Category: Misc. Rants

How To Lose Money

Own a bank stock – any bank!

Here’s a little overview of the year-to-date performance of some of the major global banking stocks on December 29, 2011, before the opening bell:

BofA: -60.38%
Citi: -44.76%
Goldman Sachs: -46.41%
JPMorgan: -23.03%
Morgan Stanley: -45.24%
RBS: -50%
Barclays: -34.32%
Lloyds: -63.02%
UBS: -29.33%
Deutsche Bank: -28,55%
Crédit Agricole: -56.04%
BNP Paribas: -37.67%
Société Générale: -59.57%

These are just some of the Too Big To Fail institutions. And while your governments have enough faith in them – or so they want you to believe – to prop them up with trillions of dollars of your money, investors are fleeing them, even if they can expect them to be propped up further.

Read more: http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/2011/12/december-29-2011-trends-2012-end-of.html#ixzz1hz87rp4P

Price Action Trading…Or not…

For a while now I have been trying to become a pure price action trader. Well, as Jessie Livermore once said

“The game taught me the game and it did not spare the rod.”

What the game has taught me is that price action trading is for the disciplined screen watcher. Price action trading requires too much discipline for me! I have come to the realization that I need at least a couple of indicators to keep me from OVER trading.

My best trading was done in 2007 with just pivot points and a 21 EMA. Trading seemed real easy back then. I would just wait for price to hit support, then break the 21 EMA. I almost never lost using this method… and as I am writing this I can’t seem to remember why I stopped using it.

Anyway, I have starting using moving averages with pivot points again. I have added fractals and will even add the awesome oscillator to keep me in trades longer.

1 minute scalps

Above is a snapshot of today. I took 7 trades off of the 1 minute chart. All but 1 were winners. I’ll start posting what I’m doing in the coming days.

In the meantime – enjoy your weekend.

Pivot Points

I am fond of pivot points. The trades in which I’ve made the most money and been the most consistant have all involved pivot points. Do I think pivot points are the holy grail of trading? NO! But I do think that enough people use them to make them effective.

Look at this image of this mornings Asian and European sessions. The red dotted line was R1, the yellow solid line the pivot point, and the green dotted line S1.

ranging chart of the pound

Remember for forex, pivot points should be calculated at 5PM EST. So the lines were calculated and drawn before the overnight price action occurred.

Draw your own conclusions.