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Ouch. You borrowed money to trade? Your returns could well be a direct result of the screaming bull market environment, especially as you are buying new highs and trading only the long side. I would be very, very cautious going forward, especially if you are trading with borrowed money...

pcgeek, this is good advice. Give yourself more time to become consistently profitable before taking on leverage. It is very easy to confuse brains with a bull market. Your initial success may have a lot to do with the extremely strong market in the past 6 months. If six months from...

Yes, you can close the position and take the profit. And in that case you would be smart to do so. No need to hold until expiration. However, I am very much against shorting puts or calls unless you are highly experienced and well aware of the pitfalls. Selling options has been the death...

Still waiting for an explanation of S&P manipulation from our thread expert.

I would like to see your explanation of how the S&P is manipulated. (Understanding of course that it represents a universe of 500 stocks, all traded by thousands of individuals and institutions, each with their own objectives and opinion of value.) But please, explain who would do the...

It isn't overrated at all. Where and how do macro events begin? They don't simply spring from nowhere. Trace their source. They begin with a very small impulse. Look at the origin of any important event or movement throughout history, whether economic or political, and you'll find...

You can close the position at anytime prior to expiration. Simply sell to close if you are long the call. And yes, it is certainly possible to show a profit although the stock has not reached the strike price prior to expiration, so long as the stock is above the price when you opened the...

I just pray that nobody ever asks Jack what time it is.

Completely incorrect on two counts. 1. Absolutely past prices can be used to predict future prices. The entire concept of "deviation from the mean", which is the basis of many excellent trading strategies and opportunities, is based on the probabilities of present and future prices in...

My experience has been directly the opposite. The next time you see panic distribution hit a stock, remember that these are humans selling, not machines. And they are driven by emotion, not efficiency theories. The stock market is not perfectly efficient. If it was, there would not be a...

Because it is extremely difficult to outperform the market averages when you need to manage and move 100s of millions. But as an individual trader is not nearly so difficult.

Good post! I'd been trying to find a good use for SSFs, and I think you nailed it. There are indeed times when it pays to pick up good buys at major market lows to hold for some time without tying up too much trading capital.

My experience thus far is that they don't follow the underlying precisely so they are problematic for short term trading, fills can be a real problem because the volume is often very thin, and there is no guarantee someone is going to take the other side of your trade when you need to exit. I...

Its a good thing to have in your bag of tricks to put into action after major market lows to catch the next uptrend. But at other times it can be very problematic. I've created trend following systems that could have solved our national debt problem since Oct 02. But run them in the...

I'll put it very plainly. If you don't have a plan...and if you don't trade the plan with discipline...you won't survive as a trader. But you already know that. Your problem is that you are not practicing what you know. You're in a state known as "cognitive dissonance". In conflict...

My fear with this type of 'system' is that it is easily open to curve fitting. If, for example, you ran numerous backtests on HLT, then DIS, to determine the best parameters for your percentages for each instrument, then this is seriously curve fit to the data and useless going forward. And...

http://i.a.cnn.net/cnn/2006/images/12/06/iraq.report.pdf Excurciatingly depressing, but a must read. (If the link does not work, go to www.cnn.com, click link under "Developing Story".)

If you haven't gotten a good response to your offer, it may well be your offer to fly to the buyer's location. From reading your posts, I'm not so sure anyone would want you in their home.

LOL! I think I am on solid ground here in saying that a system that predicts movement without knowing in which direction...probably needs some work!

LOL. That's the same day SPY will split 10-1.