If I were ever to come back into the markets in another life, it would definitely be as a YouTube trader.
2/ Oh, how sweet life would be as I would trade only the past, creating perfect 2:1, 3:1, even 5:1 setups while convincing everyone that I could be a millionaire by Friday by trading something called "support and resistance."
3/ Alas, unfortunately, I've chosen to trade the future, and the future is nowhere near as easy or as kind to your account. There is, of course, no such thing as "support and resistance."
1/ In the movie Moonstruck, the late great Olympia Dukakis wonders out loud, 'Why do men cheat?' She concludes that it's because all men are afraid to die. She then turns to her cheating husband and says, 'Cosmo, I just want you to know that you are going to die.'
2/ It's a great comic scene that could easily be repurposed to our world of trading, with Ms. Dukakis wryly staring at a group of traders and asking, 'Why do all you schmucks go on tilt? Because you are afraid to lose. And I just want you to know that you will all lose.'
3/ Trading, of course, is the business of losing. Yes, yes, I know that we are all taught that it's the art of winning, that trading is the one place where you can take a dollar and turn it into a million.
1/ There is a wonderful scene in Ted Lasso where Ted hustles the club’s snooty owner at a game of darts.
2/ The clip is all over TikTok so I recommend you find it, but the gist of it is that the arrogant owner thinks a dumb American like Lasso couldn’t possibly be any good at darts and proceeds to lose a major bet to Ted who it turns out is somewhat of a darts shark due to his…
3/ …early childhood days of spending Saturdays playing the game in a bar with his Dad.
During the soliloquy Ted launches into a monologue about a Walt Whitman quote about the need to be curious rather than judgemental.
My Weekly Trading Thread
Coffee and Algos
Machines Still Can’t Beat Us
In some ways, 21st century New York resembles a 19th century metropolis more than it does the 20th.
These days the city sidewalks are dotted with fruit stands and coffee carts just like on the Lower East Side in the late 1800’s. Entrepreneurial immigrants are willing to withstand sub zero conditions to run these things 24/7 in order to save paying rent.
In NY everyone has a fruit guy and a coffee guy.
I’ve known my coffee guy for nearly three decades. We’ve both seen our hair grow gray together.
1/ Does the stock market trend or range?
Both.
Here are four distinct times during the day when price action tends to do one or the other...
[My Weekly Trading Thread]
2/ When you are working out with weights it's a very good idea to take a pause every few days.
3/ In fact if you are doing high intensity lifting most trainers will recommend that you only work out just once a week allowing the torn muscle fibers to recover and grow - which is how you actually build muscle.
1/ Today was one of the worst trading days of the year for me. I lost 85% of my trades. The old me would have been down 200 bps on the day and broken a few screens along the way. But I actually ended up 10 bps to the good. So what did the new me do differently?
2/ For a mean reversion trader like me, today's slow and steady price action is pure poison. There are NO retraces. In fact the indices never even traded to their midpoints the whole freaking day - something I haven’t seen in months.
3/ Fortunately I did a few things differently today that saved me both my money and my sanity.