Trader Mike

Michelle B submits: I remember reading about a French housewife who when asked by her husband every morning what they would be having for dinner would always give the same tireless reply: “It depends on what jumps into my market basket.” Some traders prefer to trade from a prepared watchlist. For [...]

The bulls were very stubborn today and were determined to push the Dow to a new all-time high. That feat was accomplished on an intraday basis but the index closed below the old high once again. Still, I didn’t really like the action today. The A/D line on the Nasdaq was slightly [...]

We went from an inside day yesterday to an outside day (barely) today on both the Nasdaq and S&P 500. Volume was once again on the low side. Despite the hawkish Fed commentary at 1:00 which caused a bit of a selloff, the bears couldn’t do much damage. Chalk it up as [...]

What a day! If only they could all be like this. This kind of action, a nice steady trend for the whole session, is perfect for my style of trading. I would have had a record R-multiple and dollar day today if not for the partial profits I took along the [...]

This was the day of the sympathy plays for me as I caught some nice moves in GameStop Corp. (GME) and Infosys Technologies (INFY). Each of those stocks was up in sympathy with another stock that reported good earnings today / last night, Electronic Arts Inc. (ERTS) and Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp (CTSH), respectively. [...]

I just noticed that for the second time in about a week Ugly posted about not getting filled on an order to short an NYSE stock. Last week he missed an entry on AMR and today he missed TIE. Today he pointed out that:

I was way ahead of this one and I tried [...]

So much for my boredom with the market. It wasn’t a necessarily spectacular day today but it turned out to be my best day in a month. But like much of the action of late it was a bit of a struggle. The swoon around 11:00 almost stopped me out of Broadcom [...]

I often get asked about how I find swing trade candidates. Hopefully this post will answer those questions. As I’ve written before, most of the stocks I track initially came up on one of my candlestick pattern scans. (Please feel free to search the archives and/or use the subject index) My [...]

Here are some of the more interesting trades I took this week. It was one of my better weeks as far as winning percentage (67% — 8 winners out of 12 trades) and expectancy (0.88). Maybe I should only trade 3 days per week every week. Hmm…
I went long in WITS on [...]

A short of Google was the big winner for me today. The 80/20 rule was in full effect for me today as my other 3 trades were a wash — a 1R loss in AAPL and 0.4R and 0.67R gains in ISRG and MXIM respectively. (All trades were shorts.)
I was watching [...]