Blog

I’ve been absent from twitter, blogging, and social media in general for a while. This was by choice, as I wanted to turn inward and focus on my trading, building my business and finishing the book. For those of you who don’t know me (I’m sure there are some new faces on Twitter), a brief introduction is in order: Before trading, I was, among other things, a classically trained musician—a pianist and composer. I started trading in 1995 with agricultural futures, a very small account, and no clue; of course, I promptly went through the very typical new trader pattern of blowing out accounts as I had no clue what I was doing. (I was also working with an old-school full-service broker who charged $95 a round turn, but that’s a different story.) I was fortunate to connect with Linda Raschke, who became a mentor and a guide for me in those early years, and was further fortunate to have been trading British Pound futures during the Asian Financial Crisis. After that, I took a few years off to explore another interest (cooking professionally), returned to trading in 2000 with a focus on short-term, intraday stock index futures. Again, some real speed bumps in adjusting to a new market and timeframe, but eventually I figured out which way was up and expanded my trading operation to a small fund which combined longer-term positions in futures with my daytrading of the indexes.

After getting an MBA, I spent some time on the New York Mercantile Exchange working for Mark Fisher (author of The Logical Trader) and at SMB Capital, both in New York City. In 2009, I co-founded Waverly Advisors, an asset management and advisory firm headquartered in New York; one of my main tasks as CIO is to write a daily report focusing on technical/tactical opportunities in liquid market we follow. (Check out the website for a free trial of this research if you might be interested.) Over the past year and a half, I wrote a book, The Art & Science of Technical Analysis: Market Structure, Price Action & Trading Strategies, that is now available for purchase. I’m very excited about how this book project ended up. It was a long haul, but, in the end, I think the book has a lot to offer both retail and professional traders.

I will be posting daily on this blog. I hope to post a “Chart of the Day” which will just be a snapshot of an illustrative trading pattern drawn either from my Waverly Advisors work or from the book. Several times a week, I will also post some longer text posts, digging into my understanding of how markets work, ideas for trading strategies and risk management, and probably some random musings on life, the universe and everything. 😉 I am still (after more than a year) trying to figure out how to incorporate Twitter and other social media in this mix, but I do try to be very responsive to readers’ questions and ideas for posts. It is very easy to reach me by email at [email protected]. I’ll pick this up tomorrow with a look at that most important lessons I’ve learned about markets and trading over the past few years.