The market made a stunning comeback today after weeks of getting pummeled by the bears.

A typical buy in the open and sell in the close is the no-brainer trade today.

Just buy any of the three index below in the futures market and you can close your eyes and make money the whole trading day.

Sometimes the market will give you surprises that you won't have a hard time looking for trades.

It's just right there in front of your screen and just take the money and put it in your wallet.

Easy trading in today's market!

NQ Trade Setup

Showing some trade setups that were conducted last Friday's trading session.

The entry was at the lower arrow and the exit was at the upper arrow.

Nice breakout from the entry but was short lived.

After that it stays sideways most of the day until it drops late in the close.

The reason for the entry trade is the formation of the two big green bar from the bottom.

Notice that they are almost flat from the low of the day and by reading the price action, you can  put an entry for a long trade.

It formed a failed cup with a handle pattern or a deep saucer pan minus the handle.

I'm Back...

Been a while not posting and I'm back!

Quite busy doing trades practicing the return of the market's surge.

Been trading the NQ (Nasdaq futures) for a change but I'm a little bit late trading it.

It's been on a roll since the first day of the year and the way I can see from this daily chart is that it's starts to make a pause.

It's like a runner who's on the lead for so long and starts to run out of energy.

It might be the return of the volatility come the next trading months?

The tech stocks are on a roll probably because of the iPad/iPhone mania.

What Is Technical Analysis?

By: Mark Hanna
Posted on: April 9, 2012 at 12:30 pm
Tags: Technical Analysis

I saw a nice, concise post by Greg Harmon of Dragonfly Capital this weekend on the topic of "What is Technical Analysis" and I thought I'd bring it over, both to educate readers who might not be familiar with the framework and to have it somewhere I can refer to it in the future!  He does a great job if explaining not only what it is at the 40,000 point foot of view but what it is not – and I often take for granted the fact that many people who stop by the website have never heard of the concept or only vaguely know why anyone would or would not use it.  

In many ways I think of technical analysis ("TA") as hocus pocus – not because it is 'magic', but due to the fact the reason it gives any proposed advantage is because so many other people use it.  Hence it tends to self reinforce as more people and institutions (over the years) use it.  To that end, why does a 200 day moving average matter… but not so a 137 day (or 253 day) average?   Perhaps Fibonacci retracements can be better argued as not being "hocus pocus" as they are found widely through other disciplines but you get the drift; of course this is only my opinion and I am sure could be argued strenuously by others.

"TA" does not seem to be used very much at all anywhere in the mutual fund world (I don't think I've read more than 5-6 stories in 15+ years about it's use in the mutual fund world) but is much more prominent among the hedge fund and non mutual fund institutional set.  While some people ONLY use technical analysis and nothing else, I think it's best used as another tool on the tool belt, but to each their own.
Via Greg:

What it is

Technical Analysis at its base is an interpretation of price action plain and simple. It can be interpreted in many ways. Some use resistance and support levels based upon previous points where an asset has struggled to move higher or lower. Some use trend lines that rise or fall to glean insights into changes in buying and selling sentiment. Many look at historical patterns like triangles, wedges and channels to try to estimate how prices will react going forward. Still others look for cycles and patterns like Fibonacci ratios, seasonal factors, election cycles and longer cycles like Elliott Waves and the Kondratieff Wave for an explanation. It can get quite complex with derivatives of the price action in momentum oscillators and volatility measures. Volume can play a role as well as an indicator appetite. But no matter what tools they use all technicians are looking for an edge to give a good entry or exit on a risk reward basis for a deployment of capital. A risk framework to design a trading strategy around. A forecast. A possible future with contingencies.

What it is not

This is a subtlety many that do not practice TA fail to grasp. A possible future with contingencies. There is nothing about certainty in that statement. TA is not a road map. It does not point to an outcome. Probability is more like it. It is not fixed in time either. The read can change with changes in the price action, expected or unexpected. Nothing is certain. It can change with time. The closest thing to certainty in the TA world are horizontal support and resistance lines. They do not change, but they are also not made of concrete. Price can just as easily blow right through them or gap over them as it can be halted. And what has worked in the past may or may not work in the future.

Are You A Victim Blamer?

by: Bill Zimmer

Thursday, April 5th, 2012 at 10:31 am

Impulsive people have a way of reaching conclusions and taking action that, in comparison, with normal deliberations and intentions would be considered impaired. Acting on a whim, giving in to temptation, doing what you have told yourself, time and again not to do, is acting impulsively. Impulsive people are not self-confident but simply hope and wish for results. Quite simply they have no long-term goals, within which trades and management should be planned, only immediate urges. Their behavior is abrupt and unplanned. The time between thought and action is very brief.
The net outcome of unplanned behavior is when failure occurs, the process of analyzing bad trades malfunctions. The person cannot accrue effective lessons from the loss. Without a plan, impulsive people can’t develop methods to determine what works and what doesn’t. They can’t understand why they failed.

Impulsive people are also deficient in a certain method of thought process. Normal people weigh, analyze, research and develop an initial impression. Impulsive people guess and bet heavily without much thought. Impulsive people are often victim blamers. The results are reflective of character and personality, not intelligence.

Victim blamers tend to interpret anything in life that doesn’t go their way as somehow aimed against them, believing somebody or something is working against their welfare. It may be a boss, a girlfriend or an entity such as a company or the government. Or it may be outside forces such as “bad luck,” “nature,” “evil forces”. They never learned to assume personal responsibility for their own actions vs. blaming others. While everyone tends to lapse into blaming others at least sometimes for their misfortune, this trading type makes blaming their primary defense mechanism to deflect their own sense of urgency.

Because they are looking for someone to blame for their investments that lose money, they are among those most in favor of intense governmental investigation and prosecution of market manipulation of any kind. With each fresh uncovering of company accounting fraud, brokerage-analyst duplicity, insider trading or any other type of market manipulation, they smile and say, “See, I told you they’re all out to get us!” But this only tends to make them feel more helpless and assume less responsibility for their own investing decisions. If you have a tendency to be impulsive, the cure is to put together realistic and sound goals along with a realistic trading plan. Make yourself work towards the attainment of those goals by not violating the rules of your trading plan.

How To Become A Day Trader

By Michael Sanibel | Investopedia – Fri, Mar 30, 2012 2:52 PM EDT

During the heyday of the tech bubble in the late 1990s, day traders made easy money buying and selling Internet stocks. It didn't take much skill to succeed in those days. In just a 17-month period, from October 1998 to March 2000, the Nasdaq Composite Index skyrocketed from roughly 1,344 to an all-time high of around 5,132. All you had to do was ride that tidal wave to rake in the profits. Many of those traders made just as much shorting the index on its way down to a low of about 1,108 in October 2002, losing 78% of its value in 31 months.

Once the bubble had fully deflated, the easy money dried up. Many of those who had profited through good luck and timing left trading and looked for other work. They discovered that day trading, like any other profession, requires education and skills to consistently make a living. For more information, see Day Trading: An Introduction.

BasicsA pure day trader buys and sells stocks or other investments and ends the trading day in cash with no open positions. If a position is held overnight or for several days, it's called a swing trade. Most day traders use both approaches, depending on their trading style and the nature of their investments.
Day trading requires a professional software platform and a high-speed Internet connection. While it's possible to design and build your own trading platform, most traders use a prepackaged setup provided by their brokerage or a specialized software company. It's best to have a powerful desktop with at least two monitors, and preferably four to six. You need multiple screens to display the charts and technical indicators that will provide your buy and sell signals.

When you use a brokerage platform, ensure that real-time news and data feeds are included in the package. You'll need that data to construct charts that expose trends and portray the time frames and trading strategies you want.

Technical IndicatorsFamiliarity with stocks and market fundamentals isn't enough to succeed as a trader. You should understand technical analysis and all of the tools used to dissect chart patterns, trading volume and price movements. Some of the more common indicators are resistance and support levels, moving average convergence/divergence (MACD), volatility, price oscillators and Bollinger Bands.

Learning and understanding how these indicators work only scratches the surface of what you'll need to know to develop your personal trading style. Hundreds of books have been written about day trading, and you can also take classes online or in person.

StrategiesTrading requires sufficient capital to take advantage of leveraging fairly large positions. Most traders make their money on relatively small price movements in liquid stocks or indexes with mid to high volatility. You need price movement to make money, either long or short. Higher volatility implies higher risk, with the potential for greater rewards and losses.

Unless you can buy several hundred or more shares of a stock, you won't make enough money on trades to cover the commissions. The lower the price of the stock, the more shares you'll need to gain sufficient leverage and total price movement.

The key to successful trading is developing techniques to determine entry and exit points. Most traders develop a style that they stick with, once they are comfortable with it. Some only trade one or two stocks every day, while others trade a small basket of favorites. The advantage of trading only a few stocks is that you learn how they act under different conditions and how movement is affected by the key market makers.

DisciplineDevelop a process and try it out with fictional trades. Refine the process and find what works for you. Only then should you put real money on the line and start actively trading the markets. Experienced traders define what constitutes a trading setup and the pattern and indicator combination they want to see before pulling the trigger. They rarely deviate from those setups in order to maintain focus and keep their emotions at bay.

Once you enter a position, stops should be placed to get you out of that position when a specified loss threshold is reached. If a trade is going the wrong way, hope and prayer will not help turn it around. Exiting the trade frees up your capital to redeploy to another more promising trade. You want to exit losers as soon as possible and ride the winners as long as they're profitable.

The Bottom LineThe success rate for day traders is estimated to be around only 10%, so if 90% are losing money, how could anyone expect to make a living this way? The answer lies in professional training, diligent research, refined skills, great discipline and the ability to admit mistakes and cut your losses. You have to be prepared to make split-second, unemotional decisions based on information that is sometimes incomplete, contradictory and changing by the second. The statistics prove it's clearly much easier said than done.

Day trading is not for the faint of heart. A winning strategy may involve executing many trades in one day, while avoiding the trap of overtrading and running up huge commissions. Day trading can be fun, as well as profitable, if you learn the ropes and set realistic goals.

Trading Psychology, The 14 Stages of Investor Emotions

Efficient markets are based on the assumption that rational people enter transactions with the intent to maximize gains and minimize losses. While this theory is sound, most investors are not the purely rational robots that efficient markets rely upon. Instead, emotions often cloud our decision-making and prevent us from acting in a rational manner.
Knowing we can never conquer our inherent emotional biases, we should seek to understand the range of emotions we may experience as investors and how it affects our interactions with the market. A common market psychology cycle exists that shines light on how emotions evolve and the effect they have on our decisions. By understanding the stages of this cycle, we can tame the emotional roller coaster. The fourteen stages are:

1. Optimism – A positive outlook encourages us about the future, leading us to buy stocks.
2. Excitement – Having seen some of our initial ideas work, we begin considering what our market success could allow us to accomplish.
3. Thrill – At this point we investors cannot believe our success and begin to comment on how smart we are.
4. Euphoria – This marks the point of maximum financial risk. Having seen every decision result in quick, easy profits, we begin to ignore risk and expect every trade to become profitable.
5. Anxiety – For the first time the market moves against us. Having never stared at unrealized losses, we tell ourselves we are long-term investors and that all our ideas will eventually work.
6. Denial – When markets have not rebounded, yet we do not know how to respond, we begin denying either that we made poor choices or that things will not improve shortly.
7. Fear – The market realities become confusing. We believe the stocks we own will never move in our favor.
8. Desperation – Not knowing how to act, we grasp at any idea that will allow us to get back to breakeven.
9. Panic – Having exhausted all ideas, we are at a loss for what to do next.
10. Capitulation – Deciding our portfolio will never increase again, we sell all our stocks to avoid any future losses.
11. Despondency – After exiting the markets we do not want to buy stocks ever again. This often marks the moment of greatest financial opportunity.
12. Depression – Not knowing how we could be so foolish, we are left trying to understand our actions.
13. Hope – Eventually we return to the realization that markets move in cycles, and we begin looking for our next opportunity.
14. Relief – Having bought a stock that turned profitable, we renew our faith that there is a future in investing.

Individuals clearly follow this cycle in their decision making process. Since broad indices like the S&P 500 are comprised of the decision of millions of individuals, we should expect index prices to track this pattern as well. If we are aware of the stage of the cycle we are experiencing at a given point in time we will have a greater grasp of how our emotions are affecting our investment decisions. This knowledge will help us manage our own investment portfolios as well as predict the next step for the broad market.

Sean Hannon, CFA, CFP is a professional fund manager.