I’m kinda bummed, it won’t be until Wednesday until I have some time to do some paper trading during market hours. I have some real life work to do in the mornings, but will try playing around with the TOS interface to get used to it when I have some time.
This NY Times article attempts to suggest the big swings in the stock market are linked to male hormones. The original research which tracked 17 traders was cited here in April. Just yesterday, I thought about how all the blogs I read about trading (links to the right) are entirely written by men. While the piece today is probably just another way to fill space in the newspaper with a different angle on how to explain the extended bear downturn, I still found it interesting.
JeePee on his blog mentioned the educational insights that can be found on AlphaTrends. These videos of live trading by Brian Shannon are just great, made more so at he taped them on Thursday afternoon with that momentous 900 points swing in three hours. He provides his reasoning on several trades and how he enters and exits positions in phases to book profits and protect capital. These were winning trades, but in the next day’s daily market analysis, he talked about some losers as well.
I tried using ScottTrades’s Market Mover list last week for the first time, attempting to spot the stocks hitting highs and lows of the day as employed by Muddy at Green on the Screen and others in the chatroom. That thing really moves fast. I’ve heard the suggestion to use your mouse to left click and hold on the maximize button at the top right of the window to slow it down. On my laptop and in Firefox, this doesn’t work, but I’m going to try in Explorer and on my older PC. It looks like E-trade has a similar window on their Pro platform, so I’m going to check that out as well as TDAmeritrade’s Motion Detector tool this week to see if they work for me better. I opened accounts at several online brokers to see which one I like best and to give myself extra day trades when I get to real trading, but right now all my accounts are defunded.
