rules into profitable trades. This is all done via a vast selection of videos.

With Barry’s courses I have not only fully comprehended how to trade his methods but also developed a far deeper understanding of the Share market & the associated charts but more critically the money management and personal attitudes that are such an important part of becoming a successful Share trader.

Barry’s courses are the best Share trading courses that I have found and I would strongly suggest that you give his FREE course a go. This course has 5 videos that walk you through some of the most powerful trading material I’ve ever seen.

Provided you follow the principals Barry explores, you will end up with a very profitable ratio of winning trades with tight control on the losses, so when one does lose (which all traders do) the financial pain is not too great.

I have completed the course, loved it, and gained a vast amount from it and have moved to Barry’s more advanced courses. My wish to learn Share trading will never again produce the losses of the past.

Try Barry’s Free Video Course for yourself, it’ll be the best thing you’ll do!

At first they were going to charge for it … but they have decided to start
the New Year by giving it away to all of their students, subscribers and readers.

Ot is just their way of saying “thank you” for your friendship, and to help you make this your best trading year.

There are no strings attached and you don’t have to “opt-in” to anything. Simply go to the site, download the PDF outline and then follow along with it as you watch the 3 videos (there is about one hour of training in all).

It’s there for you at the Top Dog Trading Blog

To access the course, just go to the front page of the blog and you’ll see the most recent post at the top of the page gives a quick introduction and then gives you the link to the course.

The post is entitled: “Top 20 Daytrader Secrets for Day Trading Stocks, Emini Day Trading, Forex and Other Markets.”

Just go to  Top Dog Trading Blog