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Gold Bugs have this perverse desire to know more than anyone else and be proven right. I was a frigging walking talking encyclopedia. I was to latter learn the hard way, that trading is about making money and holding onto it, not predicting and being proven right. Usually, being quickly...

Take one trade, and you have to be able to predict. Then trading is all about offense. Take 1000 trades, and absent edge, you will have 500 winners, and 500 losers. Then, and only then, does your skill as a trader influence your outcome. Take a lot of trades, close a lot of bad entries, and you...

My biggest win WAS my biggest loss. I bought gold all the way up to the peak, and then rode it most of the way back down, giving back most all of my profits. 1. Fell in love with the story 2. Overcome with fundamentals 3. Didn't exercise basic money management 4. Didn't know anything about...

My favorite indicator is a bad entry. If I see I'm losing money, it's either a bad entry, a bad trade, or both, so I close it. What remains are good, high probability trades. It's a very powerful indicator, but to employ it, you have to ignore the low probability trades that would have...

Her dad is 81, he was pro trader when he was young, an expert witness in commodities trading, and is a genius quant. He's pretty much married to that time frame and that instrument. Who am I to criticize? That's what they like so that's what they do. If I were to go down to those levels, I'd...

Agreed. However, I still stand by my initial premise, trading gets progressively easier as the time frame rises. That being said, I must admit my wife does pretty well with a system that includes a 3 tick chart on the ES. Super fast is not me.

Provided you trade a deep in the money option, you can get the approximate movement of the underlying. You are absolutely right about the spreads. However, that's kind of a chicken vs. egg argument. The reason we trade these low priced stocks is they really move. However, the leverage...

You could open an options account and sell a call on Tesla or buy a put (both are short the underlying, Tesla). The ins and outs of options trading is a bit much to get into here, but as a substitute for shorting stock, it's pretty clear cut.

How I Made $2M in the Stock Market, by Nick Darvos A quick read that underscores the importance of trading on longer time frames, and the value of set-it, and forget-it.

Then maybe the collar story is just some bragging baloney Cuban spread to make him look like a smart guy. I'm just a small retail trader, and don't pay much attention to the big corporate types. I recognized early on that if I wanted to be successful as a small retail trader, I had to learn my...

Where to hedge: There are a lot of ways to do this. It depends on your underlying, in your case stock. Options are most often used as a hedge for stock. There are a number of ways to do this, however let's keep it simple. 1) Provided options are available, you could buy two at the money...

Buy and hold underperforms. The only advantage it offers is it lowers the bar for the ignorant to play and convinces them they are not at risk. Your information is dated. There's multiple studies of this on the internet, but you won't get them from big fund managers who prey off of people's...

It's not that I dislike stock investing, it's that it doesn't have many of the advantages and flexibility of other types of trading. The tax treatment is terrible, there's a strong bullish bias against shorting, you have to borrow shares to short, the leverage of 2:1 is lousy, and there's no...

Sure, and you trade those stocks because they move. They move because they are relatively small and illiquid. Why not have your cake and eat it too? The leverage of options makes relatively placid stocks with great liquidity move sufficient to trade. This is the proper use of leverage, not...

With a holding time of only 5-10 days you wouldn't suffer too much time decay. You could buy ten put contracts and avoid the whole borrowing shares issue, however the spreads on these low priced options tend to be no smaller than with the higher priced stocks and can eat into your profits.

I saw a great chart of Don Miller's results on his site. He plotted all his losses and wins as dots around a zero line. The frigging thing looked like the plane of a spiral galaxy. His overall profits made that galaxy's centerline slightly in the green, and that was enough to earn him a...

If you are investing in stocks, you are paying for all the crazy misconduct of a company's managers which essentially rips you off with their stock buybacks and outrageous compensation. However if you just trade options, you are trading a derivative and the company can be damned, it's not your...

You can make money day trading, but first a word of caution. It's harder today to make money day trading than ever before. Some algo traders are so fast, it's like they are trading off the screen and you are trading from a chart in a newspaper. The price you see on your screen is no longer...

The major difference between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom is we rationalize decisions made on instinct, and then anchor to those decisions and try to MAKE them work. That's suicide over the long haul. We think individual trades matter, they don't. The reasons why we do what we do...