stocks market

Charts

A Good Trader Uses Stop Losses Always

Using stop losses can help you limit your losses. Depending on how much money you have to lose, you can set a limit of one to three percent of your portfolio value. You may want to set the limit lower if you have had some losses recently. You can also choose to use a trailing stop loss. The downside to using stop loss orders is that they lock in your losses. This means that if you sell at $97 and then a buyer comes along, your order will be cancelled. It may also cause you to take a large loss if you place it too far off the current price. When you use a stop order, make sure it’s far enough from the current price to avoid a large loss. Stop-loss orders are often used by investors to limit their losses when they open new positions. For example, a trader might buy a hundred shares of a new tech stock at $25 a share. To avoid a large loss, he or she would set a stop-loss order at twenty percent […]

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Analysis

When Stocks Suck – It’s Time to Run Your Analysis

There were quite a few bullish chart setups on individual stocks. After pulling back to the 50 day moving averages, stocks bounced hard two Fridays ago and the S&P and Nasdaq looked like they were done with a slight, normal pullback. So what did we get this past week??? You guessed it. In hindsight, I should have known the ball was going to pulled out again by this market. That is what it is best at right now – tricking and confusing all traders, bulls and bears alike. It has done it so many times now that we should all be expecting it. Trading it however is a lot easier said than done because what we see with our eyes is certainly telling us one thing, whereas the market seems to just keep throwing curveballs at us that our eyes can’t judge correctly. To be perfectly honest, this market sucks but there is nothing we can do about it except accept it and try to not let it affect our returns too much in a negative way. That’s easier said […]

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Hard To Argue About the Strength of This Market

After a massive run-up going into this morning’s job number, the market was certainly set up for a selloff, and when the number came out (which was AWFUL), we certainly got a selloff…sort of. The market started the day with a gap, tried to bounce a bit, but then quickly sold off further. That was about it, however, and around 11:15, a bottom was put in for the day and the market rallied strongly from there, finishing well off of its lows. Although the final numbers will show decent sized losses, in my opinion today was a very impressive showing by the bulls. Remember as well that this was in the face of an AWFUL jobs number… I went into the day short two stocks (SOHU and BEXP) and long only one stock. I was stopped out of both shorts by lunchtime and began to go long again in force as I saw setups I liked all over the place. This may be the wrong play as perhaps the market needs to pullback further from here, but given the action […]

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