Writing prompts: Trading psychology and risk management
Continuing from my last post, here are the rest of the questions my friend asked me to expound upon. What is Risk Management and should it be lumped together under…
Writing prompts: what is an edge in trading?
I received an interesting email from a friend who is doing a survey. In that email, he asked a few questions about trading. As I thought about these, I decided…
Wins live in the land of loss
I'm sitting here at my desk looking out the window. On my desk is a (perfectly normal and fair) coin that I had been flipping a while. Question: can you…
How to avoid getting chopped up in the noise
One of the keys to discretionary trading success is knowing when not to trade. Here's a simple chart pattern that can help filter out some of the good times from…
Coming soon…
I just wanted to take a few minutes here at the end of the week and share some things I'm working on. Some of these things you will see soon,…
Forecasting volatility
A lot of the questions I get from people are about volatility--how to measure it, how to trade, and even, in a basic level, what it means. I recently added…
Five steps to creativity
Our culture has an interesting relationship with creativity. On one hand, we hold creative artists in high regard, but many people secretly laugh at the arts as a career choice.…
Are beliefs all that matter? Thoughts on trading psychology
Here's an interesting question on a controversial topic--trading psychology. Reader Rob sent me a note asking: Hi. I hope you can help me with a question. I am a developing…
What happens after big spikes in the VIX?
I ran a quick study this morning to look at what happens to stock market volatility following large single day volatile events. Note that we are looking at market volatility…
Evaluating a trade edge: is it good or not?
This will be the last post in a short series in which we have looked at ways to quantify and to understand a trading edge. This series was motivated by…
Common sense checks for quantitative data
Yesterday I wrote a post that looked at asset returns and how to compound them. That post was in response to a reader's (Anthony's) question, and I want to continue…
Gains and losses: understanding returns in assets and trading accounts
One of my readers, Anthony, sent me a good question about doing some statistical analysis on stock indexes. I think there are some important lessons here. Here's the question First,…
Reader question: Who moves the market?
As markets languish in the summer doldrums, Glenn comes back with a good philosophical question: The edge in technical analysis is to find an imbalance of buying and selling pressure..…
Where does market intuition come from?
I saw this interesting article from Bloomberg last week, with the almost-clickbait title of "Train your brain for trading (No, Really!)" I just happened to click on it, and found…
Video blog: That trend indicator… is it helping or hurting?
It can difficult to dig into someone else's work and research. I wrote a post a few years ago about why using the slope of a moving average, moving average…
Trendlines 101
I thought it might be useful, since most markets are about as exciting as drying paint right now, to take a few steps back and consider some basic tools that…