Investors / Traders that have been in the market for 10+ years?

Saturday, 29. May 2010


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Hi

My personal experience has been very bad, in spite of paying a lot of money and learning dozens of different strategies.

If you fit into the criteria listed (i.e. you’ve been trading / investing successfully for over a decade), i would like to ask if your ROI has exceeded the ^DJI over that time frame.

If it has, what kind of returns have you been making?

Honest answers please. Too many crooked salesman are out there making trading sound like a breeze. I’ve done a crap-ton of financial modelling, dcf, fcff, fcfe, momentum and trend trading strats and at the end, i realize now that it may all have been for naught.

I would know enough to conduct a seminar on financial modelling and technical analysis, but in the end, i would not believe in a word myself.

Bullish on oil stocks… is the ride coming to an end?

Saturday, 1. May 2010

If the recent run up on oil company stocks is caused by momentum, what are the chances that prices will fall once the exuberance is over?

(yahoo finance 10-17)
Many analysts believe speculative investing is the real culprit behind oil’s 11 percent rally over the last week, arguing that supply and demand fundamentals do not support prices near a barrel. Traders see technical signs in the differences between current and future oil contracts that suggest money continues to be plowed into oil futures. Those signals spark new buying that pushes prices even higher.

"I think the market has been trading on momentum," said Antoine Halff, head of energy research at Fimat USA LLC.

How To Buy The Best Stocks

Sunday, 7. February 2010

Although it may seem obvious to most stock market swing traders there are a number of simple rules that you can follow which will ensure that you have more success when buying stocks:

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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How To Trade Options Correctly

Sunday, 7. February 2010

There is a lot of hype surrounding options trading, and for good reason, it’s a good way make a lot of cash fast, or can be used to grow your capital consistently month after month.

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.

3 Common Mistakes Made When Trading Options

Wednesday, 9. September 2009

#1 Trading options in only one direction and that’s usually up.

A very common mistake that traders make is options omission. They forget or fail to realize that options trading allows one to make money on falling prices as well as rising prices. By not trading in both up markets and down markets, they are not maximizing their investments. When you stop trading when the market is in a downturn, you are potentially leaving half the available money on the table.

Additionally, security prices tend to fall faster than they rise, so some of the biggest, quickest gainers are executed via falling share prices. So if an options traders is not considering short trades for their investment portfolio, they are missing out on some really solid trades.

#2 Not having money-management rules in place.

Another common mistake is to not strictly adhere to sound money-management rules. Critical metrics arise from guiding principles such as how much should you trade and how much should you risk? Where should you set your stops or in what manner should you hedge?

Solid money management rules control help you to control your trades. And the most important thing is they are helpful in preventing big losses and many sleepless nights.

#3 Letting your emotions dictate your trade entry and exit points.

Many times behavior that is illogical makes investors execute trades that lack the necessary fundamentals. Instead of letting sound principles guide their investing decisions, they move on pure emotions. Fear of price reversal drives traders out of winning trades too soon and fear of loss makes them stay in losing trades for too long.

And because there is zero way to eliminate your emotions completely, you must learn to control them. The most realistic and effective way to do so is to develop a set of trading rules to constrict your trading activities and to conduct the majority of your research and trading decisions outside of open trading hours.