What do Wayne Gretsky, Coach Phil Jackson, Michael Jordan and William O’Neil have in common? They all share the same unique blend of personal attributes that have led to individual greatness in their careers. I’m a huge sports fan, but not in the classic sense of religiously following... READ MORE
Stock market mastery has many components, but the first step is to acknowledge that it all starts with you – the investor self. Jesse Livermore once told his sons: “Successful trading is always an emotional battle for the speculator, not an intelligent battle.” He knew that his biggest enemies were his... READ MORE
Trading the stock market is not the blood sport that many in the press portray it to be. That sentiment is just part and parcel of Wall Street’s sophisticated disinformation machine which preaches a familiar old sermon to individual investors. The market pitch goes something like this: “the market... READ MORE
If you don’t believe in yourself as an investor and have absolute faith in your methodology, trading the markets will be like trying to nail Jello to the wall. We use to joke that my high school buddy, Brian Maxwell, was a force of nature – so much so that... READ MORE
I’m a big fan of pithy quotes. When I teach my college class “Tensile Trading”, I use quotes extensively to help illustrate each of the 10 stages of successful investing. This week, I thought I’d have a guest blogger share his wisdom with respect to each of my... READ MORE
“Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.” --Warren Buffet A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog about the four classic elements of mastery. The resulting firestorm from my trading buddies and fellow investors was shocking. Seems as though everyone... READ MORE
Team USA versus Spain vying for the Gold Medal in Olympic Basketball. Sensational! Score: 107 USA to 100 Spain. You didn’t have to be a sports fan to have been caught up in the thrill of Olympic competition during this very competitive game. Much has been written already about... READ MORE
Mastery is not achieved by knowing the Holy Grail of trading systems. Mastery is achieved by having the discipline to put in writing your own trading system, learning to overcome a lot of potentially costly enemies within yourself and then following your system. A few years ago, I conducted an... READ MORE
Knowing how top salespeople convert suspects into prospects into clients yields powerful insights as to how top investors convert equity ideas into portfolio candidates and finally into profitable trades. An investor’s winning trading plan includes money management rules that accommodate both right and wrong scenarios. The plan includes a... READ MORE
As many of you know, American composer extraordinaire Richard Rodgers collaborated with Oscar Hammerstein to produce some of the greatest musicals of the 20th century. Discussing their success, he once explained his thoughts on what it takes to be a superb songwriter. In his marvelous quote, I took the liberty... READ MORE
A week doesn’t go by without some investor asking me “which one single indicator do you recommend above all others?” When I answer this question, the indicator I speak of is never the one they expect. The most important indicator – the one that will determine the majority of your... READ MORE
Make no mistake about it: these are internet days and news circles the globe at the speed of light. Couple that with the fact that Wall Street is the world’s most sophisticated disinformation machine ever devised and you’ll appreciate why I believe technical analysis is an individual investor’... READ MORE
I’ve been teaching college extension classes for over ten years, and I invariably see a disproportionate percentage of new investors being drawn to investing because they envision themselves as lone wolves and believe the markets provide an arena where they can fly solo and succeed. Nothing could be further... READ MORE
Ever drive a bumper car at an amusement park? Remember how the bumper car headed off in one direction until it bumped into what it deemed an immovable object and then backed off in a seemingly random direction. I’ve met investors whose methodology resembles something similar. Every experienced investor... READ MORE
Most people call it Technical Analysis, but I prefer to think of it as “Visual Analysis”. Picture it as a tree with many colorful branches. I gravitated towards Technical Analysis many years ago because I came to realize that I was visually wired as an individual and I appreciated the... READ MORE
Highly educated people are, for the most part, trained to ask the question “Why?” Engineers, accountants, doctors, lawyers and the like invariably want to know all they can about why certain things happen. The assumption is, of course, that knowing why will help you do the right thing in your... READ MORE
When I was a graduate student in business school, I had the privilege and good fortune of watching John Elway play football as the quarterback for Stanford and seeing him around campus in a multitude of different situations. I was struck by the fact that, even as an undergraduate student... READ MORE
I trust you read last week’s post, Part I on “The Art of Selling Well”. Those rules provide the foundation for what I will describe this week. I would hope that most investors reading about last week’s basic selling system “Three Descending Peaks” came away saying “I can... READ MORE
In its most elemental form, selling is an inner struggle that deals with an investor’s ability to tame two wild horses: one’s own inner fear and greed. In his book Trading in the Zone, Mark Douglas wrote that an investor must address four types of fear: * losing money... READ MORE
I’m sitting on the lanai of a condo here at the Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii watching the sun peek above the ocean horizon, and I’m digging into the question of why a disproportionate number of my winning trades have occurred on these vacations. My... READ MORE
In the sports world, parties debate whether a premiere defense defeats a premier offense or whether great hitters beat great pitchers. Successful long-term investors have no such debate. They know that after making sacrifices to accumulate their assets, they build a premier defense first and then they focus on offense... READ MORE
Warren Buffett once said, “You only have to do a few things right in your life so long as you don’t do too many things wrong.” The objective of this new series of blogs is to increase the probabilities that you will do more “things right” and fewer “things... READ MORE
Big money is made by being on the correct side of a major market move and executing a carefully pre-planned scenario with conviction. I'll share an example. When I was an MBA student in 1979, Robert Swanson, the founder of Genentech, spoke to my class about an industry... READ MORE
Most individual investors seem to feel it isn't cool to talk about exits before even buying an equity. Institutional traders know that it's uncool not to do so. Who is right? As is my norm, I’ve looked to my Trading Journal to answer that question,... READ MORE
(Welcome to the debut article of our new blog area called "The Traders Journal" written by our new Educational Evangelist, Gatis Roze. Gatis has been trading his own account successfully for over 20 years and teaching sold-out investment classes in the Seattle area for over 10 years. Gatis&... READ MORE