At the most fundamental level, volatility is the fluctuation in the price of an asset. The greter the price swings in the shorter periods of time, the greater the volatility. Periods of great volatility are like thunderstorms. They get your attention. Volatility is an absolute requirement for a trader to make money. Most investors look […]
Month: April 2009
Profitable ETF Trading Strategies: Good traders know and exploit their edge
As an individual trader, you must be absolutely clear about where your edge is in the market place so that you can ensure your trading strategies are designed to put you into positions where your edge can make the difference against the average market return. Let’s be clear too: your edge must give you a […]
Profitable ETF Trading Strategies: Stalking your way to success
One of the more neglected topics in trading systems development is the concept of stalking. Traders, particularly early in their career will tend to spend lot of time, if not ll of their time, focusing on the entry, reasoning that if they can get that part right they will have some control over the market’s […]
Profitable ETF Trading Strategies: Choose your self-talk wisely
The words we use matter. Words have power to shape our outcomes and direct our way through the future. Language is connected to our deepest emotional centers and affects us in profound ways. Steven Pinker makes the point that it is the artifact of language which distinguishes us from other species far more than the […]
Profitable ETF Trading Strategies: Finding your best mental state for trading
In previous articles I have described my concept of the “zero-state”, and the combination of personal satisfaction and improved bottomline performance I get when I trade from that state. In this article I want to describe some other mental states that traders I know find useful and consider the implications for your own journey of […]
Profitable ETF Trading Strategies: Experiencing the Zero-State
For me, achieving the zero-state is a necessary precondition for trading at my peak. In other essays I have described it as a place where adjective pairs of mental states cancel each other out, leaving only a moment of pure being. It is the space between the words that we know, a moment and a […]
Profitable ETF Trading Strategies: Trading From the Zero-State
One of the most important qualities of the professional trader is the ability to manage your psychological state. Psychology is such an important component of shorter term trading that it can make all the difference between success and failure. In my own trading, the essential state of mind I must be in to trade at […]
Profitable ETF Trading Strategies: How science can improve your trading
Trading by its very nature is filled with uncertainty. Any human endeavor that has such a strong psychological component must be uncertain, until such time as human nature itself undergoes a fundamental change. It is uncertainty which helps make a market for assets. It’s what helps drive the discovery process to uncover the relative value […]
Profitable ETF Trading Strategies: 8 attributes of quality research
There are plenty of snake oil salesmen in the financial advisory business, but there are by far many more conscientious professionals prepared to act as good fiduciaries for you. At the same time there are many people willing to take on full responsibility for the design and implementation of some or all of their own […]
Profitable ETF Trading Strategies: You don’t have to be “right” to make money
What happens when you have placed your trade and you immediately have second thoughts as you watch the market moving against you? It is a normal trading experience to have a position that has moved in your favor a certain distance but has begin to stall before it reached the price that you were expecting […]