blood red friday

That massive spike down last Oct 2014 was amazing!

I'm writing this one at ~1am EDT on Saturday, August 22.  So today was Friday.  And the stock market decided once again to take a BIG FAT HUGE SHIT ALL OVER THE PLACE.  Second day in a row in the red.  And it coincides with me being on PTO. How come the market always seems to do crazy shit like this when I'm on vacation, and not in 'business mind' mode?

SPXL is one of my favorite issues.  It trades at 3x the S&P500, so you get A LOT MORE ACTION on it than the normal S&P500 index traded ETF.  The same goes for the T Q's as I like to call them: TQQQ.  You get 3x the action on the NASDAQ with that one.  If you can time the market decently, then you can make decent money at trading these two issues.  Of course there are A LOT of people who don't believe you can time the market.  And people used to believe that running a 4min mile was impossible too.  Timing the market takes a ton of work and determination.  And what really sucks is that it costs a lot of money to learn how to time the markets - in all the bad trades you do.  I'm not great at it, but I'm getting better at it with each cycle of the market.  Most of my learnings have been from William O'Neil and Investors Business Daily.  His book, How to make money in Stocks is the golden word.

It's a really funny story for me.  I daytraded for a year and lost my ass.  I found that I am too reactive to the micro movements during the day.  I spent too much time learning on bad trades that got me into trouble.  Then I would react to them and it was red, red, red, red, red... all day long, almost every day...  
Well, the past is the past , and as they say when you have failed, I learned a lot.  It turns out I am much better now at swing trading.  I read some of the news.  I listen to even less of the news.  And I trade extremely infrequently.  I follow Leaderboard and the IBD Big Picture as closely as I can, but I don't even follow them that closely.  There is a creature known as TMI and that is very much an issue for me.  As a matter of fact, Dan Zanger* has preached before that just because you are not executing trades, it doesn't mean you are not working (on trading).  Learning from him and IBD + William O'Neil, you MUST be very selective in your trading at all times: discipline.
* his site looks like shit, but he REALLY, REALLY , REALLY knows his stuff.

Apart from the Leaderboard charting service I use, I like to use BigCharts.  They offer a fairly clean charting service.  Very reliable and fast usually.  And it's offered at the very attractive price of FREE.  Which makes it pass the Top Three Buying Criteria with ease.

If you are a trader, the I wish you much luck!
#blackFriday
#bloodRedFriday