Trendlines in the DJIA: What Can We Learn About Market Structure?
A quick lesson on trendlines and what they can tell us about market dynamics. Take a look at a fairly long-term chart of the Dow Jones Industrial Average (below) with…
Stock screens for trading day Thursday 10 August 2017
I've shared these screens for a while, and they will eventually be part of the new MarketLife project. Until we're live there, I'll keep sharing them here. Here is a…
Video blog: how to use the stock screens
https://youtu.be/jD4L12m5xXA
Trust your gut: the power of subjective chartreading
I’ve looked deeply into ratios, levels, and their application to market data. I won’t rehash all of that work here, but, after literally years of research, the bottom line is…
Know where to look…
We have limited time and attention. This is one of the realities that developing traders soon face—no matter how hard you work or how well-intentioned you are, there’s a limit…
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…
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…
Putting momentum to work for you
Financial markets are confusing--there's no doubt about that. Sudden reversals, spikes, dull dead periods exploding into panic, fakeouts and fakeouts of fakeouts... the list goes on, but traders and investors…
AUDUSD: Short-term inflections or trend change?
One of the key challenges for discretionary traders is balancing short-term and longer-term information. Err too far on either side, and bad things will happen: Focus too much on short-term,…
Exits: know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em
We all focus a lot of attention, perhaps too much attention, on where to buy and sell a market, on where to enter trades. Today, let's spend some time looking…
Getting that elusive market feel
This week, I'm writing a series of short posts on very practical, applied things that you can add to your trading toolkit. I'm trying to select these so that they…
Basic backtesting in Excel: How to keep learning
My goal was to put simple, but powerful, tools into your hands so you can start doing the work to understand how the market moves. In this, the last, post…
Basic backtesting in Excel: Doing statistical tests
So this is what we've been waiting for. We finally have the tools to ask simple market questions and to ask some critical questions. If you are new to backtesting,…
Basic backtesting in Excel: Conditions, logic, and stats
Pat yourself on the back if you've come this far in the little backtesting mini-course. After many posts, we've basically gotten data into a spreadsheet and calculated some moving averages.…
Basic backtesting in Excel: graphs and first calculations
Continuing on with the short series on backtesting in Excel, let's look at some tools to visualize data and make some simple calculations. Excel is a good tool for quick…