I wanted to create a new series on the Afraid to Trade.com blog, entitled “Idealized Trades of the Day.” What I am attempting to accomplish is to highlight the most ‘perfect’ trade setups – whether resulting in a profit or loss – based on my system and interpretation of intraday market action, in order to…
Dr. Steenbarger at TraderFeed offers a series of recent blog posts on the topics of Stress and Coping Mechanisms for traders and provides wonderful insights. The series is the following: Emotional Style vs. Content: What it Means for Trading Coping Strategies: An Overview Stress, Coping, and Trading: The Role of Appraisal In these articles, Dr….
It pays to be selective with your trade set-ups and entries. Sub-prime setups often lead to sub-optimal trading results. How can you be sure you’re taking the highest probability trades? While a discussion on high probability trading is well beyond the scope of any singular blog post, it helps to be able to articulate –…
The relative value of the Australian Dollar has plunged over the last few weeks, underscoring the point that global markets are suffering along with the United States. The visual chart of the decline shows a market under intense selling pressure, and is an educational example of how price can run away from you as a…
I’m currently testing various simple strategies and discussing the results as I learn more, but one may ask what is the point in studying random entry trading systems? First, newer traders believe that if they can find the perfect settings or the perfect combination of indicators on a chart, then they will be very successful…
Thank you so much to all you readers and fellow blog authors. This weekend, we surpassed 1,000,000 hits on the Afraid to Trade blogsite! I cannot express enough thanks to you all for your support and continued readership of the site. I enjoy reading the comments and responding to the emails and communicating with fellow…
Previously in the post ATR Strategies to Test, I mentioned that you can create a trading system with random entries that produces a greater than 80% win rate. Despite this extraordinarily high winning trade percentage, the system had a zero or negative expectancy – in other words, it was a failing strategy. However, with the…
Last week was one for the record books! Traders on both sides of the market were both squeezed relentlessly, and rewarded handsomely… often within hours or days of each other. The following remarkable technical events occurred last week: The Dow plunged 300 points by mid-day only to recover almost fully (swing up by 300 points)…
The US Stock Market absolutely astonished most if not all traders today with a harrowing price plummet early in the day with normal corrections and continuations, but the stories will be written about today’s amazing price action likely will not focus on the fact that the Dow fell 300 points today, but the fact that…
There’s really no other way to state it: All Major US Stock Market Indexes are now in confirmed downtrends by most traders’ definitions: Price has made a lower low, lower high, and then taken out that high Price is below the 20 period, 50 period, and 200 period moving averages The 20 period moving average…