July 2005 Archives

Here are some charts that caught my eye as I went through my scans today -- ADBE, EXAR, GOOG, GRMN, ITRI, MACR, MNTA, NBIX, PALM, PLAY AND RAIL:

Micahel Taylor has posted the follow-up to his post about (not) scaling into trades. This one looks at scaling out of trades:

In part I, I mentioned how scaling into trades ends up increasing the complexity of your system while reducing the edge and thus your profitability. Now, on to scaling out of trades.

Scaling out of trades is pure magic. Yes, magic. The more I think about scaling out of trades...the more I realize how powerful this technique is to your system. Think of it this way. Scaling out of your trades gives you the chance to create trading systems that are 100% profitable. How in the world can you beat that? :) [read the entire article...]

As you know I've been working to get better at taking partial profits on my trades. I found a method that works for me. As soon as I enter a trade the first thing I do is set my stop loss and then I immediately set an alert which will tell me to sell half of my position when the position reaches a certain percentage gain. That's been working very well for me so far. It seems that about half the time my first sale is better than the final sale. I can live with that and I no longer fret about not maximizing the gains on the entire original position. Being able to lock in a decent gain and then guarantee yourself at least a small profit on the remaining shares makes trading a lot less stressful.

Michael lists some other tenets of scaling out of trades, namely "a way to lock in your profits, free up your money quicker, let some profits ride, reduce your system drawdown, and increase your win ratio to boot." Good stuff, and a must-read article.

We've got another busy morning. How about that ITWO? I thought they were out of business! Anyway, the Nasdaq is just a hair away from 2200 and I can only imagine the number of stops the bears have set at that level. I won't be surprised to see some up-thrusts through that level. I may just watch until that level is cleanly broken...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

A few people have asked me questions about the dummy trades I keep talking about. Why not ask the Chairman himself? He's moving his weekly chat to Monday night and the topic for next week is daytrading. His planned topics are "how to trade with trend, find low-risk spots to enter, and manage open positions." Get all those pressing questions lined up.

Here's an interesting thread at EliteTrader on which traders are posting screen captures of their trade blotters showing their daily P&L's. (via Trade-Ideas)

Dan Fitzpatrick has written a good article about how stocks build support (and resistance) levels.

There's lots of good, "humble" trading advice on Trader Eyal's site.

Glenn has a note on his site underneath a collection of links to stock blogs (BTW, thanks for the link Glenn) which reads:

Why do so many have to place ads everywhere on there sites? Does it really provide a source of income and why would you need it if you are a trader and good at it? What it does... is add clutter and slow down your site. The only ones who don't use ads from the above are thekirkreport.com; brandonfredrickson.com/blog; fickletrader.blogspot.com thanks guys your sites are better for it! Personally I hate ads and never click on em, the only people who do are usually helping someone which is clickfraud.

First, yes, ads really do provide a source of income. My AdSense money from June bought my brand new shiny 60GB iPod as well as a couple of accessories. That may not be a whole lot of money but I'll take it. There are bloggers making a lot more than I do from AdSense -- see Darren 'ProBlogger' Rowse who made between '$10k and $20k in the month of May' from AdSense.

So there are real people making real money from ads. While click-fraud certainly exists I don't think it's as rampant as Glenn seems to believe. I would suggest that anyone who feels like Glenn short the hell out of Google and Yahoo because their business are worthless according to that belief. It's obvious to me that advertisers are getting value from advertising on the web. I just got a renewal BlogAd from Zacks today (thanks!). I doubt they would have renewed for August if the July ad didn't pay off. And I won't even get into the millions that are spent advertising on Yahoo...

As for why a 'good' trader would 'need' ad income I would ask why does Glenn want something for nothing? Why does Dan Zanger -- who's on the 2004 Trader Monthly 100 and made an estimated $10 to $15 million -- charge for access to his site? Why don't George Soros or Jim Rogers give their books away for free? I run ads on my site because it helps to diversify my income and it gives me an incentive to keep the site going. Do I not deserve to be compensated for my time?

Glenn praises the likes of Kirk, who doesn't run ads but asks for donations, and requires a donation to access the 'members only' portions of his site. Why not ask why Kirk, who's apparently a 'good' trader, needs to ask for donations? (Kirk obviously spends a ton of time on his site. Doesn't he deserve some kind of compensation for that?)

I'm not mad at Glenn for disliking ads. I've been a hard-core TiVo user for years and I skip ads all the time. Likewise, I rarely look at ads on the internet much less click on them. But the fact remains that advertising seems to be the only model that works online. I've had a 'tip jar' on the site for a very long time yet I've only received 4 'tips' in the two-plus years I've been blogging. (Thanks again to Karin (twice), Joe and Adam.) So if I had to rely on donations this site probably would have died out a long time ago. Thankfully Google came along with AdSense and created what I think is a very fair tradeoff for both publishers and readers.

(For those that really just despise ads perhaps you should just block them.)

What a day! This was the best day in well over a year (maybe two) for me. I took 10 trades, 7 of which were winners. Charts of the big R-multiple winners are below. I didn't annotate the entries b/c the true dummies already know where they are. :-)

Man I'm beat this morning. I did a little (one day early) birthday celebrating last night and I'm paying for it now. (Where's my caffeine injection?) I would have just stayed in bed but I want to be here if we get some month-end mark-ups. It feels like the market wants to go higher and there's plenty of room for the Nasdaq to lift to its upper Bollinger Band, which is around 2,225. (I'm not saying that's going to happen, but it's certainly a possibility)

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Man, that ISRG is a beast! I unfortunately got stopped out of it in my IRA last fall just days before it had a huge post-earnings gap up -- just like it's doing again today (sigh). It's almost tripled from my initial buy point. Maybe there's something to that buy & hope, er, hold thing...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Below is a chart of the Nasdaq. I'm not too concerned about that trendline break because I think it was a bit too steep to be sustainable. The thing to watch out for though is the fact that there's not much support between here and 2100. All it needs is a little push...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Here are some charts that caught my eye as I went through my scans today -- ADBE, EXAR, GOOG, GRMN, ITRI, MACR, MNTA, NBIX, PALM, PLAY AND RAIL:

Micahel Taylor has posted the follow-up to his post about (not) scaling into trades. This one looks at scaling out of trades:

In part I, I mentioned how scaling into trades ends up increasing the complexity of your system while reducing the edge and thus your profitability. Now, on to scaling out of trades.

Scaling out of trades is pure magic. Yes, magic. The more I think about scaling out of trades...the more I realize how powerful this technique is to your system. Think of it this way. Scaling out of your trades gives you the chance to create trading systems that are 100% profitable. How in the world can you beat that? :) [read the entire article...]

As you know I've been working to get better at taking partial profits on my trades. I found a method that works for me. As soon as I enter a trade the first thing I do is set my stop loss and then I immediately set an alert which will tell me to sell half of my position when the position reaches a certain percentage gain. That's been working very well for me so far. It seems that about half the time my first sale is better than the final sale. I can live with that and I no longer fret about not maximizing the gains on the entire original position. Being able to lock in a decent gain and then guarantee yourself at least a small profit on the remaining shares makes trading a lot less stressful.

Michael lists some other tenets of scaling out of trades, namely "a way to lock in your profits, free up your money quicker, let some profits ride, reduce your system drawdown, and increase your win ratio to boot." Good stuff, and a must-read article.

We've got another busy morning. How about that ITWO? I thought they were out of business! Anyway, the Nasdaq is just a hair away from 2200 and I can only imagine the number of stops the bears have set at that level. I won't be surprised to see some up-thrusts through that level. I may just watch until that level is cleanly broken...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

A few people have asked me questions about the dummy trades I keep talking about. Why not ask the Chairman himself? He's moving his weekly chat to Monday night and the topic for next week is daytrading. His planned topics are "how to trade with trend, find low-risk spots to enter, and manage open positions." Get all those pressing questions lined up.

Here's an interesting thread at EliteTrader on which traders are posting screen captures of their trade blotters showing their daily P&L's. (via Trade-Ideas)

Dan Fitzpatrick has written a good article about how stocks build support (and resistance) levels.

There's lots of good, "humble" trading advice on Trader Eyal's site.

Glenn has a note on his site underneath a collection of links to stock blogs (BTW, thanks for the link Glenn) which reads:

Why do so many have to place ads everywhere on there sites? Does it really provide a source of income and why would you need it if you are a trader and good at it? What it does... is add clutter and slow down your site. The only ones who don't use ads from the above are thekirkreport.com; brandonfredrickson.com/blog; fickletrader.blogspot.com thanks guys your sites are better for it! Personally I hate ads and never click on em, the only people who do are usually helping someone which is clickfraud.

First, yes, ads really do provide a source of income. My AdSense money from June bought my brand new shiny 60GB iPod as well as a couple of accessories. That may not be a whole lot of money but I'll take it. There are bloggers making a lot more than I do from AdSense -- see Darren 'ProBlogger' Rowse who made between '$10k and $20k in the month of May' from AdSense.

So there are real people making real money from ads. While click-fraud certainly exists I don't think it's as rampant as Glenn seems to believe. I would suggest that anyone who feels like Glenn short the hell out of Google and Yahoo because their business are worthless according to that belief. It's obvious to me that advertisers are getting value from advertising on the web. I just got a renewal BlogAd from Zacks today (thanks!). I doubt they would have renewed for August if the July ad didn't pay off. And I won't even get into the millions that are spent advertising on Yahoo...

As for why a 'good' trader would 'need' ad income I would ask why does Glenn want something for nothing? Why does Dan Zanger -- who's on the 2004 Trader Monthly 100 and made an estimated $10 to $15 million -- charge for access to his site? Why don't George Soros or Jim Rogers give their books away for free? I run ads on my site because it helps to diversify my income and it gives me an incentive to keep the site going. Do I not deserve to be compensated for my time?

Glenn praises the likes of Kirk, who doesn't run ads but asks for donations, and requires a donation to access the 'members only' portions of his site. Why not ask why Kirk, who's apparently a 'good' trader, needs to ask for donations? (Kirk obviously spends a ton of time on his site. Doesn't he deserve some kind of compensation for that?)

I'm not mad at Glenn for disliking ads. I've been a hard-core TiVo user for years and I skip ads all the time. Likewise, I rarely look at ads on the internet much less click on them. But the fact remains that advertising seems to be the only model that works online. I've had a 'tip jar' on the site for a very long time yet I've only received 4 'tips' in the two-plus years I've been blogging. (Thanks again to Karin (twice), Joe and Adam.) So if I had to rely on donations this site probably would have died out a long time ago. Thankfully Google came along with AdSense and created what I think is a very fair tradeoff for both publishers and readers.

(For those that really just despise ads perhaps you should just block them.)

What a day! This was the best day in well over a year (maybe two) for me. I took 10 trades, 7 of which were winners. Charts of the big R-multiple winners are below. I didn't annotate the entries b/c the true dummies already know where they are. :-)

Man I'm beat this morning. I did a little (one day early) birthday celebrating last night and I'm paying for it now. (Where's my caffeine injection?) I would have just stayed in bed but I want to be here if we get some month-end mark-ups. It feels like the market wants to go higher and there's plenty of room for the Nasdaq to lift to its upper Bollinger Band, which is around 2,225. (I'm not saying that's going to happen, but it's certainly a possibility)

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Man, that ISRG is a beast! I unfortunately got stopped out of it in my IRA last fall just days before it had a huge post-earnings gap up -- just like it's doing again today (sigh). It's almost tripled from my initial buy point. Maybe there's something to that buy & hope, er, hold thing...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Below is a chart of the Nasdaq. I'm not too concerned about that trendline break because I think it was a bit too steep to be sustainable. The thing to watch out for though is the fact that there's not much support between here and 2100. All it needs is a little push...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Here are some charts that caught my eye as I went through my scans today -- ADBE, EXAR, GOOG, GRMN, ITRI, MACR, MNTA, NBIX, PALM, PLAY AND RAIL:

Micahel Taylor has posted the follow-up to his post about (not) scaling into trades. This one looks at scaling out of trades:

In part I, I mentioned how scaling into trades ends up increasing the complexity of your system while reducing the edge and thus your profitability. Now, on to scaling out of trades.

Scaling out of trades is pure magic. Yes, magic. The more I think about scaling out of trades...the more I realize how powerful this technique is to your system. Think of it this way. Scaling out of your trades gives you the chance to create trading systems that are 100% profitable. How in the world can you beat that? :) [read the entire article...]

As you know I've been working to get better at taking partial profits on my trades. I found a method that works for me. As soon as I enter a trade the first thing I do is set my stop loss and then I immediately set an alert which will tell me to sell half of my position when the position reaches a certain percentage gain. That's been working very well for me so far. It seems that about half the time my first sale is better than the final sale. I can live with that and I no longer fret about not maximizing the gains on the entire original position. Being able to lock in a decent gain and then guarantee yourself at least a small profit on the remaining shares makes trading a lot less stressful.

Michael lists some other tenets of scaling out of trades, namely "a way to lock in your profits, free up your money quicker, let some profits ride, reduce your system drawdown, and increase your win ratio to boot." Good stuff, and a must-read article.

We've got another busy morning. How about that ITWO? I thought they were out of business! Anyway, the Nasdaq is just a hair away from 2200 and I can only imagine the number of stops the bears have set at that level. I won't be surprised to see some up-thrusts through that level. I may just watch until that level is cleanly broken...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

A few people have asked me questions about the dummy trades I keep talking about. Why not ask the Chairman himself? He's moving his weekly chat to Monday night and the topic for next week is daytrading. His planned topics are "how to trade with trend, find low-risk spots to enter, and manage open positions." Get all those pressing questions lined up.

Here's an interesting thread at EliteTrader on which traders are posting screen captures of their trade blotters showing their daily P&L's. (via Trade-Ideas)

Dan Fitzpatrick has written a good article about how stocks build support (and resistance) levels.

There's lots of good, "humble" trading advice on Trader Eyal's site.

Glenn has a note on his site underneath a collection of links to stock blogs (BTW, thanks for the link Glenn) which reads:

Why do so many have to place ads everywhere on there sites? Does it really provide a source of income and why would you need it if you are a trader and good at it? What it does... is add clutter and slow down your site. The only ones who don't use ads from the above are thekirkreport.com; brandonfredrickson.com/blog; fickletrader.blogspot.com thanks guys your sites are better for it! Personally I hate ads and never click on em, the only people who do are usually helping someone which is clickfraud.

First, yes, ads really do provide a source of income. My AdSense money from June bought my brand new shiny 60GB iPod as well as a couple of accessories. That may not be a whole lot of money but I'll take it. There are bloggers making a lot more than I do from AdSense -- see Darren 'ProBlogger' Rowse who made between '$10k and $20k in the month of May' from AdSense.

So there are real people making real money from ads. While click-fraud certainly exists I don't think it's as rampant as Glenn seems to believe. I would suggest that anyone who feels like Glenn short the hell out of Google and Yahoo because their business are worthless according to that belief. It's obvious to me that advertisers are getting value from advertising on the web. I just got a renewal BlogAd from Zacks today (thanks!). I doubt they would have renewed for August if the July ad didn't pay off. And I won't even get into the millions that are spent advertising on Yahoo...

As for why a 'good' trader would 'need' ad income I would ask why does Glenn want something for nothing? Why does Dan Zanger -- who's on the 2004 Trader Monthly 100 and made an estimated $10 to $15 million -- charge for access to his site? Why don't George Soros or Jim Rogers give their books away for free? I run ads on my site because it helps to diversify my income and it gives me an incentive to keep the site going. Do I not deserve to be compensated for my time?

Glenn praises the likes of Kirk, who doesn't run ads but asks for donations, and requires a donation to access the 'members only' portions of his site. Why not ask why Kirk, who's apparently a 'good' trader, needs to ask for donations? (Kirk obviously spends a ton of time on his site. Doesn't he deserve some kind of compensation for that?)

I'm not mad at Glenn for disliking ads. I've been a hard-core TiVo user for years and I skip ads all the time. Likewise, I rarely look at ads on the internet much less click on them. But the fact remains that advertising seems to be the only model that works online. I've had a 'tip jar' on the site for a very long time yet I've only received 4 'tips' in the two-plus years I've been blogging. (Thanks again to Karin (twice), Joe and Adam.) So if I had to rely on donations this site probably would have died out a long time ago. Thankfully Google came along with AdSense and created what I think is a very fair tradeoff for both publishers and readers.

(For those that really just despise ads perhaps you should just block them.)

What a day! This was the best day in well over a year (maybe two) for me. I took 10 trades, 7 of which were winners. Charts of the big R-multiple winners are below. I didn't annotate the entries b/c the true dummies already know where they are. :-)

Man I'm beat this morning. I did a little (one day early) birthday celebrating last night and I'm paying for it now. (Where's my caffeine injection?) I would have just stayed in bed but I want to be here if we get some month-end mark-ups. It feels like the market wants to go higher and there's plenty of room for the Nasdaq to lift to its upper Bollinger Band, which is around 2,225. (I'm not saying that's going to happen, but it's certainly a possibility)

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Man, that ISRG is a beast! I unfortunately got stopped out of it in my IRA last fall just days before it had a huge post-earnings gap up -- just like it's doing again today (sigh). It's almost tripled from my initial buy point. Maybe there's something to that buy & hope, er, hold thing...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Below is a chart of the Nasdaq. I'm not too concerned about that trendline break because I think it was a bit too steep to be sustainable. The thing to watch out for though is the fact that there's not much support between here and 2100. All it needs is a little push...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Here are some charts that caught my eye as I went through my scans today -- ADBE, EXAR, GOOG, GRMN, ITRI, MACR, MNTA, NBIX, PALM, PLAY AND RAIL:

Micahel Taylor has posted the follow-up to his post about (not) scaling into trades. This one looks at scaling out of trades:

In part I, I mentioned how scaling into trades ends up increasing the complexity of your system while reducing the edge and thus your profitability. Now, on to scaling out of trades.

Scaling out of trades is pure magic. Yes, magic. The more I think about scaling out of trades...the more I realize how powerful this technique is to your system. Think of it this way. Scaling out of your trades gives you the chance to create trading systems that are 100% profitable. How in the world can you beat that? :) [read the entire article...]

As you know I've been working to get better at taking partial profits on my trades. I found a method that works for me. As soon as I enter a trade the first thing I do is set my stop loss and then I immediately set an alert which will tell me to sell half of my position when the position reaches a certain percentage gain. That's been working very well for me so far. It seems that about half the time my first sale is better than the final sale. I can live with that and I no longer fret about not maximizing the gains on the entire original position. Being able to lock in a decent gain and then guarantee yourself at least a small profit on the remaining shares makes trading a lot less stressful.

Michael lists some other tenets of scaling out of trades, namely "a way to lock in your profits, free up your money quicker, let some profits ride, reduce your system drawdown, and increase your win ratio to boot." Good stuff, and a must-read article.

We've got another busy morning. How about that ITWO? I thought they were out of business! Anyway, the Nasdaq is just a hair away from 2200 and I can only imagine the number of stops the bears have set at that level. I won't be surprised to see some up-thrusts through that level. I may just watch until that level is cleanly broken...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

A few people have asked me questions about the dummy trades I keep talking about. Why not ask the Chairman himself? He's moving his weekly chat to Monday night and the topic for next week is daytrading. His planned topics are "how to trade with trend, find low-risk spots to enter, and manage open positions." Get all those pressing questions lined up.

Here's an interesting thread at EliteTrader on which traders are posting screen captures of their trade blotters showing their daily P&L's. (via Trade-Ideas)

Dan Fitzpatrick has written a good article about how stocks build support (and resistance) levels.

There's lots of good, "humble" trading advice on Trader Eyal's site.

Glenn has a note on his site underneath a collection of links to stock blogs (BTW, thanks for the link Glenn) which reads:

Why do so many have to place ads everywhere on there sites? Does it really provide a source of income and why would you need it if you are a trader and good at it? What it does... is add clutter and slow down your site. The only ones who don't use ads from the above are thekirkreport.com; brandonfredrickson.com/blog; fickletrader.blogspot.com thanks guys your sites are better for it! Personally I hate ads and never click on em, the only people who do are usually helping someone which is clickfraud.

First, yes, ads really do provide a source of income. My AdSense money from June bought my brand new shiny 60GB iPod as well as a couple of accessories. That may not be a whole lot of money but I'll take it. There are bloggers making a lot more than I do from AdSense -- see Darren 'ProBlogger' Rowse who made between '$10k and $20k in the month of May' from AdSense.

So there are real people making real money from ads. While click-fraud certainly exists I don't think it's as rampant as Glenn seems to believe. I would suggest that anyone who feels like Glenn short the hell out of Google and Yahoo because their business are worthless according to that belief. It's obvious to me that advertisers are getting value from advertising on the web. I just got a renewal BlogAd from Zacks today (thanks!). I doubt they would have renewed for August if the July ad didn't pay off. And I won't even get into the millions that are spent advertising on Yahoo...

As for why a 'good' trader would 'need' ad income I would ask why does Glenn want something for nothing? Why does Dan Zanger -- who's on the 2004 Trader Monthly 100 and made an estimated $10 to $15 million -- charge for access to his site? Why don't George Soros or Jim Rogers give their books away for free? I run ads on my site because it helps to diversify my income and it gives me an incentive to keep the site going. Do I not deserve to be compensated for my time?

Glenn praises the likes of Kirk, who doesn't run ads but asks for donations, and requires a donation to access the 'members only' portions of his site. Why not ask why Kirk, who's apparently a 'good' trader, needs to ask for donations? (Kirk obviously spends a ton of time on his site. Doesn't he deserve some kind of compensation for that?)

I'm not mad at Glenn for disliking ads. I've been a hard-core TiVo user for years and I skip ads all the time. Likewise, I rarely look at ads on the internet much less click on them. But the fact remains that advertising seems to be the only model that works online. I've had a 'tip jar' on the site for a very long time yet I've only received 4 'tips' in the two-plus years I've been blogging. (Thanks again to Karin (twice), Joe and Adam.) So if I had to rely on donations this site probably would have died out a long time ago. Thankfully Google came along with AdSense and created what I think is a very fair tradeoff for both publishers and readers.

(For those that really just despise ads perhaps you should just block them.)

What a day! This was the best day in well over a year (maybe two) for me. I took 10 trades, 7 of which were winners. Charts of the big R-multiple winners are below. I didn't annotate the entries b/c the true dummies already know where they are. :-)

Man I'm beat this morning. I did a little (one day early) birthday celebrating last night and I'm paying for it now. (Where's my caffeine injection?) I would have just stayed in bed but I want to be here if we get some month-end mark-ups. It feels like the market wants to go higher and there's plenty of room for the Nasdaq to lift to its upper Bollinger Band, which is around 2,225. (I'm not saying that's going to happen, but it's certainly a possibility)

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Man, that ISRG is a beast! I unfortunately got stopped out of it in my IRA last fall just days before it had a huge post-earnings gap up -- just like it's doing again today (sigh). It's almost tripled from my initial buy point. Maybe there's something to that buy & hope, er, hold thing...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Below is a chart of the Nasdaq. I'm not too concerned about that trendline break because I think it was a bit too steep to be sustainable. The thing to watch out for though is the fact that there's not much support between here and 2100. All it needs is a little push...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Here are some charts that caught my eye as I went through my scans today -- ADBE, EXAR, GOOG, GRMN, ITRI, MACR, MNTA, NBIX, PALM, PLAY AND RAIL:

Micahel Taylor has posted the follow-up to his post about (not) scaling into trades. This one looks at scaling out of trades:

In part I, I mentioned how scaling into trades ends up increasing the complexity of your system while reducing the edge and thus your profitability. Now, on to scaling out of trades.

Scaling out of trades is pure magic. Yes, magic. The more I think about scaling out of trades...the more I realize how powerful this technique is to your system. Think of it this way. Scaling out of your trades gives you the chance to create trading systems that are 100% profitable. How in the world can you beat that? :) [read the entire article...]

As you know I've been working to get better at taking partial profits on my trades. I found a method that works for me. As soon as I enter a trade the first thing I do is set my stop loss and then I immediately set an alert which will tell me to sell half of my position when the position reaches a certain percentage gain. That's been working very well for me so far. It seems that about half the time my first sale is better than the final sale. I can live with that and I no longer fret about not maximizing the gains on the entire original position. Being able to lock in a decent gain and then guarantee yourself at least a small profit on the remaining shares makes trading a lot less stressful.

Michael lists some other tenets of scaling out of trades, namely "a way to lock in your profits, free up your money quicker, let some profits ride, reduce your system drawdown, and increase your win ratio to boot." Good stuff, and a must-read article.

We've got another busy morning. How about that ITWO? I thought they were out of business! Anyway, the Nasdaq is just a hair away from 2200 and I can only imagine the number of stops the bears have set at that level. I won't be surprised to see some up-thrusts through that level. I may just watch until that level is cleanly broken...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

A few people have asked me questions about the dummy trades I keep talking about. Why not ask the Chairman himself? He's moving his weekly chat to Monday night and the topic for next week is daytrading. His planned topics are "how to trade with trend, find low-risk spots to enter, and manage open positions." Get all those pressing questions lined up.

Here's an interesting thread at EliteTrader on which traders are posting screen captures of their trade blotters showing their daily P&L's. (via Trade-Ideas)

Dan Fitzpatrick has written a good article about how stocks build support (and resistance) levels.

There's lots of good, "humble" trading advice on Trader Eyal's site.

Glenn has a note on his site underneath a collection of links to stock blogs (BTW, thanks for the link Glenn) which reads:

Why do so many have to place ads everywhere on there sites? Does it really provide a source of income and why would you need it if you are a trader and good at it? What it does... is add clutter and slow down your site. The only ones who don't use ads from the above are thekirkreport.com; brandonfredrickson.com/blog; fickletrader.blogspot.com thanks guys your sites are better for it! Personally I hate ads and never click on em, the only people who do are usually helping someone which is clickfraud.

First, yes, ads really do provide a source of income. My AdSense money from June bought my brand new shiny 60GB iPod as well as a couple of accessories. That may not be a whole lot of money but I'll take it. There are bloggers making a lot more than I do from AdSense -- see Darren 'ProBlogger' Rowse who made between '$10k and $20k in the month of May' from AdSense.

So there are real people making real money from ads. While click-fraud certainly exists I don't think it's as rampant as Glenn seems to believe. I would suggest that anyone who feels like Glenn short the hell out of Google and Yahoo because their business are worthless according to that belief. It's obvious to me that advertisers are getting value from advertising on the web. I just got a renewal BlogAd from Zacks today (thanks!). I doubt they would have renewed for August if the July ad didn't pay off. And I won't even get into the millions that are spent advertising on Yahoo...

As for why a 'good' trader would 'need' ad income I would ask why does Glenn want something for nothing? Why does Dan Zanger -- who's on the 2004 Trader Monthly 100 and made an estimated $10 to $15 million -- charge for access to his site? Why don't George Soros or Jim Rogers give their books away for free? I run ads on my site because it helps to diversify my income and it gives me an incentive to keep the site going. Do I not deserve to be compensated for my time?

Glenn praises the likes of Kirk, who doesn't run ads but asks for donations, and requires a donation to access the 'members only' portions of his site. Why not ask why Kirk, who's apparently a 'good' trader, needs to ask for donations? (Kirk obviously spends a ton of time on his site. Doesn't he deserve some kind of compensation for that?)

I'm not mad at Glenn for disliking ads. I've been a hard-core TiVo user for years and I skip ads all the time. Likewise, I rarely look at ads on the internet much less click on them. But the fact remains that advertising seems to be the only model that works online. I've had a 'tip jar' on the site for a very long time yet I've only received 4 'tips' in the two-plus years I've been blogging. (Thanks again to Karin (twice), Joe and Adam.) So if I had to rely on donations this site probably would have died out a long time ago. Thankfully Google came along with AdSense and created what I think is a very fair tradeoff for both publishers and readers.

(For those that really just despise ads perhaps you should just block them.)

What a day! This was the best day in well over a year (maybe two) for me. I took 10 trades, 7 of which were winners. Charts of the big R-multiple winners are below. I didn't annotate the entries b/c the true dummies already know where they are. :-)

Man I'm beat this morning. I did a little (one day early) birthday celebrating last night and I'm paying for it now. (Where's my caffeine injection?) I would have just stayed in bed but I want to be here if we get some month-end mark-ups. It feels like the market wants to go higher and there's plenty of room for the Nasdaq to lift to its upper Bollinger Band, which is around 2,225. (I'm not saying that's going to happen, but it's certainly a possibility)

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Man, that ISRG is a beast! I unfortunately got stopped out of it in my IRA last fall just days before it had a huge post-earnings gap up -- just like it's doing again today (sigh). It's almost tripled from my initial buy point. Maybe there's something to that buy & hope, er, hold thing...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Below is a chart of the Nasdaq. I'm not too concerned about that trendline break because I think it was a bit too steep to be sustainable. The thing to watch out for though is the fact that there's not much support between here and 2100. All it needs is a little push...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Here are some charts that caught my eye as I went through my scans today -- ADBE, EXAR, GOOG, GRMN, ITRI, MACR, MNTA, NBIX, PALM, PLAY AND RAIL:

Micahel Taylor has posted the follow-up to his post about (not) scaling into trades. This one looks at scaling out of trades:

In part I, I mentioned how scaling into trades ends up increasing the complexity of your system while reducing the edge and thus your profitability. Now, on to scaling out of trades.

Scaling out of trades is pure magic. Yes, magic. The more I think about scaling out of trades...the more I realize how powerful this technique is to your system. Think of it this way. Scaling out of your trades gives you the chance to create trading systems that are 100% profitable. How in the world can you beat that? :) [read the entire article...]

As you know I've been working to get better at taking partial profits on my trades. I found a method that works for me. As soon as I enter a trade the first thing I do is set my stop loss and then I immediately set an alert which will tell me to sell half of my position when the position reaches a certain percentage gain. That's been working very well for me so far. It seems that about half the time my first sale is better than the final sale. I can live with that and I no longer fret about not maximizing the gains on the entire original position. Being able to lock in a decent gain and then guarantee yourself at least a small profit on the remaining shares makes trading a lot less stressful.

Michael lists some other tenets of scaling out of trades, namely "a way to lock in your profits, free up your money quicker, let some profits ride, reduce your system drawdown, and increase your win ratio to boot." Good stuff, and a must-read article.

We've got another busy morning. How about that ITWO? I thought they were out of business! Anyway, the Nasdaq is just a hair away from 2200 and I can only imagine the number of stops the bears have set at that level. I won't be surprised to see some up-thrusts through that level. I may just watch until that level is cleanly broken...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

A few people have asked me questions about the dummy trades I keep talking about. Why not ask the Chairman himself? He's moving his weekly chat to Monday night and the topic for next week is daytrading. His planned topics are "how to trade with trend, find low-risk spots to enter, and manage open positions." Get all those pressing questions lined up.

Here's an interesting thread at EliteTrader on which traders are posting screen captures of their trade blotters showing their daily P&L's. (via Trade-Ideas)

Dan Fitzpatrick has written a good article about how stocks build support (and resistance) levels.

There's lots of good, "humble" trading advice on Trader Eyal's site.

Glenn has a note on his site underneath a collection of links to stock blogs (BTW, thanks for the link Glenn) which reads:

Why do so many have to place ads everywhere on there sites? Does it really provide a source of income and why would you need it if you are a trader and good at it? What it does... is add clutter and slow down your site. The only ones who don't use ads from the above are thekirkreport.com; brandonfredrickson.com/blog; fickletrader.blogspot.com thanks guys your sites are better for it! Personally I hate ads and never click on em, the only people who do are usually helping someone which is clickfraud.

First, yes, ads really do provide a source of income. My AdSense money from June bought my brand new shiny 60GB iPod as well as a couple of accessories. That may not be a whole lot of money but I'll take it. There are bloggers making a lot more than I do from AdSense -- see Darren 'ProBlogger' Rowse who made between '$10k and $20k in the month of May' from AdSense.

So there are real people making real money from ads. While click-fraud certainly exists I don't think it's as rampant as Glenn seems to believe. I would suggest that anyone who feels like Glenn short the hell out of Google and Yahoo because their business are worthless according to that belief. It's obvious to me that advertisers are getting value from advertising on the web. I just got a renewal BlogAd from Zacks today (thanks!). I doubt they would have renewed for August if the July ad didn't pay off. And I won't even get into the millions that are spent advertising on Yahoo...

As for why a 'good' trader would 'need' ad income I would ask why does Glenn want something for nothing? Why does Dan Zanger -- who's on the 2004 Trader Monthly 100 and made an estimated $10 to $15 million -- charge for access to his site? Why don't George Soros or Jim Rogers give their books away for free? I run ads on my site because it helps to diversify my income and it gives me an incentive to keep the site going. Do I not deserve to be compensated for my time?

Glenn praises the likes of Kirk, who doesn't run ads but asks for donations, and requires a donation to access the 'members only' portions of his site. Why not ask why Kirk, who's apparently a 'good' trader, needs to ask for donations? (Kirk obviously spends a ton of time on his site. Doesn't he deserve some kind of compensation for that?)

I'm not mad at Glenn for disliking ads. I've been a hard-core TiVo user for years and I skip ads all the time. Likewise, I rarely look at ads on the internet much less click on them. But the fact remains that advertising seems to be the only model that works online. I've had a 'tip jar' on the site for a very long time yet I've only received 4 'tips' in the two-plus years I've been blogging. (Thanks again to Karin (twice), Joe and Adam.) So if I had to rely on donations this site probably would have died out a long time ago. Thankfully Google came along with AdSense and created what I think is a very fair tradeoff for both publishers and readers.

(For those that really just despise ads perhaps you should just block them.)

What a day! This was the best day in well over a year (maybe two) for me. I took 10 trades, 7 of which were winners. Charts of the big R-multiple winners are below. I didn't annotate the entries b/c the true dummies already know where they are. :-)

Man I'm beat this morning. I did a little (one day early) birthday celebrating last night and I'm paying for it now. (Where's my caffeine injection?) I would have just stayed in bed but I want to be here if we get some month-end mark-ups. It feels like the market wants to go higher and there's plenty of room for the Nasdaq to lift to its upper Bollinger Band, which is around 2,225. (I'm not saying that's going to happen, but it's certainly a possibility)

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Man, that ISRG is a beast! I unfortunately got stopped out of it in my IRA last fall just days before it had a huge post-earnings gap up -- just like it's doing again today (sigh). It's almost tripled from my initial buy point. Maybe there's something to that buy & hope, er, hold thing...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Below is a chart of the Nasdaq. I'm not too concerned about that trendline break because I think it was a bit too steep to be sustainable. The thing to watch out for though is the fact that there's not much support between here and 2100. All it needs is a little push...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Here are some charts that caught my eye as I went through my scans today -- ADBE, EXAR, GOOG, GRMN, ITRI, MACR, MNTA, NBIX, PALM, PLAY AND RAIL:

Micahel Taylor has posted the follow-up to his post about (not) scaling into trades. This one looks at scaling out of trades:

In part I, I mentioned how scaling into trades ends up increasing the complexity of your system while reducing the edge and thus your profitability. Now, on to scaling out of trades.

Scaling out of trades is pure magic. Yes, magic. The more I think about scaling out of trades...the more I realize how powerful this technique is to your system. Think of it this way. Scaling out of your trades gives you the chance to create trading systems that are 100% profitable. How in the world can you beat that? :) [read the entire article...]

As you know I've been working to get better at taking partial profits on my trades. I found a method that works for me. As soon as I enter a trade the first thing I do is set my stop loss and then I immediately set an alert which will tell me to sell half of my position when the position reaches a certain percentage gain. That's been working very well for me so far. It seems that about half the time my first sale is better than the final sale. I can live with that and I no longer fret about not maximizing the gains on the entire original position. Being able to lock in a decent gain and then guarantee yourself at least a small profit on the remaining shares makes trading a lot less stressful.

Michael lists some other tenets of scaling out of trades, namely "a way to lock in your profits, free up your money quicker, let some profits ride, reduce your system drawdown, and increase your win ratio to boot." Good stuff, and a must-read article.

We've got another busy morning. How about that ITWO? I thought they were out of business! Anyway, the Nasdaq is just a hair away from 2200 and I can only imagine the number of stops the bears have set at that level. I won't be surprised to see some up-thrusts through that level. I may just watch until that level is cleanly broken...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

A few people have asked me questions about the dummy trades I keep talking about. Why not ask the Chairman himself? He's moving his weekly chat to Monday night and the topic for next week is daytrading. His planned topics are "how to trade with trend, find low-risk spots to enter, and manage open positions." Get all those pressing questions lined up.

Here's an interesting thread at EliteTrader on which traders are posting screen captures of their trade blotters showing their daily P&L's. (via Trade-Ideas)

Dan Fitzpatrick has written a good article about how stocks build support (and resistance) levels.

There's lots of good, "humble" trading advice on Trader Eyal's site.

Glenn has a note on his site underneath a collection of links to stock blogs (BTW, thanks for the link Glenn) which reads:

Why do so many have to place ads everywhere on there sites? Does it really provide a source of income and why would you need it if you are a trader and good at it? What it does... is add clutter and slow down your site. The only ones who don't use ads from the above are thekirkreport.com; brandonfredrickson.com/blog; fickletrader.blogspot.com thanks guys your sites are better for it! Personally I hate ads and never click on em, the only people who do are usually helping someone which is clickfraud.

First, yes, ads really do provide a source of income. My AdSense money from June bought my brand new shiny 60GB iPod as well as a couple of accessories. That may not be a whole lot of money but I'll take it. There are bloggers making a lot more than I do from AdSense -- see Darren 'ProBlogger' Rowse who made between '$10k and $20k in the month of May' from AdSense.

So there are real people making real money from ads. While click-fraud certainly exists I don't think it's as rampant as Glenn seems to believe. I would suggest that anyone who feels like Glenn short the hell out of Google and Yahoo because their business are worthless according to that belief. It's obvious to me that advertisers are getting value from advertising on the web. I just got a renewal BlogAd from Zacks today (thanks!). I doubt they would have renewed for August if the July ad didn't pay off. And I won't even get into the millions that are spent advertising on Yahoo...

As for why a 'good' trader would 'need' ad income I would ask why does Glenn want something for nothing? Why does Dan Zanger -- who's on the 2004 Trader Monthly 100 and made an estimated $10 to $15 million -- charge for access to his site? Why don't George Soros or Jim Rogers give their books away for free? I run ads on my site because it helps to diversify my income and it gives me an incentive to keep the site going. Do I not deserve to be compensated for my time?

Glenn praises the likes of Kirk, who doesn't run ads but asks for donations, and requires a donation to access the 'members only' portions of his site. Why not ask why Kirk, who's apparently a 'good' trader, needs to ask for donations? (Kirk obviously spends a ton of time on his site. Doesn't he deserve some kind of compensation for that?)

I'm not mad at Glenn for disliking ads. I've been a hard-core TiVo user for years and I skip ads all the time. Likewise, I rarely look at ads on the internet much less click on them. But the fact remains that advertising seems to be the only model that works online. I've had a 'tip jar' on the site for a very long time yet I've only received 4 'tips' in the two-plus years I've been blogging. (Thanks again to Karin (twice), Joe and Adam.) So if I had to rely on donations this site probably would have died out a long time ago. Thankfully Google came along with AdSense and created what I think is a very fair tradeoff for both publishers and readers.

(For those that really just despise ads perhaps you should just block them.)

What a day! This was the best day in well over a year (maybe two) for me. I took 10 trades, 7 of which were winners. Charts of the big R-multiple winners are below. I didn't annotate the entries b/c the true dummies already know where they are. :-)

Man I'm beat this morning. I did a little (one day early) birthday celebrating last night and I'm paying for it now. (Where's my caffeine injection?) I would have just stayed in bed but I want to be here if we get some month-end mark-ups. It feels like the market wants to go higher and there's plenty of room for the Nasdaq to lift to its upper Bollinger Band, which is around 2,225. (I'm not saying that's going to happen, but it's certainly a possibility)

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Man, that ISRG is a beast! I unfortunately got stopped out of it in my IRA last fall just days before it had a huge post-earnings gap up -- just like it's doing again today (sigh). It's almost tripled from my initial buy point. Maybe there's something to that buy & hope, er, hold thing...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Below is a chart of the Nasdaq. I'm not too concerned about that trendline break because I think it was a bit too steep to be sustainable. The thing to watch out for though is the fact that there's not much support between here and 2100. All it needs is a little push...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Here are some charts that caught my eye as I went through my scans today -- ADBE, EXAR, GOOG, GRMN, ITRI, MACR, MNTA, NBIX, PALM, PLAY AND RAIL:

Micahel Taylor has posted the follow-up to his post about (not) scaling into trades. This one looks at scaling out of trades:

In part I, I mentioned how scaling into trades ends up increasing the complexity of your system while reducing the edge and thus your profitability. Now, on to scaling out of trades.

Scaling out of trades is pure magic. Yes, magic. The more I think about scaling out of trades...the more I realize how powerful this technique is to your system. Think of it this way. Scaling out of your trades gives you the chance to create trading systems that are 100% profitable. How in the world can you beat that? :) [read the entire article...]

As you know I've been working to get better at taking partial profits on my trades. I found a method that works for me. As soon as I enter a trade the first thing I do is set my stop loss and then I immediately set an alert which will tell me to sell half of my position when the position reaches a certain percentage gain. That's been working very well for me so far. It seems that about half the time my first sale is better than the final sale. I can live with that and I no longer fret about not maximizing the gains on the entire original position. Being able to lock in a decent gain and then guarantee yourself at least a small profit on the remaining shares makes trading a lot less stressful.

Michael lists some other tenets of scaling out of trades, namely "a way to lock in your profits, free up your money quicker, let some profits ride, reduce your system drawdown, and increase your win ratio to boot." Good stuff, and a must-read article.

We've got another busy morning. How about that ITWO? I thought they were out of business! Anyway, the Nasdaq is just a hair away from 2200 and I can only imagine the number of stops the bears have set at that level. I won't be surprised to see some up-thrusts through that level. I may just watch until that level is cleanly broken...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

A few people have asked me questions about the dummy trades I keep talking about. Why not ask the Chairman himself? He's moving his weekly chat to Monday night and the topic for next week is daytrading. His planned topics are "how to trade with trend, find low-risk spots to enter, and manage open positions." Get all those pressing questions lined up.

Here's an interesting thread at EliteTrader on which traders are posting screen captures of their trade blotters showing their daily P&L's. (via Trade-Ideas)

Dan Fitzpatrick has written a good article about how stocks build support (and resistance) levels.

There's lots of good, "humble" trading advice on Trader Eyal's site.

Glenn has a note on his site underneath a collection of links to stock blogs (BTW, thanks for the link Glenn) which reads:

Why do so many have to place ads everywhere on there sites? Does it really provide a source of income and why would you need it if you are a trader and good at it? What it does... is add clutter and slow down your site. The only ones who don't use ads from the above are thekirkreport.com; brandonfredrickson.com/blog; fickletrader.blogspot.com thanks guys your sites are better for it! Personally I hate ads and never click on em, the only people who do are usually helping someone which is clickfraud.

First, yes, ads really do provide a source of income. My AdSense money from June bought my brand new shiny 60GB iPod as well as a couple of accessories. That may not be a whole lot of money but I'll take it. There are bloggers making a lot more than I do from AdSense -- see Darren 'ProBlogger' Rowse who made between '$10k and $20k in the month of May' from AdSense.

So there are real people making real money from ads. While click-fraud certainly exists I don't think it's as rampant as Glenn seems to believe. I would suggest that anyone who feels like Glenn short the hell out of Google and Yahoo because their business are worthless according to that belief. It's obvious to me that advertisers are getting value from advertising on the web. I just got a renewal BlogAd from Zacks today (thanks!). I doubt they would have renewed for August if the July ad didn't pay off. And I won't even get into the millions that are spent advertising on Yahoo...

As for why a 'good' trader would 'need' ad income I would ask why does Glenn want something for nothing? Why does Dan Zanger -- who's on the 2004 Trader Monthly 100 and made an estimated $10 to $15 million -- charge for access to his site? Why don't George Soros or Jim Rogers give their books away for free? I run ads on my site because it helps to diversify my income and it gives me an incentive to keep the site going. Do I not deserve to be compensated for my time?

Glenn praises the likes of Kirk, who doesn't run ads but asks for donations, and requires a donation to access the 'members only' portions of his site. Why not ask why Kirk, who's apparently a 'good' trader, needs to ask for donations? (Kirk obviously spends a ton of time on his site. Doesn't he deserve some kind of compensation for that?)

I'm not mad at Glenn for disliking ads. I've been a hard-core TiVo user for years and I skip ads all the time. Likewise, I rarely look at ads on the internet much less click on them. But the fact remains that advertising seems to be the only model that works online. I've had a 'tip jar' on the site for a very long time yet I've only received 4 'tips' in the two-plus years I've been blogging. (Thanks again to Karin (twice), Joe and Adam.) So if I had to rely on donations this site probably would have died out a long time ago. Thankfully Google came along with AdSense and created what I think is a very fair tradeoff for both publishers and readers.

(For those that really just despise ads perhaps you should just block them.)

What a day! This was the best day in well over a year (maybe two) for me. I took 10 trades, 7 of which were winners. Charts of the big R-multiple winners are below. I didn't annotate the entries b/c the true dummies already know where they are. :-)

Man I'm beat this morning. I did a little (one day early) birthday celebrating last night and I'm paying for it now. (Where's my caffeine injection?) I would have just stayed in bed but I want to be here if we get some month-end mark-ups. It feels like the market wants to go higher and there's plenty of room for the Nasdaq to lift to its upper Bollinger Band, which is around 2,225. (I'm not saying that's going to happen, but it's certainly a possibility)

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Man, that ISRG is a beast! I unfortunately got stopped out of it in my IRA last fall just days before it had a huge post-earnings gap up -- just like it's doing again today (sigh). It's almost tripled from my initial buy point. Maybe there's something to that buy & hope, er, hold thing...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Below is a chart of the Nasdaq. I'm not too concerned about that trendline break because I think it was a bit too steep to be sustainable. The thing to watch out for though is the fact that there's not much support between here and 2100. All it needs is a little push...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Here are some charts that caught my eye as I went through my scans today -- ADBE, EXAR, GOOG, GRMN, ITRI, MACR, MNTA, NBIX, PALM, PLAY AND RAIL:

Micahel Taylor has posted the follow-up to his post about (not) scaling into trades. This one looks at scaling out of trades:

In part I, I mentioned how scaling into trades ends up increasing the complexity of your system while reducing the edge and thus your profitability. Now, on to scaling out of trades.

Scaling out of trades is pure magic. Yes, magic. The more I think about scaling out of trades...the more I realize how powerful this technique is to your system. Think of it this way. Scaling out of your trades gives you the chance to create trading systems that are 100% profitable. How in the world can you beat that? :) [read the entire article...]

As you know I've been working to get better at taking partial profits on my trades. I found a method that works for me. As soon as I enter a trade the first thing I do is set my stop loss and then I immediately set an alert which will tell me to sell half of my position when the position reaches a certain percentage gain. That's been working very well for me so far. It seems that about half the time my first sale is better than the final sale. I can live with that and I no longer fret about not maximizing the gains on the entire original position. Being able to lock in a decent gain and then guarantee yourself at least a small profit on the remaining shares makes trading a lot less stressful.

Michael lists some other tenets of scaling out of trades, namely "a way to lock in your profits, free up your money quicker, let some profits ride, reduce your system drawdown, and increase your win ratio to boot." Good stuff, and a must-read article.

We've got another busy morning. How about that ITWO? I thought they were out of business! Anyway, the Nasdaq is just a hair away from 2200 and I can only imagine the number of stops the bears have set at that level. I won't be surprised to see some up-thrusts through that level. I may just watch until that level is cleanly broken...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

A few people have asked me questions about the dummy trades I keep talking about. Why not ask the Chairman himself? He's moving his weekly chat to Monday night and the topic for next week is daytrading. His planned topics are "how to trade with trend, find low-risk spots to enter, and manage open positions." Get all those pressing questions lined up.

Here's an interesting thread at EliteTrader on which traders are posting screen captures of their trade blotters showing their daily P&L's. (via Trade-Ideas)

Dan Fitzpatrick has written a good article about how stocks build support (and resistance) levels.

There's lots of good, "humble" trading advice on Trader Eyal's site.

Glenn has a note on his site underneath a collection of links to stock blogs (BTW, thanks for the link Glenn) which reads:

Why do so many have to place ads everywhere on there sites? Does it really provide a source of income and why would you need it if you are a trader and good at it? What it does... is add clutter and slow down your site. The only ones who don't use ads from the above are thekirkreport.com; brandonfredrickson.com/blog; fickletrader.blogspot.com thanks guys your sites are better for it! Personally I hate ads and never click on em, the only people who do are usually helping someone which is clickfraud.

First, yes, ads really do provide a source of income. My AdSense money from June bought my brand new shiny 60GB iPod as well as a couple of accessories. That may not be a whole lot of money but I'll take it. There are bloggers making a lot more than I do from AdSense -- see Darren 'ProBlogger' Rowse who made between '$10k and $20k in the month of May' from AdSense.

So there are real people making real money from ads. While click-fraud certainly exists I don't think it's as rampant as Glenn seems to believe. I would suggest that anyone who feels like Glenn short the hell out of Google and Yahoo because their business are worthless according to that belief. It's obvious to me that advertisers are getting value from advertising on the web. I just got a renewal BlogAd from Zacks today (thanks!). I doubt they would have renewed for August if the July ad didn't pay off. And I won't even get into the millions that are spent advertising on Yahoo...

As for why a 'good' trader would 'need' ad income I would ask why does Glenn want something for nothing? Why does Dan Zanger -- who's on the 2004 Trader Monthly 100 and made an estimated $10 to $15 million -- charge for access to his site? Why don't George Soros or Jim Rogers give their books away for free? I run ads on my site because it helps to diversify my income and it gives me an incentive to keep the site going. Do I not deserve to be compensated for my time?

Glenn praises the likes of Kirk, who doesn't run ads but asks for donations, and requires a donation to access the 'members only' portions of his site. Why not ask why Kirk, who's apparently a 'good' trader, needs to ask for donations? (Kirk obviously spends a ton of time on his site. Doesn't he deserve some kind of compensation for that?)

I'm not mad at Glenn for disliking ads. I've been a hard-core TiVo user for years and I skip ads all the time. Likewise, I rarely look at ads on the internet much less click on them. But the fact remains that advertising seems to be the only model that works online. I've had a 'tip jar' on the site for a very long time yet I've only received 4 'tips' in the two-plus years I've been blogging. (Thanks again to Karin (twice), Joe and Adam.) So if I had to rely on donations this site probably would have died out a long time ago. Thankfully Google came along with AdSense and created what I think is a very fair tradeoff for both publishers and readers.

(For those that really just despise ads perhaps you should just block them.)

What a day! This was the best day in well over a year (maybe two) for me. I took 10 trades, 7 of which were winners. Charts of the big R-multiple winners are below. I didn't annotate the entries b/c the true dummies already know where they are. :-)

Man I'm beat this morning. I did a little (one day early) birthday celebrating last night and I'm paying for it now. (Where's my caffeine injection?) I would have just stayed in bed but I want to be here if we get some month-end mark-ups. It feels like the market wants to go higher and there's plenty of room for the Nasdaq to lift to its upper Bollinger Band, which is around 2,225. (I'm not saying that's going to happen, but it's certainly a possibility)

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Man, that ISRG is a beast! I unfortunately got stopped out of it in my IRA last fall just days before it had a huge post-earnings gap up -- just like it's doing again today (sigh). It's almost tripled from my initial buy point. Maybe there's something to that buy & hope, er, hold thing...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Below is a chart of the Nasdaq. I'm not too concerned about that trendline break because I think it was a bit too steep to be sustainable. The thing to watch out for though is the fact that there's not much support between here and 2100. All it needs is a little push...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Here are some charts that caught my eye as I went through my scans today -- ADBE, EXAR, GOOG, GRMN, ITRI, MACR, MNTA, NBIX, PALM, PLAY AND RAIL:

Micahel Taylor has posted the follow-up to his post about (not) scaling into trades. This one looks at scaling out of trades:

In part I, I mentioned how scaling into trades ends up increasing the complexity of your system while reducing the edge and thus your profitability. Now, on to scaling out of trades.

Scaling out of trades is pure magic. Yes, magic. The more I think about scaling out of trades...the more I realize how powerful this technique is to your system. Think of it this way. Scaling out of your trades gives you the chance to create trading systems that are 100% profitable. How in the world can you beat that? :) [read the entire article...]

As you know I've been working to get better at taking partial profits on my trades. I found a method that works for me. As soon as I enter a trade the first thing I do is set my stop loss and then I immediately set an alert which will tell me to sell half of my position when the position reaches a certain percentage gain. That's been working very well for me so far. It seems that about half the time my first sale is better than the final sale. I can live with that and I no longer fret about not maximizing the gains on the entire original position. Being able to lock in a decent gain and then guarantee yourself at least a small profit on the remaining shares makes trading a lot less stressful.

Michael lists some other tenets of scaling out of trades, namely "a way to lock in your profits, free up your money quicker, let some profits ride, reduce your system drawdown, and increase your win ratio to boot." Good stuff, and a must-read article.

We've got another busy morning. How about that ITWO? I thought they were out of business! Anyway, the Nasdaq is just a hair away from 2200 and I can only imagine the number of stops the bears have set at that level. I won't be surprised to see some up-thrusts through that level. I may just watch until that level is cleanly broken...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

A few people have asked me questions about the dummy trades I keep talking about. Why not ask the Chairman himself? He's moving his weekly chat to Monday night and the topic for next week is daytrading. His planned topics are "how to trade with trend, find low-risk spots to enter, and manage open positions." Get all those pressing questions lined up.

Here's an interesting thread at EliteTrader on which traders are posting screen captures of their trade blotters showing their daily P&L's. (via Trade-Ideas)

Dan Fitzpatrick has written a good article about how stocks build support (and resistance) levels.

There's lots of good, "humble" trading advice on Trader Eyal's site.

Glenn has a note on his site underneath a collection of links to stock blogs (BTW, thanks for the link Glenn) which reads:

Why do so many have to place ads everywhere on there sites? Does it really provide a source of income and why would you need it if you are a trader and good at it? What it does... is add clutter and slow down your site. The only ones who don't use ads from the above are thekirkreport.com; brandonfredrickson.com/blog; fickletrader.blogspot.com thanks guys your sites are better for it! Personally I hate ads and never click on em, the only people who do are usually helping someone which is clickfraud.

First, yes, ads really do provide a source of income. My AdSense money from June bought my brand new shiny 60GB iPod as well as a couple of accessories. That may not be a whole lot of money but I'll take it. There are bloggers making a lot more than I do from AdSense -- see Darren 'ProBlogger' Rowse who made between '$10k and $20k in the month of May' from AdSense.

So there are real people making real money from ads. While click-fraud certainly exists I don't think it's as rampant as Glenn seems to believe. I would suggest that anyone who feels like Glenn short the hell out of Google and Yahoo because their business are worthless according to that belief. It's obvious to me that advertisers are getting value from advertising on the web. I just got a renewal BlogAd from Zacks today (thanks!). I doubt they would have renewed for August if the July ad didn't pay off. And I won't even get into the millions that are spent advertising on Yahoo...

As for why a 'good' trader would 'need' ad income I would ask why does Glenn want something for nothing? Why does Dan Zanger -- who's on the 2004 Trader Monthly 100 and made an estimated $10 to $15 million -- charge for access to his site? Why don't George Soros or Jim Rogers give their books away for free? I run ads on my site because it helps to diversify my income and it gives me an incentive to keep the site going. Do I not deserve to be compensated for my time?

Glenn praises the likes of Kirk, who doesn't run ads but asks for donations, and requires a donation to access the 'members only' portions of his site. Why not ask why Kirk, who's apparently a 'good' trader, needs to ask for donations? (Kirk obviously spends a ton of time on his site. Doesn't he deserve some kind of compensation for that?)

I'm not mad at Glenn for disliking ads. I've been a hard-core TiVo user for years and I skip ads all the time. Likewise, I rarely look at ads on the internet much less click on them. But the fact remains that advertising seems to be the only model that works online. I've had a 'tip jar' on the site for a very long time yet I've only received 4 'tips' in the two-plus years I've been blogging. (Thanks again to Karin (twice), Joe and Adam.) So if I had to rely on donations this site probably would have died out a long time ago. Thankfully Google came along with AdSense and created what I think is a very fair tradeoff for both publishers and readers.

(For those that really just despise ads perhaps you should just block them.)

What a day! This was the best day in well over a year (maybe two) for me. I took 10 trades, 7 of which were winners. Charts of the big R-multiple winners are below. I didn't annotate the entries b/c the true dummies already know where they are. :-)

Man I'm beat this morning. I did a little (one day early) birthday celebrating last night and I'm paying for it now. (Where's my caffeine injection?) I would have just stayed in bed but I want to be here if we get some month-end mark-ups. It feels like the market wants to go higher and there's plenty of room for the Nasdaq to lift to its upper Bollinger Band, which is around 2,225. (I'm not saying that's going to happen, but it's certainly a possibility)

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Man, that ISRG is a beast! I unfortunately got stopped out of it in my IRA last fall just days before it had a huge post-earnings gap up -- just like it's doing again today (sigh). It's almost tripled from my initial buy point. Maybe there's something to that buy & hope, er, hold thing...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Below is a chart of the Nasdaq. I'm not too concerned about that trendline break because I think it was a bit too steep to be sustainable. The thing to watch out for though is the fact that there's not much support between here and 2100. All it needs is a little push...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Here are some charts that caught my eye as I went through my scans today -- ADBE, EXAR, GOOG, GRMN, ITRI, MACR, MNTA, NBIX, PALM, PLAY AND RAIL:

Micahel Taylor has posted the follow-up to his post about (not) scaling into trades. This one looks at scaling out of trades:

In part I, I mentioned how scaling into trades ends up increasing the complexity of your system while reducing the edge and thus your profitability. Now, on to scaling out of trades.

Scaling out of trades is pure magic. Yes, magic. The more I think about scaling out of trades...the more I realize how powerful this technique is to your system. Think of it this way. Scaling out of your trades gives you the chance to create trading systems that are 100% profitable. How in the world can you beat that? :) [read the entire article...]

As you know I've been working to get better at taking partial profits on my trades. I found a method that works for me. As soon as I enter a trade the first thing I do is set my stop loss and then I immediately set an alert which will tell me to sell half of my position when the position reaches a certain percentage gain. That's been working very well for me so far. It seems that about half the time my first sale is better than the final sale. I can live with that and I no longer fret about not maximizing the gains on the entire original position. Being able to lock in a decent gain and then guarantee yourself at least a small profit on the remaining shares makes trading a lot less stressful.

Michael lists some other tenets of scaling out of trades, namely "a way to lock in your profits, free up your money quicker, let some profits ride, reduce your system drawdown, and increase your win ratio to boot." Good stuff, and a must-read article.

We've got another busy morning. How about that ITWO? I thought they were out of business! Anyway, the Nasdaq is just a hair away from 2200 and I can only imagine the number of stops the bears have set at that level. I won't be surprised to see some up-thrusts through that level. I may just watch until that level is cleanly broken...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

A few people have asked me questions about the dummy trades I keep talking about. Why not ask the Chairman himself? He's moving his weekly chat to Monday night and the topic for next week is daytrading. His planned topics are "how to trade with trend, find low-risk spots to enter, and manage open positions." Get all those pressing questions lined up.

Here's an interesting thread at EliteTrader on which traders are posting screen captures of their trade blotters showing their daily P&L's. (via Trade-Ideas)

Dan Fitzpatrick has written a good article about how stocks build support (and resistance) levels.

There's lots of good, "humble" trading advice on Trader Eyal's site.

Glenn has a note on his site underneath a collection of links to stock blogs (BTW, thanks for the link Glenn) which reads:

Why do so many have to place ads everywhere on there sites? Does it really provide a source of income and why would you need it if you are a trader and good at it? What it does... is add clutter and slow down your site. The only ones who don't use ads from the above are thekirkreport.com; brandonfredrickson.com/blog; fickletrader.blogspot.com thanks guys your sites are better for it! Personally I hate ads and never click on em, the only people who do are usually helping someone which is clickfraud.

First, yes, ads really do provide a source of income. My AdSense money from June bought my brand new shiny 60GB iPod as well as a couple of accessories. That may not be a whole lot of money but I'll take it. There are bloggers making a lot more than I do from AdSense -- see Darren 'ProBlogger' Rowse who made between '$10k and $20k in the month of May' from AdSense.

So there are real people making real money from ads. While click-fraud certainly exists I don't think it's as rampant as Glenn seems to believe. I would suggest that anyone who feels like Glenn short the hell out of Google and Yahoo because their business are worthless according to that belief. It's obvious to me that advertisers are getting value from advertising on the web. I just got a renewal BlogAd from Zacks today (thanks!). I doubt they would have renewed for August if the July ad didn't pay off. And I won't even get into the millions that are spent advertising on Yahoo...

As for why a 'good' trader would 'need' ad income I would ask why does Glenn want something for nothing? Why does Dan Zanger -- who's on the 2004 Trader Monthly 100 and made an estimated $10 to $15 million -- charge for access to his site? Why don't George Soros or Jim Rogers give their books away for free? I run ads on my site because it helps to diversify my income and it gives me an incentive to keep the site going. Do I not deserve to be compensated for my time?

Glenn praises the likes of Kirk, who doesn't run ads but asks for donations, and requires a donation to access the 'members only' portions of his site. Why not ask why Kirk, who's apparently a 'good' trader, needs to ask for donations? (Kirk obviously spends a ton of time on his site. Doesn't he deserve some kind of compensation for that?)

I'm not mad at Glenn for disliking ads. I've been a hard-core TiVo user for years and I skip ads all the time. Likewise, I rarely look at ads on the internet much less click on them. But the fact remains that advertising seems to be the only model that works online. I've had a 'tip jar' on the site for a very long time yet I've only received 4 'tips' in the two-plus years I've been blogging. (Thanks again to Karin (twice), Joe and Adam.) So if I had to rely on donations this site probably would have died out a long time ago. Thankfully Google came along with AdSense and created what I think is a very fair tradeoff for both publishers and readers.

(For those that really just despise ads perhaps you should just block them.)

What a day! This was the best day in well over a year (maybe two) for me. I took 10 trades, 7 of which were winners. Charts of the big R-multiple winners are below. I didn't annotate the entries b/c the true dummies already know where they are. :-)

Man I'm beat this morning. I did a little (one day early) birthday celebrating last night and I'm paying for it now. (Where's my caffeine injection?) I would have just stayed in bed but I want to be here if we get some month-end mark-ups. It feels like the market wants to go higher and there's plenty of room for the Nasdaq to lift to its upper Bollinger Band, which is around 2,225. (I'm not saying that's going to happen, but it's certainly a possibility)

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Man, that ISRG is a beast! I unfortunately got stopped out of it in my IRA last fall just days before it had a huge post-earnings gap up -- just like it's doing again today (sigh). It's almost tripled from my initial buy point. Maybe there's something to that buy & hope, er, hold thing...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Below is a chart of the Nasdaq. I'm not too concerned about that trendline break because I think it was a bit too steep to be sustainable. The thing to watch out for though is the fact that there's not much support between here and 2100. All it needs is a little push...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Here are some charts that caught my eye as I went through my scans today -- ADBE, EXAR, GOOG, GRMN, ITRI, MACR, MNTA, NBIX, PALM, PLAY AND RAIL:

Micahel Taylor has posted the follow-up to his post about (not) scaling into trades. This one looks at scaling out of trades:

In part I, I mentioned how scaling into trades ends up increasing the complexity of your system while reducing the edge and thus your profitability. Now, on to scaling out of trades.

Scaling out of trades is pure magic. Yes, magic. The more I think about scaling out of trades...the more I realize how powerful this technique is to your system. Think of it this way. Scaling out of your trades gives you the chance to create trading systems that are 100% profitable. How in the world can you beat that? :) [read the entire article...]

As you know I've been working to get better at taking partial profits on my trades. I found a method that works for me. As soon as I enter a trade the first thing I do is set my stop loss and then I immediately set an alert which will tell me to sell half of my position when the position reaches a certain percentage gain. That's been working very well for me so far. It seems that about half the time my first sale is better than the final sale. I can live with that and I no longer fret about not maximizing the gains on the entire original position. Being able to lock in a decent gain and then guarantee yourself at least a small profit on the remaining shares makes trading a lot less stressful.

Michael lists some other tenets of scaling out of trades, namely "a way to lock in your profits, free up your money quicker, let some profits ride, reduce your system drawdown, and increase your win ratio to boot." Good stuff, and a must-read article.

We've got another busy morning. How about that ITWO? I thought they were out of business! Anyway, the Nasdaq is just a hair away from 2200 and I can only imagine the number of stops the bears have set at that level. I won't be surprised to see some up-thrusts through that level. I may just watch until that level is cleanly broken...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

A few people have asked me questions about the dummy trades I keep talking about. Why not ask the Chairman himself? He's moving his weekly chat to Monday night and the topic for next week is daytrading. His planned topics are "how to trade with trend, find low-risk spots to enter, and manage open positions." Get all those pressing questions lined up.

Here's an interesting thread at EliteTrader on which traders are posting screen captures of their trade blotters showing their daily P&L's. (via Trade-Ideas)

Dan Fitzpatrick has written a good article about how stocks build support (and resistance) levels.

There's lots of good, "humble" trading advice on Trader Eyal's site.

Glenn has a note on his site underneath a collection of links to stock blogs (BTW, thanks for the link Glenn) which reads:

Why do so many have to place ads everywhere on there sites? Does it really provide a source of income and why would you need it if you are a trader and good at it? What it does... is add clutter and slow down your site. The only ones who don't use ads from the above are thekirkreport.com; brandonfredrickson.com/blog; fickletrader.blogspot.com thanks guys your sites are better for it! Personally I hate ads and never click on em, the only people who do are usually helping someone which is clickfraud.

First, yes, ads really do provide a source of income. My AdSense money from June bought my brand new shiny 60GB iPod as well as a couple of accessories. That may not be a whole lot of money but I'll take it. There are bloggers making a lot more than I do from AdSense -- see Darren 'ProBlogger' Rowse who made between '$10k and $20k in the month of May' from AdSense.

So there are real people making real money from ads. While click-fraud certainly exists I don't think it's as rampant as Glenn seems to believe. I would suggest that anyone who feels like Glenn short the hell out of Google and Yahoo because their business are worthless according to that belief. It's obvious to me that advertisers are getting value from advertising on the web. I just got a renewal BlogAd from Zacks today (thanks!). I doubt they would have renewed for August if the July ad didn't pay off. And I won't even get into the millions that are spent advertising on Yahoo...

As for why a 'good' trader would 'need' ad income I would ask why does Glenn want something for nothing? Why does Dan Zanger -- who's on the 2004 Trader Monthly 100 and made an estimated $10 to $15 million -- charge for access to his site? Why don't George Soros or Jim Rogers give their books away for free? I run ads on my site because it helps to diversify my income and it gives me an incentive to keep the site going. Do I not deserve to be compensated for my time?

Glenn praises the likes of Kirk, who doesn't run ads but asks for donations, and requires a donation to access the 'members only' portions of his site. Why not ask why Kirk, who's apparently a 'good' trader, needs to ask for donations? (Kirk obviously spends a ton of time on his site. Doesn't he deserve some kind of compensation for that?)

I'm not mad at Glenn for disliking ads. I've been a hard-core TiVo user for years and I skip ads all the time. Likewise, I rarely look at ads on the internet much less click on them. But the fact remains that advertising seems to be the only model that works online. I've had a 'tip jar' on the site for a very long time yet I've only received 4 'tips' in the two-plus years I've been blogging. (Thanks again to Karin (twice), Joe and Adam.) So if I had to rely on donations this site probably would have died out a long time ago. Thankfully Google came along with AdSense and created what I think is a very fair tradeoff for both publishers and readers.

(For those that really just despise ads perhaps you should just block them.)

What a day! This was the best day in well over a year (maybe two) for me. I took 10 trades, 7 of which were winners. Charts of the big R-multiple winners are below. I didn't annotate the entries b/c the true dummies already know where they are. :-)

Man I'm beat this morning. I did a little (one day early) birthday celebrating last night and I'm paying for it now. (Where's my caffeine injection?) I would have just stayed in bed but I want to be here if we get some month-end mark-ups. It feels like the market wants to go higher and there's plenty of room for the Nasdaq to lift to its upper Bollinger Band, which is around 2,225. (I'm not saying that's going to happen, but it's certainly a possibility)

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Man, that ISRG is a beast! I unfortunately got stopped out of it in my IRA last fall just days before it had a huge post-earnings gap up -- just like it's doing again today (sigh). It's almost tripled from my initial buy point. Maybe there's something to that buy & hope, er, hold thing...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Below is a chart of the Nasdaq. I'm not too concerned about that trendline break because I think it was a bit too steep to be sustainable. The thing to watch out for though is the fact that there's not much support between here and 2100. All it needs is a little push...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Here are some charts that caught my eye as I went through my scans today -- ADBE, EXAR, GOOG, GRMN, ITRI, MACR, MNTA, NBIX, PALM, PLAY AND RAIL:

Micahel Taylor has posted the follow-up to his post about (not) scaling into trades. This one looks at scaling out of trades:

In part I, I mentioned how scaling into trades ends up increasing the complexity of your system while reducing the edge and thus your profitability. Now, on to scaling out of trades.

Scaling out of trades is pure magic. Yes, magic. The more I think about scaling out of trades...the more I realize how powerful this technique is to your system. Think of it this way. Scaling out of your trades gives you the chance to create trading systems that are 100% profitable. How in the world can you beat that? :) [read the entire article...]

As you know I've been working to get better at taking partial profits on my trades. I found a method that works for me. As soon as I enter a trade the first thing I do is set my stop loss and then I immediately set an alert which will tell me to sell half of my position when the position reaches a certain percentage gain. That's been working very well for me so far. It seems that about half the time my first sale is better than the final sale. I can live with that and I no longer fret about not maximizing the gains on the entire original position. Being able to lock in a decent gain and then guarantee yourself at least a small profit on the remaining shares makes trading a lot less stressful.

Michael lists some other tenets of scaling out of trades, namely "a way to lock in your profits, free up your money quicker, let some profits ride, reduce your system drawdown, and increase your win ratio to boot." Good stuff, and a must-read article.

We've got another busy morning. How about that ITWO? I thought they were out of business! Anyway, the Nasdaq is just a hair away from 2200 and I can only imagine the number of stops the bears have set at that level. I won't be surprised to see some up-thrusts through that level. I may just watch until that level is cleanly broken...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

A few people have asked me questions about the dummy trades I keep talking about. Why not ask the Chairman himself? He's moving his weekly chat to Monday night and the topic for next week is daytrading. His planned topics are "how to trade with trend, find low-risk spots to enter, and manage open positions." Get all those pressing questions lined up.

Here's an interesting thread at EliteTrader on which traders are posting screen captures of their trade blotters showing their daily P&L's. (via Trade-Ideas)

Dan Fitzpatrick has written a good article about how stocks build support (and resistance) levels.

There's lots of good, "humble" trading advice on Trader Eyal's site.

Glenn has a note on his site underneath a collection of links to stock blogs (BTW, thanks for the link Glenn) which reads:

Why do so many have to place ads everywhere on there sites? Does it really provide a source of income and why would you need it if you are a trader and good at it? What it does... is add clutter and slow down your site. The only ones who don't use ads from the above are thekirkreport.com; brandonfredrickson.com/blog; fickletrader.blogspot.com thanks guys your sites are better for it! Personally I hate ads and never click on em, the only people who do are usually helping someone which is clickfraud.

First, yes, ads really do provide a source of income. My AdSense money from June bought my brand new shiny 60GB iPod as well as a couple of accessories. That may not be a whole lot of money but I'll take it. There are bloggers making a lot more than I do from AdSense -- see Darren 'ProBlogger' Rowse who made between '$10k and $20k in the month of May' from AdSense.

So there are real people making real money from ads. While click-fraud certainly exists I don't think it's as rampant as Glenn seems to believe. I would suggest that anyone who feels like Glenn short the hell out of Google and Yahoo because their business are worthless according to that belief. It's obvious to me that advertisers are getting value from advertising on the web. I just got a renewal BlogAd from Zacks today (thanks!). I doubt they would have renewed for August if the July ad didn't pay off. And I won't even get into the millions that are spent advertising on Yahoo...

As for why a 'good' trader would 'need' ad income I would ask why does Glenn want something for nothing? Why does Dan Zanger -- who's on the 2004 Trader Monthly 100 and made an estimated $10 to $15 million -- charge for access to his site? Why don't George Soros or Jim Rogers give their books away for free? I run ads on my site because it helps to diversify my income and it gives me an incentive to keep the site going. Do I not deserve to be compensated for my time?

Glenn praises the likes of Kirk, who doesn't run ads but asks for donations, and requires a donation to access the 'members only' portions of his site. Why not ask why Kirk, who's apparently a 'good' trader, needs to ask for donations? (Kirk obviously spends a ton of time on his site. Doesn't he deserve some kind of compensation for that?)

I'm not mad at Glenn for disliking ads. I've been a hard-core TiVo user for years and I skip ads all the time. Likewise, I rarely look at ads on the internet much less click on them. But the fact remains that advertising seems to be the only model that works online. I've had a 'tip jar' on the site for a very long time yet I've only received 4 'tips' in the two-plus years I've been blogging. (Thanks again to Karin (twice), Joe and Adam.) So if I had to rely on donations this site probably would have died out a long time ago. Thankfully Google came along with AdSense and created what I think is a very fair tradeoff for both publishers and readers.

(For those that really just despise ads perhaps you should just block them.)

What a day! This was the best day in well over a year (maybe two) for me. I took 10 trades, 7 of which were winners. Charts of the big R-multiple winners are below. I didn't annotate the entries b/c the true dummies already know where they are. :-)

Man I'm beat this morning. I did a little (one day early) birthday celebrating last night and I'm paying for it now. (Where's my caffeine injection?) I would have just stayed in bed but I want to be here if we get some month-end mark-ups. It feels like the market wants to go higher and there's plenty of room for the Nasdaq to lift to its upper Bollinger Band, which is around 2,225. (I'm not saying that's going to happen, but it's certainly a possibility)

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Man, that ISRG is a beast! I unfortunately got stopped out of it in my IRA last fall just days before it had a huge post-earnings gap up -- just like it's doing again today (sigh). It's almost tripled from my initial buy point. Maybe there's something to that buy & hope, er, hold thing...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Below is a chart of the Nasdaq. I'm not too concerned about that trendline break because I think it was a bit too steep to be sustainable. The thing to watch out for though is the fact that there's not much support between here and 2100. All it needs is a little push...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Here are some charts that caught my eye as I went through my scans today -- ADBE, EXAR, GOOG, GRMN, ITRI, MACR, MNTA, NBIX, PALM, PLAY AND RAIL:

Micahel Taylor has posted the follow-up to his post about (not) scaling into trades. This one looks at scaling out of trades:

In part I, I mentioned how scaling into trades ends up increasing the complexity of your system while reducing the edge and thus your profitability. Now, on to scaling out of trades.

Scaling out of trades is pure magic. Yes, magic. The more I think about scaling out of trades...the more I realize how powerful this technique is to your system. Think of it this way. Scaling out of your trades gives you the chance to create trading systems that are 100% profitable. How in the world can you beat that? :) [read the entire article...]

As you know I've been working to get better at taking partial profits on my trades. I found a method that works for me. As soon as I enter a trade the first thing I do is set my stop loss and then I immediately set an alert which will tell me to sell half of my position when the position reaches a certain percentage gain. That's been working very well for me so far. It seems that about half the time my first sale is better than the final sale. I can live with that and I no longer fret about not maximizing the gains on the entire original position. Being able to lock in a decent gain and then guarantee yourself at least a small profit on the remaining shares makes trading a lot less stressful.

Michael lists some other tenets of scaling out of trades, namely "a way to lock in your profits, free up your money quicker, let some profits ride, reduce your system drawdown, and increase your win ratio to boot." Good stuff, and a must-read article.

We've got another busy morning. How about that ITWO? I thought they were out of business! Anyway, the Nasdaq is just a hair away from 2200 and I can only imagine the number of stops the bears have set at that level. I won't be surprised to see some up-thrusts through that level. I may just watch until that level is cleanly broken...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

A few people have asked me questions about the dummy trades I keep talking about. Why not ask the Chairman himself? He's moving his weekly chat to Monday night and the topic for next week is daytrading. His planned topics are "how to trade with trend, find low-risk spots to enter, and manage open positions." Get all those pressing questions lined up.

Here's an interesting thread at EliteTrader on which traders are posting screen captures of their trade blotters showing their daily P&L's. (via Trade-Ideas)

Dan Fitzpatrick has written a good article about how stocks build support (and resistance) levels.

There's lots of good, "humble" trading advice on Trader Eyal's site.

Glenn has a note on his site underneath a collection of links to stock blogs (BTW, thanks for the link Glenn) which reads:

Why do so many have to place ads everywhere on there sites? Does it really provide a source of income and why would you need it if you are a trader and good at it? What it does... is add clutter and slow down your site. The only ones who don't use ads from the above are thekirkreport.com; brandonfredrickson.com/blog; fickletrader.blogspot.com thanks guys your sites are better for it! Personally I hate ads and never click on em, the only people who do are usually helping someone which is clickfraud.

First, yes, ads really do provide a source of income. My AdSense money from June bought my brand new shiny 60GB iPod as well as a couple of accessories. That may not be a whole lot of money but I'll take it. There are bloggers making a lot more than I do from AdSense -- see Darren 'ProBlogger' Rowse who made between '$10k and $20k in the month of May' from AdSense.

So there are real people making real money from ads. While click-fraud certainly exists I don't think it's as rampant as Glenn seems to believe. I would suggest that anyone who feels like Glenn short the hell out of Google and Yahoo because their business are worthless according to that belief. It's obvious to me that advertisers are getting value from advertising on the web. I just got a renewal BlogAd from Zacks today (thanks!). I doubt they would have renewed for August if the July ad didn't pay off. And I won't even get into the millions that are spent advertising on Yahoo...

As for why a 'good' trader would 'need' ad income I would ask why does Glenn want something for nothing? Why does Dan Zanger -- who's on the 2004 Trader Monthly 100 and made an estimated $10 to $15 million -- charge for access to his site? Why don't George Soros or Jim Rogers give their books away for free? I run ads on my site because it helps to diversify my income and it gives me an incentive to keep the site going. Do I not deserve to be compensated for my time?

Glenn praises the likes of Kirk, who doesn't run ads but asks for donations, and requires a donation to access the 'members only' portions of his site. Why not ask why Kirk, who's apparently a 'good' trader, needs to ask for donations? (Kirk obviously spends a ton of time on his site. Doesn't he deserve some kind of compensation for that?)

I'm not mad at Glenn for disliking ads. I've been a hard-core TiVo user for years and I skip ads all the time. Likewise, I rarely look at ads on the internet much less click on them. But the fact remains that advertising seems to be the only model that works online. I've had a 'tip jar' on the site for a very long time yet I've only received 4 'tips' in the two-plus years I've been blogging. (Thanks again to Karin (twice), Joe and Adam.) So if I had to rely on donations this site probably would have died out a long time ago. Thankfully Google came along with AdSense and created what I think is a very fair tradeoff for both publishers and readers.

(For those that really just despise ads perhaps you should just block them.)

What a day! This was the best day in well over a year (maybe two) for me. I took 10 trades, 7 of which were winners. Charts of the big R-multiple winners are below. I didn't annotate the entries b/c the true dummies already know where they are. :-)

Man I'm beat this morning. I did a little (one day early) birthday celebrating last night and I'm paying for it now. (Where's my caffeine injection?) I would have just stayed in bed but I want to be here if we get some month-end mark-ups. It feels like the market wants to go higher and there's plenty of room for the Nasdaq to lift to its upper Bollinger Band, which is around 2,225. (I'm not saying that's going to happen, but it's certainly a possibility)

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Man, that ISRG is a beast! I unfortunately got stopped out of it in my IRA last fall just days before it had a huge post-earnings gap up -- just like it's doing again today (sigh). It's almost tripled from my initial buy point. Maybe there's something to that buy & hope, er, hold thing...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Below is a chart of the Nasdaq. I'm not too concerned about that trendline break because I think it was a bit too steep to be sustainable. The thing to watch out for though is the fact that there's not much support between here and 2100. All it needs is a little push...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Here are some charts that caught my eye as I went through my scans today -- ADBE, EXAR, GOOG, GRMN, ITRI, MACR, MNTA, NBIX, PALM, PLAY AND RAIL:

Micahel Taylor has posted the follow-up to his post about (not) scaling into trades. This one looks at scaling out of trades:

In part I, I mentioned how scaling into trades ends up increasing the complexity of your system while reducing the edge and thus your profitability. Now, on to scaling out of trades.

Scaling out of trades is pure magic. Yes, magic. The more I think about scaling out of trades...the more I realize how powerful this technique is to your system. Think of it this way. Scaling out of your trades gives you the chance to create trading systems that are 100% profitable. How in the world can you beat that? :) [read the entire article...]

As you know I've been working to get better at taking partial profits on my trades. I found a method that works for me. As soon as I enter a trade the first thing I do is set my stop loss and then I immediately set an alert which will tell me to sell half of my position when the position reaches a certain percentage gain. That's been working very well for me so far. It seems that about half the time my first sale is better than the final sale. I can live with that and I no longer fret about not maximizing the gains on the entire original position. Being able to lock in a decent gain and then guarantee yourself at least a small profit on the remaining shares makes trading a lot less stressful.

Michael lists some other tenets of scaling out of trades, namely "a way to lock in your profits, free up your money quicker, let some profits ride, reduce your system drawdown, and increase your win ratio to boot." Good stuff, and a must-read article.

We've got another busy morning. How about that ITWO? I thought they were out of business! Anyway, the Nasdaq is just a hair away from 2200 and I can only imagine the number of stops the bears have set at that level. I won't be surprised to see some up-thrusts through that level. I may just watch until that level is cleanly broken...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

A few people have asked me questions about the dummy trades I keep talking about. Why not ask the Chairman himself? He's moving his weekly chat to Monday night and the topic for next week is daytrading. His planned topics are "how to trade with trend, find low-risk spots to enter, and manage open positions." Get all those pressing questions lined up.

Here's an interesting thread at EliteTrader on which traders are posting screen captures of their trade blotters showing their daily P&L's. (via Trade-Ideas)

Dan Fitzpatrick has written a good article about how stocks build support (and resistance) levels.

There's lots of good, "humble" trading advice on Trader Eyal's site.

Glenn has a note on his site underneath a collection of links to stock blogs (BTW, thanks for the link Glenn) which reads:

Why do so many have to place ads everywhere on there sites? Does it really provide a source of income and why would you need it if you are a trader and good at it? What it does... is add clutter and slow down your site. The only ones who don't use ads from the above are thekirkreport.com; brandonfredrickson.com/blog; fickletrader.blogspot.com thanks guys your sites are better for it! Personally I hate ads and never click on em, the only people who do are usually helping someone which is clickfraud.

First, yes, ads really do provide a source of income. My AdSense money from June bought my brand new shiny 60GB iPod as well as a couple of accessories. That may not be a whole lot of money but I'll take it. There are bloggers making a lot more than I do from AdSense -- see Darren 'ProBlogger' Rowse who made between '$10k and $20k in the month of May' from AdSense.

So there are real people making real money from ads. While click-fraud certainly exists I don't think it's as rampant as Glenn seems to believe. I would suggest that anyone who feels like Glenn short the hell out of Google and Yahoo because their business are worthless according to that belief. It's obvious to me that advertisers are getting value from advertising on the web. I just got a renewal BlogAd from Zacks today (thanks!). I doubt they would have renewed for August if the July ad didn't pay off. And I won't even get into the millions that are spent advertising on Yahoo...

As for why a 'good' trader would 'need' ad income I would ask why does Glenn want something for nothing? Why does Dan Zanger -- who's on the 2004 Trader Monthly 100 and made an estimated $10 to $15 million -- charge for access to his site? Why don't George Soros or Jim Rogers give their books away for free? I run ads on my site because it helps to diversify my income and it gives me an incentive to keep the site going. Do I not deserve to be compensated for my time?

Glenn praises the likes of Kirk, who doesn't run ads but asks for donations, and requires a donation to access the 'members only' portions of his site. Why not ask why Kirk, who's apparently a 'good' trader, needs to ask for donations? (Kirk obviously spends a ton of time on his site. Doesn't he deserve some kind of compensation for that?)

I'm not mad at Glenn for disliking ads. I've been a hard-core TiVo user for years and I skip ads all the time. Likewise, I rarely look at ads on the internet much less click on them. But the fact remains that advertising seems to be the only model that works online. I've had a 'tip jar' on the site for a very long time yet I've only received 4 'tips' in the two-plus years I've been blogging. (Thanks again to Karin (twice), Joe and Adam.) So if I had to rely on donations this site probably would have died out a long time ago. Thankfully Google came along with AdSense and created what I think is a very fair tradeoff for both publishers and readers.

(For those that really just despise ads perhaps you should just block them.)

What a day! This was the best day in well over a year (maybe two) for me. I took 10 trades, 7 of which were winners. Charts of the big R-multiple winners are below. I didn't annotate the entries b/c the true dummies already know where they are. :-)

Man I'm beat this morning. I did a little (one day early) birthday celebrating last night and I'm paying for it now. (Where's my caffeine injection?) I would have just stayed in bed but I want to be here if we get some month-end mark-ups. It feels like the market wants to go higher and there's plenty of room for the Nasdaq to lift to its upper Bollinger Band, which is around 2,225. (I'm not saying that's going to happen, but it's certainly a possibility)

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Man, that ISRG is a beast! I unfortunately got stopped out of it in my IRA last fall just days before it had a huge post-earnings gap up -- just like it's doing again today (sigh). It's almost tripled from my initial buy point. Maybe there's something to that buy & hope, er, hold thing...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Below is a chart of the Nasdaq. I'm not too concerned about that trendline break because I think it was a bit too steep to be sustainable. The thing to watch out for though is the fact that there's not much support between here and 2100. All it needs is a little push...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Here are some charts that caught my eye as I went through my scans today -- ADBE, EXAR, GOOG, GRMN, ITRI, MACR, MNTA, NBIX, PALM, PLAY AND RAIL:

Micahel Taylor has posted the follow-up to his post about (not) scaling into trades. This one looks at scaling out of trades:

In part I, I mentioned how scaling into trades ends up increasing the complexity of your system while reducing the edge and thus your profitability. Now, on to scaling out of trades.

Scaling out of trades is pure magic. Yes, magic. The more I think about scaling out of trades...the more I realize how powerful this technique is to your system. Think of it this way. Scaling out of your trades gives you the chance to create trading systems that are 100% profitable. How in the world can you beat that? :) [read the entire article...]

As you know I've been working to get better at taking partial profits on my trades. I found a method that works for me. As soon as I enter a trade the first thing I do is set my stop loss and then I immediately set an alert which will tell me to sell half of my position when the position reaches a certain percentage gain. That's been working very well for me so far. It seems that about half the time my first sale is better than the final sale. I can live with that and I no longer fret about not maximizing the gains on the entire original position. Being able to lock in a decent gain and then guarantee yourself at least a small profit on the remaining shares makes trading a lot less stressful.

Michael lists some other tenets of scaling out of trades, namely "a way to lock in your profits, free up your money quicker, let some profits ride, reduce your system drawdown, and increase your win ratio to boot." Good stuff, and a must-read article.

We've got another busy morning. How about that ITWO? I thought they were out of business! Anyway, the Nasdaq is just a hair away from 2200 and I can only imagine the number of stops the bears have set at that level. I won't be surprised to see some up-thrusts through that level. I may just watch until that level is cleanly broken...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

A few people have asked me questions about the dummy trades I keep talking about. Why not ask the Chairman himself? He's moving his weekly chat to Monday night and the topic for next week is daytrading. His planned topics are "how to trade with trend, find low-risk spots to enter, and manage open positions." Get all those pressing questions lined up.

Here's an interesting thread at EliteTrader on which traders are posting screen captures of their trade blotters showing their daily P&L's. (via Trade-Ideas)

Dan Fitzpatrick has written a good article about how stocks build support (and resistance) levels.

There's lots of good, "humble" trading advice on Trader Eyal's site.

Glenn has a note on his site underneath a collection of links to stock blogs (BTW, thanks for the link Glenn) which reads:

Why do so many have to place ads everywhere on there sites? Does it really provide a source of income and why would you need it if you are a trader and good at it? What it does... is add clutter and slow down your site. The only ones who don't use ads from the above are thekirkreport.com; brandonfredrickson.com/blog; fickletrader.blogspot.com thanks guys your sites are better for it! Personally I hate ads and never click on em, the only people who do are usually helping someone which is clickfraud.

First, yes, ads really do provide a source of income. My AdSense money from June bought my brand new shiny 60GB iPod as well as a couple of accessories. That may not be a whole lot of money but I'll take it. There are bloggers making a lot more than I do from AdSense -- see Darren 'ProBlogger' Rowse who made between '$10k and $20k in the month of May' from AdSense.

So there are real people making real money from ads. While click-fraud certainly exists I don't think it's as rampant as Glenn seems to believe. I would suggest that anyone who feels like Glenn short the hell out of Google and Yahoo because their business are worthless according to that belief. It's obvious to me that advertisers are getting value from advertising on the web. I just got a renewal BlogAd from Zacks today (thanks!). I doubt they would have renewed for August if the July ad didn't pay off. And I won't even get into the millions that are spent advertising on Yahoo...

As for why a 'good' trader would 'need' ad income I would ask why does Glenn want something for nothing? Why does Dan Zanger -- who's on the 2004 Trader Monthly 100 and made an estimated $10 to $15 million -- charge for access to his site? Why don't George Soros or Jim Rogers give their books away for free? I run ads on my site because it helps to diversify my income and it gives me an incentive to keep the site going. Do I not deserve to be compensated for my time?

Glenn praises the likes of Kirk, who doesn't run ads but asks for donations, and requires a donation to access the 'members only' portions of his site. Why not ask why Kirk, who's apparently a 'good' trader, needs to ask for donations? (Kirk obviously spends a ton of time on his site. Doesn't he deserve some kind of compensation for that?)

I'm not mad at Glenn for disliking ads. I've been a hard-core TiVo user for years and I skip ads all the time. Likewise, I rarely look at ads on the internet much less click on them. But the fact remains that advertising seems to be the only model that works online. I've had a 'tip jar' on the site for a very long time yet I've only received 4 'tips' in the two-plus years I've been blogging. (Thanks again to Karin (twice), Joe and Adam.) So if I had to rely on donations this site probably would have died out a long time ago. Thankfully Google came along with AdSense and created what I think is a very fair tradeoff for both publishers and readers.

(For those that really just despise ads perhaps you should just block them.)

What a day! This was the best day in well over a year (maybe two) for me. I took 10 trades, 7 of which were winners. Charts of the big R-multiple winners are below. I didn't annotate the entries b/c the true dummies already know where they are. :-)

Man I'm beat this morning. I did a little (one day early) birthday celebrating last night and I'm paying for it now. (Where's my caffeine injection?) I would have just stayed in bed but I want to be here if we get some month-end mark-ups. It feels like the market wants to go higher and there's plenty of room for the Nasdaq to lift to its upper Bollinger Band, which is around 2,225. (I'm not saying that's going to happen, but it's certainly a possibility)

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Man, that ISRG is a beast! I unfortunately got stopped out of it in my IRA last fall just days before it had a huge post-earnings gap up -- just like it's doing again today (sigh). It's almost tripled from my initial buy point. Maybe there's something to that buy & hope, er, hold thing...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Below is a chart of the Nasdaq. I'm not too concerned about that trendline break because I think it was a bit too steep to be sustainable. The thing to watch out for though is the fact that there's not much support between here and 2100. All it needs is a little push...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Here are some charts that caught my eye as I went through my scans today -- ADBE, EXAR, GOOG, GRMN, ITRI, MACR, MNTA, NBIX, PALM, PLAY AND RAIL:

Micahel Taylor has posted the follow-up to his post about (not) scaling into trades. This one looks at scaling out of trades:

In part I, I mentioned how scaling into trades ends up increasing the complexity of your system while reducing the edge and thus your profitability. Now, on to scaling out of trades.

Scaling out of trades is pure magic. Yes, magic. The more I think about scaling out of trades...the more I realize how powerful this technique is to your system. Think of it this way. Scaling out of your trades gives you the chance to create trading systems that are 100% profitable. How in the world can you beat that? :) [read the entire article...]

As you know I've been working to get better at taking partial profits on my trades. I found a method that works for me. As soon as I enter a trade the first thing I do is set my stop loss and then I immediately set an alert which will tell me to sell half of my position when the position reaches a certain percentage gain. That's been working very well for me so far. It seems that about half the time my first sale is better than the final sale. I can live with that and I no longer fret about not maximizing the gains on the entire original position. Being able to lock in a decent gain and then guarantee yourself at least a small profit on the remaining shares makes trading a lot less stressful.

Michael lists some other tenets of scaling out of trades, namely "a way to lock in your profits, free up your money quicker, let some profits ride, reduce your system drawdown, and increase your win ratio to boot." Good stuff, and a must-read article.

We've got another busy morning. How about that ITWO? I thought they were out of business! Anyway, the Nasdaq is just a hair away from 2200 and I can only imagine the number of stops the bears have set at that level. I won't be surprised to see some up-thrusts through that level. I may just watch until that level is cleanly broken...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

A few people have asked me questions about the dummy trades I keep talking about. Why not ask the Chairman himself? He's moving his weekly chat to Monday night and the topic for next week is daytrading. His planned topics are "how to trade with trend, find low-risk spots to enter, and manage open positions." Get all those pressing questions lined up.

Here's an interesting thread at EliteTrader on which traders are posting screen captures of their trade blotters showing their daily P&L's. (via Trade-Ideas)

Dan Fitzpatrick has written a good article about how stocks build support (and resistance) levels.

There's lots of good, "humble" trading advice on Trader Eyal's site.

Glenn has a note on his site underneath a collection of links to stock blogs (BTW, thanks for the link Glenn) which reads:

Why do so many have to place ads everywhere on there sites? Does it really provide a source of income and why would you need it if you are a trader and good at it? What it does... is add clutter and slow down your site. The only ones who don't use ads from the above are thekirkreport.com; brandonfredrickson.com/blog; fickletrader.blogspot.com thanks guys your sites are better for it! Personally I hate ads and never click on em, the only people who do are usually helping someone which is clickfraud.

First, yes, ads really do provide a source of income. My AdSense money from June bought my brand new shiny 60GB iPod as well as a couple of accessories. That may not be a whole lot of money but I'll take it. There are bloggers making a lot more than I do from AdSense -- see Darren 'ProBlogger' Rowse who made between '$10k and $20k in the month of May' from AdSense.

So there are real people making real money from ads. While click-fraud certainly exists I don't think it's as rampant as Glenn seems to believe. I would suggest that anyone who feels like Glenn short the hell out of Google and Yahoo because their business are worthless according to that belief. It's obvious to me that advertisers are getting value from advertising on the web. I just got a renewal BlogAd from Zacks today (thanks!). I doubt they would have renewed for August if the July ad didn't pay off. And I won't even get into the millions that are spent advertising on Yahoo...

As for why a 'good' trader would 'need' ad income I would ask why does Glenn want something for nothing? Why does Dan Zanger -- who's on the 2004 Trader Monthly 100 and made an estimated $10 to $15 million -- charge for access to his site? Why don't George Soros or Jim Rogers give their books away for free? I run ads on my site because it helps to diversify my income and it gives me an incentive to keep the site going. Do I not deserve to be compensated for my time?

Glenn praises the likes of Kirk, who doesn't run ads but asks for donations, and requires a donation to access the 'members only' portions of his site. Why not ask why Kirk, who's apparently a 'good' trader, needs to ask for donations? (Kirk obviously spends a ton of time on his site. Doesn't he deserve some kind of compensation for that?)

I'm not mad at Glenn for disliking ads. I've been a hard-core TiVo user for years and I skip ads all the time. Likewise, I rarely look at ads on the internet much less click on them. But the fact remains that advertising seems to be the only model that works online. I've had a 'tip jar' on the site for a very long time yet I've only received 4 'tips' in the two-plus years I've been blogging. (Thanks again to Karin (twice), Joe and Adam.) So if I had to rely on donations this site probably would have died out a long time ago. Thankfully Google came along with AdSense and created what I think is a very fair tradeoff for both publishers and readers.

(For those that really just despise ads perhaps you should just block them.)

What a day! This was the best day in well over a year (maybe two) for me. I took 10 trades, 7 of which were winners. Charts of the big R-multiple winners are below. I didn't annotate the entries b/c the true dummies already know where they are. :-)

Man I'm beat this morning. I did a little (one day early) birthday celebrating last night and I'm paying for it now. (Where's my caffeine injection?) I would have just stayed in bed but I want to be here if we get some month-end mark-ups. It feels like the market wants to go higher and there's plenty of room for the Nasdaq to lift to its upper Bollinger Band, which is around 2,225. (I'm not saying that's going to happen, but it's certainly a possibility)

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Man, that ISRG is a beast! I unfortunately got stopped out of it in my IRA last fall just days before it had a huge post-earnings gap up -- just like it's doing again today (sigh). It's almost tripled from my initial buy point. Maybe there's something to that buy & hope, er, hold thing...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Below is a chart of the Nasdaq. I'm not too concerned about that trendline break because I think it was a bit too steep to be sustainable. The thing to watch out for though is the fact that there's not much support between here and 2100. All it needs is a little push...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Here are some charts that caught my eye as I went through my scans today -- ADBE, EXAR, GOOG, GRMN, ITRI, MACR, MNTA, NBIX, PALM, PLAY AND RAIL:

Micahel Taylor has posted the follow-up to his post about (not) scaling into trades. This one looks at scaling out of trades:

In part I, I mentioned how scaling into trades ends up increasing the complexity of your system while reducing the edge and thus your profitability. Now, on to scaling out of trades.

Scaling out of trades is pure magic. Yes, magic. The more I think about scaling out of trades...the more I realize how powerful this technique is to your system. Think of it this way. Scaling out of your trades gives you the chance to create trading systems that are 100% profitable. How in the world can you beat that? :) [read the entire article...]

As you know I've been working to get better at taking partial profits on my trades. I found a method that works for me. As soon as I enter a trade the first thing I do is set my stop loss and then I immediately set an alert which will tell me to sell half of my position when the position reaches a certain percentage gain. That's been working very well for me so far. It seems that about half the time my first sale is better than the final sale. I can live with that and I no longer fret about not maximizing the gains on the entire original position. Being able to lock in a decent gain and then guarantee yourself at least a small profit on the remaining shares makes trading a lot less stressful.

Michael lists some other tenets of scaling out of trades, namely "a way to lock in your profits, free up your money quicker, let some profits ride, reduce your system drawdown, and increase your win ratio to boot." Good stuff, and a must-read article.

We've got another busy morning. How about that ITWO? I thought they were out of business! Anyway, the Nasdaq is just a hair away from 2200 and I can only imagine the number of stops the bears have set at that level. I won't be surprised to see some up-thrusts through that level. I may just watch until that level is cleanly broken...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

A few people have asked me questions about the dummy trades I keep talking about. Why not ask the Chairman himself? He's moving his weekly chat to Monday night and the topic for next week is daytrading. His planned topics are "how to trade with trend, find low-risk spots to enter, and manage open positions." Get all those pressing questions lined up.

Here's an interesting thread at EliteTrader on which traders are posting screen captures of their trade blotters showing their daily P&L's. (via Trade-Ideas)

Dan Fitzpatrick has written a good article about how stocks build support (and resistance) levels.

There's lots of good, "humble" trading advice on Trader Eyal's site.

Glenn has a note on his site underneath a collection of links to stock blogs (BTW, thanks for the link Glenn) which reads:

Why do so many have to place ads everywhere on there sites? Does it really provide a source of income and why would you need it if you are a trader and good at it? What it does... is add clutter and slow down your site. The only ones who don't use ads from the above are thekirkreport.com; brandonfredrickson.com/blog; fickletrader.blogspot.com thanks guys your sites are better for it! Personally I hate ads and never click on em, the only people who do are usually helping someone which is clickfraud.

First, yes, ads really do provide a source of income. My AdSense money from June bought my brand new shiny 60GB iPod as well as a couple of accessories. That may not be a whole lot of money but I'll take it. There are bloggers making a lot more than I do from AdSense -- see Darren 'ProBlogger' Rowse who made between '$10k and $20k in the month of May' from AdSense.

So there are real people making real money from ads. While click-fraud certainly exists I don't think it's as rampant as Glenn seems to believe. I would suggest that anyone who feels like Glenn short the hell out of Google and Yahoo because their business are worthless according to that belief. It's obvious to me that advertisers are getting value from advertising on the web. I just got a renewal BlogAd from Zacks today (thanks!). I doubt they would have renewed for August if the July ad didn't pay off. And I won't even get into the millions that are spent advertising on Yahoo...

As for why a 'good' trader would 'need' ad income I would ask why does Glenn want something for nothing? Why does Dan Zanger -- who's on the 2004 Trader Monthly 100 and made an estimated $10 to $15 million -- charge for access to his site? Why don't George Soros or Jim Rogers give their books away for free? I run ads on my site because it helps to diversify my income and it gives me an incentive to keep the site going. Do I not deserve to be compensated for my time?

Glenn praises the likes of Kirk, who doesn't run ads but asks for donations, and requires a donation to access the 'members only' portions of his site. Why not ask why Kirk, who's apparently a 'good' trader, needs to ask for donations? (Kirk obviously spends a ton of time on his site. Doesn't he deserve some kind of compensation for that?)

I'm not mad at Glenn for disliking ads. I've been a hard-core TiVo user for years and I skip ads all the time. Likewise, I rarely look at ads on the internet much less click on them. But the fact remains that advertising seems to be the only model that works online. I've had a 'tip jar' on the site for a very long time yet I've only received 4 'tips' in the two-plus years I've been blogging. (Thanks again to Karin (twice), Joe and Adam.) So if I had to rely on donations this site probably would have died out a long time ago. Thankfully Google came along with AdSense and created what I think is a very fair tradeoff for both publishers and readers.

(For those that really just despise ads perhaps you should just block them.)

What a day! This was the best day in well over a year (maybe two) for me. I took 10 trades, 7 of which were winners. Charts of the big R-multiple winners are below. I didn't annotate the entries b/c the true dummies already know where they are. :-)

Man I'm beat this morning. I did a little (one day early) birthday celebrating last night and I'm paying for it now. (Where's my caffeine injection?) I would have just stayed in bed but I want to be here if we get some month-end mark-ups. It feels like the market wants to go higher and there's plenty of room for the Nasdaq to lift to its upper Bollinger Band, which is around 2,225. (I'm not saying that's going to happen, but it's certainly a possibility)

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Man, that ISRG is a beast! I unfortunately got stopped out of it in my IRA last fall just days before it had a huge post-earnings gap up -- just like it's doing again today (sigh). It's almost tripled from my initial buy point. Maybe there's something to that buy & hope, er, hold thing...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Below is a chart of the Nasdaq. I'm not too concerned about that trendline break because I think it was a bit too steep to be sustainable. The thing to watch out for though is the fact that there's not much support between here and 2100. All it needs is a little push...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Here are some charts that caught my eye as I went through my scans today -- ADBE, EXAR, GOOG, GRMN, ITRI, MACR, MNTA, NBIX, PALM, PLAY AND RAIL:

Micahel Taylor has posted the follow-up to his post about (not) scaling into trades. This one looks at scaling out of trades:

In part I, I mentioned how scaling into trades ends up increasing the complexity of your system while reducing the edge and thus your profitability. Now, on to scaling out of trades.

Scaling out of trades is pure magic. Yes, magic. The more I think about scaling out of trades...the more I realize how powerful this technique is to your system. Think of it this way. Scaling out of your trades gives you the chance to create trading systems that are 100% profitable. How in the world can you beat that? :) [read the entire article...]

As you know I've been working to get better at taking partial profits on my trades. I found a method that works for me. As soon as I enter a trade the first thing I do is set my stop loss and then I immediately set an alert which will tell me to sell half of my position when the position reaches a certain percentage gain. That's been working very well for me so far. It seems that about half the time my first sale is better than the final sale. I can live with that and I no longer fret about not maximizing the gains on the entire original position. Being able to lock in a decent gain and then guarantee yourself at least a small profit on the remaining shares makes trading a lot less stressful.

Michael lists some other tenets of scaling out of trades, namely "a way to lock in your profits, free up your money quicker, let some profits ride, reduce your system drawdown, and increase your win ratio to boot." Good stuff, and a must-read article.

We've got another busy morning. How about that ITWO? I thought they were out of business! Anyway, the Nasdaq is just a hair away from 2200 and I can only imagine the number of stops the bears have set at that level. I won't be surprised to see some up-thrusts through that level. I may just watch until that level is cleanly broken...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

A few people have asked me questions about the dummy trades I keep talking about. Why not ask the Chairman himself? He's moving his weekly chat to Monday night and the topic for next week is daytrading. His planned topics are "how to trade with trend, find low-risk spots to enter, and manage open positions." Get all those pressing questions lined up.

Here's an interesting thread at EliteTrader on which traders are posting screen captures of their trade blotters showing their daily P&L's. (via Trade-Ideas)

Dan Fitzpatrick has written a good article about how stocks build support (and resistance) levels.

There's lots of good, "humble" trading advice on Trader Eyal's site.

Glenn has a note on his site underneath a collection of links to stock blogs (BTW, thanks for the link Glenn) which reads:

Why do so many have to place ads everywhere on there sites? Does it really provide a source of income and why would you need it if you are a trader and good at it? What it does... is add clutter and slow down your site. The only ones who don't use ads from the above are thekirkreport.com; brandonfredrickson.com/blog; fickletrader.blogspot.com thanks guys your sites are better for it! Personally I hate ads and never click on em, the only people who do are usually helping someone which is clickfraud.

First, yes, ads really do provide a source of income. My AdSense money from June bought my brand new shiny 60GB iPod as well as a couple of accessories. That may not be a whole lot of money but I'll take it. There are bloggers making a lot more than I do from AdSense -- see Darren 'ProBlogger' Rowse who made between '$10k and $20k in the month of May' from AdSense.

So there are real people making real money from ads. While click-fraud certainly exists I don't think it's as rampant as Glenn seems to believe. I would suggest that anyone who feels like Glenn short the hell out of Google and Yahoo because their business are worthless according to that belief. It's obvious to me that advertisers are getting value from advertising on the web. I just got a renewal BlogAd from Zacks today (thanks!). I doubt they would have renewed for August if the July ad didn't pay off. And I won't even get into the millions that are spent advertising on Yahoo...

As for why a 'good' trader would 'need' ad income I would ask why does Glenn want something for nothing? Why does Dan Zanger -- who's on the 2004 Trader Monthly 100 and made an estimated $10 to $15 million -- charge for access to his site? Why don't George Soros or Jim Rogers give their books away for free? I run ads on my site because it helps to diversify my income and it gives me an incentive to keep the site going. Do I not deserve to be compensated for my time?

Glenn praises the likes of Kirk, who doesn't run ads but asks for donations, and requires a donation to access the 'members only' portions of his site. Why not ask why Kirk, who's apparently a 'good' trader, needs to ask for donations? (Kirk obviously spends a ton of time on his site. Doesn't he deserve some kind of compensation for that?)

I'm not mad at Glenn for disliking ads. I've been a hard-core TiVo user for years and I skip ads all the time. Likewise, I rarely look at ads on the internet much less click on them. But the fact remains that advertising seems to be the only model that works online. I've had a 'tip jar' on the site for a very long time yet I've only received 4 'tips' in the two-plus years I've been blogging. (Thanks again to Karin (twice), Joe and Adam.) So if I had to rely on donations this site probably would have died out a long time ago. Thankfully Google came along with AdSense and created what I think is a very fair tradeoff for both publishers and readers.

(For those that really just despise ads perhaps you should just block them.)

What a day! This was the best day in well over a year (maybe two) for me. I took 10 trades, 7 of which were winners. Charts of the big R-multiple winners are below. I didn't annotate the entries b/c the true dummies already know where they are. :-)

Man I'm beat this morning. I did a little (one day early) birthday celebrating last night and I'm paying for it now. (Where's my caffeine injection?) I would have just stayed in bed but I want to be here if we get some month-end mark-ups. It feels like the market wants to go higher and there's plenty of room for the Nasdaq to lift to its upper Bollinger Band, which is around 2,225. (I'm not saying that's going to happen, but it's certainly a possibility)

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Man, that ISRG is a beast! I unfortunately got stopped out of it in my IRA last fall just days before it had a huge post-earnings gap up -- just like it's doing again today (sigh). It's almost tripled from my initial buy point. Maybe there's something to that buy & hope, er, hold thing...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Below is a chart of the Nasdaq. I'm not too concerned about that trendline break because I think it was a bit too steep to be sustainable. The thing to watch out for though is the fact that there's not much support between here and 2100. All it needs is a little push...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Here are some charts that caught my eye as I went through my scans today -- ADBE, EXAR, GOOG, GRMN, ITRI, MACR, MNTA, NBIX, PALM, PLAY AND RAIL:

Micahel Taylor has posted the follow-up to his post about (not) scaling into trades. This one looks at scaling out of trades:

In part I, I mentioned how scaling into trades ends up increasing the complexity of your system while reducing the edge and thus your profitability. Now, on to scaling out of trades.

Scaling out of trades is pure magic. Yes, magic. The more I think about scaling out of trades...the more I realize how powerful this technique is to your system. Think of it this way. Scaling out of your trades gives you the chance to create trading systems that are 100% profitable. How in the world can you beat that? :) [read the entire article...]

As you know I've been working to get better at taking partial profits on my trades. I found a method that works for me. As soon as I enter a trade the first thing I do is set my stop loss and then I immediately set an alert which will tell me to sell half of my position when the position reaches a certain percentage gain. That's been working very well for me so far. It seems that about half the time my first sale is better than the final sale. I can live with that and I no longer fret about not maximizing the gains on the entire original position. Being able to lock in a decent gain and then guarantee yourself at least a small profit on the remaining shares makes trading a lot less stressful.

Michael lists some other tenets of scaling out of trades, namely "a way to lock in your profits, free up your money quicker, let some profits ride, reduce your system drawdown, and increase your win ratio to boot." Good stuff, and a must-read article.

We've got another busy morning. How about that ITWO? I thought they were out of business! Anyway, the Nasdaq is just a hair away from 2200 and I can only imagine the number of stops the bears have set at that level. I won't be surprised to see some up-thrusts through that level. I may just watch until that level is cleanly broken...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

A few people have asked me questions about the dummy trades I keep talking about. Why not ask the Chairman himself? He's moving his weekly chat to Monday night and the topic for next week is daytrading. His planned topics are "how to trade with trend, find low-risk spots to enter, and manage open positions." Get all those pressing questions lined up.

Here's an interesting thread at EliteTrader on which traders are posting screen captures of their trade blotters showing their daily P&L's. (via Trade-Ideas)

Dan Fitzpatrick has written a good article about how stocks build support (and resistance) levels.

There's lots of good, "humble" trading advice on Trader Eyal's site.

Glenn has a note on his site underneath a collection of links to stock blogs (BTW, thanks for the link Glenn) which reads:

Why do so many have to place ads everywhere on there sites? Does it really provide a source of income and why would you need it if you are a trader and good at it? What it does... is add clutter and slow down your site. The only ones who don't use ads from the above are thekirkreport.com; brandonfredrickson.com/blog; fickletrader.blogspot.com thanks guys your sites are better for it! Personally I hate ads and never click on em, the only people who do are usually helping someone which is clickfraud.

First, yes, ads really do provide a source of income. My AdSense money from June bought my brand new shiny 60GB iPod as well as a couple of accessories. That may not be a whole lot of money but I'll take it. There are bloggers making a lot more than I do from AdSense -- see Darren 'ProBlogger' Rowse who made between '$10k and $20k in the month of May' from AdSense.

So there are real people making real money from ads. While click-fraud certainly exists I don't think it's as rampant as Glenn seems to believe. I would suggest that anyone who feels like Glenn short the hell out of Google and Yahoo because their business are worthless according to that belief. It's obvious to me that advertisers are getting value from advertising on the web. I just got a renewal BlogAd from Zacks today (thanks!). I doubt they would have renewed for August if the July ad didn't pay off. And I won't even get into the millions that are spent advertising on Yahoo...

As for why a 'good' trader would 'need' ad income I would ask why does Glenn want something for nothing? Why does Dan Zanger -- who's on the 2004 Trader Monthly 100 and made an estimated $10 to $15 million -- charge for access to his site? Why don't George Soros or Jim Rogers give their books away for free? I run ads on my site because it helps to diversify my income and it gives me an incentive to keep the site going. Do I not deserve to be compensated for my time?

Glenn praises the likes of Kirk, who doesn't run ads but asks for donations, and requires a donation to access the 'members only' portions of his site. Why not ask why Kirk, who's apparently a 'good' trader, needs to ask for donations? (Kirk obviously spends a ton of time on his site. Doesn't he deserve some kind of compensation for that?)

I'm not mad at Glenn for disliking ads. I've been a hard-core TiVo user for years and I skip ads all the time. Likewise, I rarely look at ads on the internet much less click on them. But the fact remains that advertising seems to be the only model that works online. I've had a 'tip jar' on the site for a very long time yet I've only received 4 'tips' in the two-plus years I've been blogging. (Thanks again to Karin (twice), Joe and Adam.) So if I had to rely on donations this site probably would have died out a long time ago. Thankfully Google came along with AdSense and created what I think is a very fair tradeoff for both publishers and readers.

(For those that really just despise ads perhaps you should just block them.)

What a day! This was the best day in well over a year (maybe two) for me. I took 10 trades, 7 of which were winners. Charts of the big R-multiple winners are below. I didn't annotate the entries b/c the true dummies already know where they are. :-)

Man I'm beat this morning. I did a little (one day early) birthday celebrating last night and I'm paying for it now. (Where's my caffeine injection?) I would have just stayed in bed but I want to be here if we get some month-end mark-ups. It feels like the market wants to go higher and there's plenty of room for the Nasdaq to lift to its upper Bollinger Band, which is around 2,225. (I'm not saying that's going to happen, but it's certainly a possibility)

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Man, that ISRG is a beast! I unfortunately got stopped out of it in my IRA last fall just days before it had a huge post-earnings gap up -- just like it's doing again today (sigh). It's almost tripled from my initial buy point. Maybe there's something to that buy & hope, er, hold thing...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Below is a chart of the Nasdaq. I'm not too concerned about that trendline break because I think it was a bit too steep to be sustainable. The thing to watch out for though is the fact that there's not much support between here and 2100. All it needs is a little push...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Here are some charts that caught my eye as I went through my scans today -- ADBE, EXAR, GOOG, GRMN, ITRI, MACR, MNTA, NBIX, PALM, PLAY AND RAIL:

Micahel Taylor has posted the follow-up to his post about (not) scaling into trades. This one looks at scaling out of trades:

In part I, I mentioned how scaling into trades ends up increasing the complexity of your system while reducing the edge and thus your profitability. Now, on to scaling out of trades.

Scaling out of trades is pure magic. Yes, magic. The more I think about scaling out of trades...the more I realize how powerful this technique is to your system. Think of it this way. Scaling out of your trades gives you the chance to create trading systems that are 100% profitable. How in the world can you beat that? :) [read the entire article...]

As you know I've been working to get better at taking partial profits on my trades. I found a method that works for me. As soon as I enter a trade the first thing I do is set my stop loss and then I immediately set an alert which will tell me to sell half of my position when the position reaches a certain percentage gain. That's been working very well for me so far. It seems that about half the time my first sale is better than the final sale. I can live with that and I no longer fret about not maximizing the gains on the entire original position. Being able to lock in a decent gain and then guarantee yourself at least a small profit on the remaining shares makes trading a lot less stressful.

Michael lists some other tenets of scaling out of trades, namely "a way to lock in your profits, free up your money quicker, let some profits ride, reduce your system drawdown, and increase your win ratio to boot." Good stuff, and a must-read article.

We've got another busy morning. How about that ITWO? I thought they were out of business! Anyway, the Nasdaq is just a hair away from 2200 and I can only imagine the number of stops the bears have set at that level. I won't be surprised to see some up-thrusts through that level. I may just watch until that level is cleanly broken...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

A few people have asked me questions about the dummy trades I keep talking about. Why not ask the Chairman himself? He's moving his weekly chat to Monday night and the topic for next week is daytrading. His planned topics are "how to trade with trend, find low-risk spots to enter, and manage open positions." Get all those pressing questions lined up.

Here's an interesting thread at EliteTrader on which traders are posting screen captures of their trade blotters showing their daily P&L's. (via Trade-Ideas)

Dan Fitzpatrick has written a good article about how stocks build support (and resistance) levels.

There's lots of good, "humble" trading advice on Trader Eyal's site.

Glenn has a note on his site underneath a collection of links to stock blogs (BTW, thanks for the link Glenn) which reads:

Why do so many have to place ads everywhere on there sites? Does it really provide a source of income and why would you need it if you are a trader and good at it? What it does... is add clutter and slow down your site. The only ones who don't use ads from the above are thekirkreport.com; brandonfredrickson.com/blog; fickletrader.blogspot.com thanks guys your sites are better for it! Personally I hate ads and never click on em, the only people who do are usually helping someone which is clickfraud.

First, yes, ads really do provide a source of income. My AdSense money from June bought my brand new shiny 60GB iPod as well as a couple of accessories. That may not be a whole lot of money but I'll take it. There are bloggers making a lot more than I do from AdSense -- see Darren 'ProBlogger' Rowse who made between '$10k and $20k in the month of May' from AdSense.

So there are real people making real money from ads. While click-fraud certainly exists I don't think it's as rampant as Glenn seems to believe. I would suggest that anyone who feels like Glenn short the hell out of Google and Yahoo because their business are worthless according to that belief. It's obvious to me that advertisers are getting value from advertising on the web. I just got a renewal BlogAd from Zacks today (thanks!). I doubt they would have renewed for August if the July ad didn't pay off. And I won't even get into the millions that are spent advertising on Yahoo...

As for why a 'good' trader would 'need' ad income I would ask why does Glenn want something for nothing? Why does Dan Zanger -- who's on the 2004 Trader Monthly 100 and made an estimated $10 to $15 million -- charge for access to his site? Why don't George Soros or Jim Rogers give their books away for free? I run ads on my site because it helps to diversify my income and it gives me an incentive to keep the site going. Do I not deserve to be compensated for my time?

Glenn praises the likes of Kirk, who doesn't run ads but asks for donations, and requires a donation to access the 'members only' portions of his site. Why not ask why Kirk, who's apparently a 'good' trader, needs to ask for donations? (Kirk obviously spends a ton of time on his site. Doesn't he deserve some kind of compensation for that?)

I'm not mad at Glenn for disliking ads. I've been a hard-core TiVo user for years and I skip ads all the time. Likewise, I rarely look at ads on the internet much less click on them. But the fact remains that advertising seems to be the only model that works online. I've had a 'tip jar' on the site for a very long time yet I've only received 4 'tips' in the two-plus years I've been blogging. (Thanks again to Karin (twice), Joe and Adam.) So if I had to rely on donations this site probably would have died out a long time ago. Thankfully Google came along with AdSense and created what I think is a very fair tradeoff for both publishers and readers.

(For those that really just despise ads perhaps you should just block them.)

What a day! This was the best day in well over a year (maybe two) for me. I took 10 trades, 7 of which were winners. Charts of the big R-multiple winners are below. I didn't annotate the entries b/c the true dummies already know where they are. :-)

Man I'm beat this morning. I did a little (one day early) birthday celebrating last night and I'm paying for it now. (Where's my caffeine injection?) I would have just stayed in bed but I want to be here if we get some month-end mark-ups. It feels like the market wants to go higher and there's plenty of room for the Nasdaq to lift to its upper Bollinger Band, which is around 2,225. (I'm not saying that's going to happen, but it's certainly a possibility)

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Man, that ISRG is a beast! I unfortunately got stopped out of it in my IRA last fall just days before it had a huge post-earnings gap up -- just like it's doing again today (sigh). It's almost tripled from my initial buy point. Maybe there's something to that buy & hope, er, hold thing...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Below is a chart of the Nasdaq. I'm not too concerned about that trendline break because I think it was a bit too steep to be sustainable. The thing to watch out for though is the fact that there's not much support between here and 2100. All it needs is a little push...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Here are some charts that caught my eye as I went through my scans today -- ADBE, EXAR, GOOG, GRMN, ITRI, MACR, MNTA, NBIX, PALM, PLAY AND RAIL:

Micahel Taylor has posted the follow-up to his post about (not) scaling into trades. This one looks at scaling out of trades:

In part I, I mentioned how scaling into trades ends up increasing the complexity of your system while reducing the edge and thus your profitability. Now, on to scaling out of trades.

Scaling out of trades is pure magic. Yes, magic. The more I think about scaling out of trades...the more I realize how powerful this technique is to your system. Think of it this way. Scaling out of your trades gives you the chance to create trading systems that are 100% profitable. How in the world can you beat that? :) [read the entire article...]

As you know I've been working to get better at taking partial profits on my trades. I found a method that works for me. As soon as I enter a trade the first thing I do is set my stop loss and then I immediately set an alert which will tell me to sell half of my position when the position reaches a certain percentage gain. That's been working very well for me so far. It seems that about half the time my first sale is better than the final sale. I can live with that and I no longer fret about not maximizing the gains on the entire original position. Being able to lock in a decent gain and then guarantee yourself at least a small profit on the remaining shares makes trading a lot less stressful.

Michael lists some other tenets of scaling out of trades, namely "a way to lock in your profits, free up your money quicker, let some profits ride, reduce your system drawdown, and increase your win ratio to boot." Good stuff, and a must-read article.

We've got another busy morning. How about that ITWO? I thought they were out of business! Anyway, the Nasdaq is just a hair away from 2200 and I can only imagine the number of stops the bears have set at that level. I won't be surprised to see some up-thrusts through that level. I may just watch until that level is cleanly broken...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

A few people have asked me questions about the dummy trades I keep talking about. Why not ask the Chairman himself? He's moving his weekly chat to Monday night and the topic for next week is daytrading. His planned topics are "how to trade with trend, find low-risk spots to enter, and manage open positions." Get all those pressing questions lined up.

Here's an interesting thread at EliteTrader on which traders are posting screen captures of their trade blotters showing their daily P&L's. (via Trade-Ideas)

Dan Fitzpatrick has written a good article about how stocks build support (and resistance) levels.

There's lots of good, "humble" trading advice on Trader Eyal's site.

Glenn has a note on his site underneath a collection of links to stock blogs (BTW, thanks for the link Glenn) which reads:

Why do so many have to place ads everywhere on there sites? Does it really provide a source of income and why would you need it if you are a trader and good at it? What it does... is add clutter and slow down your site. The only ones who don't use ads from the above are thekirkreport.com; brandonfredrickson.com/blog; fickletrader.blogspot.com thanks guys your sites are better for it! Personally I hate ads and never click on em, the only people who do are usually helping someone which is clickfraud.

First, yes, ads really do provide a source of income. My AdSense money from June bought my brand new shiny 60GB iPod as well as a couple of accessories. That may not be a whole lot of money but I'll take it. There are bloggers making a lot more than I do from AdSense -- see Darren 'ProBlogger' Rowse who made between '$10k and $20k in the month of May' from AdSense.

So there are real people making real money from ads. While click-fraud certainly exists I don't think it's as rampant as Glenn seems to believe. I would suggest that anyone who feels like Glenn short the hell out of Google and Yahoo because their business are worthless according to that belief. It's obvious to me that advertisers are getting value from advertising on the web. I just got a renewal BlogAd from Zacks today (thanks!). I doubt they would have renewed for August if the July ad didn't pay off. And I won't even get into the millions that are spent advertising on Yahoo...

As for why a 'good' trader would 'need' ad income I would ask why does Glenn want something for nothing? Why does Dan Zanger -- who's on the 2004 Trader Monthly 100 and made an estimated $10 to $15 million -- charge for access to his site? Why don't George Soros or Jim Rogers give their books away for free? I run ads on my site because it helps to diversify my income and it gives me an incentive to keep the site going. Do I not deserve to be compensated for my time?

Glenn praises the likes of Kirk, who doesn't run ads but asks for donations, and requires a donation to access the 'members only' portions of his site. Why not ask why Kirk, who's apparently a 'good' trader, needs to ask for donations? (Kirk obviously spends a ton of time on his site. Doesn't he deserve some kind of compensation for that?)

I'm not mad at Glenn for disliking ads. I've been a hard-core TiVo user for years and I skip ads all the time. Likewise, I rarely look at ads on the internet much less click on them. But the fact remains that advertising seems to be the only model that works online. I've had a 'tip jar' on the site for a very long time yet I've only received 4 'tips' in the two-plus years I've been blogging. (Thanks again to Karin (twice), Joe and Adam.) So if I had to rely on donations this site probably would have died out a long time ago. Thankfully Google came along with AdSense and created what I think is a very fair tradeoff for both publishers and readers.

(For those that really just despise ads perhaps you should just block them.)

What a day! This was the best day in well over a year (maybe two) for me. I took 10 trades, 7 of which were winners. Charts of the big R-multiple winners are below. I didn't annotate the entries b/c the true dummies already know where they are. :-)

Man I'm beat this morning. I did a little (one day early) birthday celebrating last night and I'm paying for it now. (Where's my caffeine injection?) I would have just stayed in bed but I want to be here if we get some month-end mark-ups. It feels like the market wants to go higher and there's plenty of room for the Nasdaq to lift to its upper Bollinger Band, which is around 2,225. (I'm not saying that's going to happen, but it's certainly a possibility)

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Man, that ISRG is a beast! I unfortunately got stopped out of it in my IRA last fall just days before it had a huge post-earnings gap up -- just like it's doing again today (sigh). It's almost tripled from my initial buy point. Maybe there's something to that buy & hope, er, hold thing...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Below is a chart of the Nasdaq. I'm not too concerned about that trendline break because I think it was a bit too steep to be sustainable. The thing to watch out for though is the fact that there's not much support between here and 2100. All it needs is a little push...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Here are some charts that caught my eye as I went through my scans today -- ADBE, EXAR, GOOG, GRMN, ITRI, MACR, MNTA, NBIX, PALM, PLAY AND RAIL:

Micahel Taylor has posted the follow-up to his post about (not) scaling into trades. This one looks at scaling out of trades:

In part I, I mentioned how scaling into trades ends up increasing the complexity of your system while reducing the edge and thus your profitability. Now, on to scaling out of trades.

Scaling out of trades is pure magic. Yes, magic. The more I think about scaling out of trades...the more I realize how powerful this technique is to your system. Think of it this way. Scaling out of your trades gives you the chance to create trading systems that are 100% profitable. How in the world can you beat that? :) [read the entire article...]

As you know I've been working to get better at taking partial profits on my trades. I found a method that works for me. As soon as I enter a trade the first thing I do is set my stop loss and then I immediately set an alert which will tell me to sell half of my position when the position reaches a certain percentage gain. That's been working very well for me so far. It seems that about half the time my first sale is better than the final sale. I can live with that and I no longer fret about not maximizing the gains on the entire original position. Being able to lock in a decent gain and then guarantee yourself at least a small profit on the remaining shares makes trading a lot less stressful.

Michael lists some other tenets of scaling out of trades, namely "a way to lock in your profits, free up your money quicker, let some profits ride, reduce your system drawdown, and increase your win ratio to boot." Good stuff, and a must-read article.

We've got another busy morning. How about that ITWO? I thought they were out of business! Anyway, the Nasdaq is just a hair away from 2200 and I can only imagine the number of stops the bears have set at that level. I won't be surprised to see some up-thrusts through that level. I may just watch until that level is cleanly broken...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

A few people have asked me questions about the dummy trades I keep talking about. Why not ask the Chairman himself? He's moving his weekly chat to Monday night and the topic for next week is daytrading. His planned topics are "how to trade with trend, find low-risk spots to enter, and manage open positions." Get all those pressing questions lined up.

Here's an interesting thread at EliteTrader on which traders are posting screen captures of their trade blotters showing their daily P&L's. (via Trade-Ideas)

Dan Fitzpatrick has written a good article about how stocks build support (and resistance) levels.

There's lots of good, "humble" trading advice on Trader Eyal's site.

Glenn has a note on his site underneath a collection of links to stock blogs (BTW, thanks for the link Glenn) which reads:

Why do so many have to place ads everywhere on there sites? Does it really provide a source of income and why would you need it if you are a trader and good at it? What it does... is add clutter and slow down your site. The only ones who don't use ads from the above are thekirkreport.com; brandonfredrickson.com/blog; fickletrader.blogspot.com thanks guys your sites are better for it! Personally I hate ads and never click on em, the only people who do are usually helping someone which is clickfraud.

First, yes, ads really do provide a source of income. My AdSense money from June bought my brand new shiny 60GB iPod as well as a couple of accessories. That may not be a whole lot of money but I'll take it. There are bloggers making a lot more than I do from AdSense -- see Darren 'ProBlogger' Rowse who made between '$10k and $20k in the month of May' from AdSense.

So there are real people making real money from ads. While click-fraud certainly exists I don't think it's as rampant as Glenn seems to believe. I would suggest that anyone who feels like Glenn short the hell out of Google and Yahoo because their business are worthless according to that belief. It's obvious to me that advertisers are getting value from advertising on the web. I just got a renewal BlogAd from Zacks today (thanks!). I doubt they would have renewed for August if the July ad didn't pay off. And I won't even get into the millions that are spent advertising on Yahoo...

As for why a 'good' trader would 'need' ad income I would ask why does Glenn want something for nothing? Why does Dan Zanger -- who's on the 2004 Trader Monthly 100 and made an estimated $10 to $15 million -- charge for access to his site? Why don't George Soros or Jim Rogers give their books away for free? I run ads on my site because it helps to diversify my income and it gives me an incentive to keep the site going. Do I not deserve to be compensated for my time?

Glenn praises the likes of Kirk, who doesn't run ads but asks for donations, and requires a donation to access the 'members only' portions of his site. Why not ask why Kirk, who's apparently a 'good' trader, needs to ask for donations? (Kirk obviously spends a ton of time on his site. Doesn't he deserve some kind of compensation for that?)

I'm not mad at Glenn for disliking ads. I've been a hard-core TiVo user for years and I skip ads all the time. Likewise, I rarely look at ads on the internet much less click on them. But the fact remains that advertising seems to be the only model that works online. I've had a 'tip jar' on the site for a very long time yet I've only received 4 'tips' in the two-plus years I've been blogging. (Thanks again to Karin (twice), Joe and Adam.) So if I had to rely on donations this site probably would have died out a long time ago. Thankfully Google came along with AdSense and created what I think is a very fair tradeoff for both publishers and readers.

(For those that really just despise ads perhaps you should just block them.)

What a day! This was the best day in well over a year (maybe two) for me. I took 10 trades, 7 of which were winners. Charts of the big R-multiple winners are below. I didn't annotate the entries b/c the true dummies already know where they are. :-)

Man I'm beat this morning. I did a little (one day early) birthday celebrating last night and I'm paying for it now. (Where's my caffeine injection?) I would have just stayed in bed but I want to be here if we get some month-end mark-ups. It feels like the market wants to go higher and there's plenty of room for the Nasdaq to lift to its upper Bollinger Band, which is around 2,225. (I'm not saying that's going to happen, but it's certainly a possibility)

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Man, that ISRG is a beast! I unfortunately got stopped out of it in my IRA last fall just days before it had a huge post-earnings gap up -- just like it's doing again today (sigh). It's almost tripled from my initial buy point. Maybe there's something to that buy & hope, er, hold thing...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Below is a chart of the Nasdaq. I'm not too concerned about that trendline break because I think it was a bit too steep to be sustainable. The thing to watch out for though is the fact that there's not much support between here and 2100. All it needs is a little push...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Here are some charts that caught my eye as I went through my scans today -- ADBE, EXAR, GOOG, GRMN, ITRI, MACR, MNTA, NBIX, PALM, PLAY AND RAIL:

Micahel Taylor has posted the follow-up to his post about (not) scaling into trades. This one looks at scaling out of trades:

In part I, I mentioned how scaling into trades ends up increasing the complexity of your system while reducing the edge and thus your profitability. Now, on to scaling out of trades.

Scaling out of trades is pure magic. Yes, magic. The more I think about scaling out of trades...the more I realize how powerful this technique is to your system. Think of it this way. Scaling out of your trades gives you the chance to create trading systems that are 100% profitable. How in the world can you beat that? :) [read the entire article...]

As you know I've been working to get better at taking partial profits on my trades. I found a method that works for me. As soon as I enter a trade the first thing I do is set my stop loss and then I immediately set an alert which will tell me to sell half of my position when the position reaches a certain percentage gain. That's been working very well for me so far. It seems that about half the time my first sale is better than the final sale. I can live with that and I no longer fret about not maximizing the gains on the entire original position. Being able to lock in a decent gain and then guarantee yourself at least a small profit on the remaining shares makes trading a lot less stressful.

Michael lists some other tenets of scaling out of trades, namely "a way to lock in your profits, free up your money quicker, let some profits ride, reduce your system drawdown, and increase your win ratio to boot." Good stuff, and a must-read article.

We've got another busy morning. How about that ITWO? I thought they were out of business! Anyway, the Nasdaq is just a hair away from 2200 and I can only imagine the number of stops the bears have set at that level. I won't be surprised to see some up-thrusts through that level. I may just watch until that level is cleanly broken...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

A few people have asked me questions about the dummy trades I keep talking about. Why not ask the Chairman himself? He's moving his weekly chat to Monday night and the topic for next week is daytrading. His planned topics are "how to trade with trend, find low-risk spots to enter, and manage open positions." Get all those pressing questions lined up.

Here's an interesting thread at EliteTrader on which traders are posting screen captures of their trade blotters showing their daily P&L's. (via Trade-Ideas)

Dan Fitzpatrick has written a good article about how stocks build support (and resistance) levels.

There's lots of good, "humble" trading advice on Trader Eyal's site.

Glenn has a note on his site underneath a collection of links to stock blogs (BTW, thanks for the link Glenn) which reads:

Why do so many have to place ads everywhere on there sites? Does it really provide a source of income and why would you need it if you are a trader and good at it? What it does... is add clutter and slow down your site. The only ones who don't use ads from the above are thekirkreport.com; brandonfredrickson.com/blog; fickletrader.blogspot.com thanks guys your sites are better for it! Personally I hate ads and never click on em, the only people who do are usually helping someone which is clickfraud.

First, yes, ads really do provide a source of income. My AdSense money from June bought my brand new shiny 60GB iPod as well as a couple of accessories. That may not be a whole lot of money but I'll take it. There are bloggers making a lot more than I do from AdSense -- see Darren 'ProBlogger' Rowse who made between '$10k and $20k in the month of May' from AdSense.

So there are real people making real money from ads. While click-fraud certainly exists I don't think it's as rampant as Glenn seems to believe. I would suggest that anyone who feels like Glenn short the hell out of Google and Yahoo because their business are worthless according to that belief. It's obvious to me that advertisers are getting value from advertising on the web. I just got a renewal BlogAd from Zacks today (thanks!). I doubt they would have renewed for August if the July ad didn't pay off. And I won't even get into the millions that are spent advertising on Yahoo...

As for why a 'good' trader would 'need' ad income I would ask why does Glenn want something for nothing? Why does Dan Zanger -- who's on the 2004 Trader Monthly 100 and made an estimated $10 to $15 million -- charge for access to his site? Why don't George Soros or Jim Rogers give their books away for free? I run ads on my site because it helps to diversify my income and it gives me an incentive to keep the site going. Do I not deserve to be compensated for my time?

Glenn praises the likes of Kirk, who doesn't run ads but asks for donations, and requires a donation to access the 'members only' portions of his site. Why not ask why Kirk, who's apparently a 'good' trader, needs to ask for donations? (Kirk obviously spends a ton of time on his site. Doesn't he deserve some kind of compensation for that?)

I'm not mad at Glenn for disliking ads. I've been a hard-core TiVo user for years and I skip ads all the time. Likewise, I rarely look at ads on the internet much less click on them. But the fact remains that advertising seems to be the only model that works online. I've had a 'tip jar' on the site for a very long time yet I've only received 4 'tips' in the two-plus years I've been blogging. (Thanks again to Karin (twice), Joe and Adam.) So if I had to rely on donations this site probably would have died out a long time ago. Thankfully Google came along with AdSense and created what I think is a very fair tradeoff for both publishers and readers.

(For those that really just despise ads perhaps you should just block them.)

What a day! This was the best day in well over a year (maybe two) for me. I took 10 trades, 7 of which were winners. Charts of the big R-multiple winners are below. I didn't annotate the entries b/c the true dummies already know where they are. :-)

Man I'm beat this morning. I did a little (one day early) birthday celebrating last night and I'm paying for it now. (Where's my caffeine injection?) I would have just stayed in bed but I want to be here if we get some month-end mark-ups. It feels like the market wants to go higher and there's plenty of room for the Nasdaq to lift to its upper Bollinger Band, which is around 2,225. (I'm not saying that's going to happen, but it's certainly a possibility)

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Man, that ISRG is a beast! I unfortunately got stopped out of it in my IRA last fall just days before it had a huge post-earnings gap up -- just like it's doing again today (sigh). It's almost tripled from my initial buy point. Maybe there's something to that buy & hope, er, hold thing...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Below is a chart of the Nasdaq. I'm not too concerned about that trendline break because I think it was a bit too steep to be sustainable. The thing to watch out for though is the fact that there's not much support between here and 2100. All it needs is a little push...

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades:

Potential swing trades:

Longs - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Shorts - None until August (after the earnings flood)

Potential day trades: