Trader Mike

Michelle B submits:

Having read a few comments at trading blogs—OK, I have read zillions—I have encountered more often than not, a frenzied, harried, stressful approach to time when one is trading. Some feel the demonic pressure crushing them as soon as the market opens; others feel enervated by its demands needling and pinpricking them throughout the trading day. Regard time, instead, as a wonderful and gracious friend, accommodating your need to focus and execute successful trades.

Specifically, I rely upon my friend, time, in three concrete ways:

I. Using Time frames

All time frames are useful and valuable–monthly, weekly, daily, hourly, thirty minute, fifteen minute, five minute, and last, but not least, one minute. My motto is: …

Michael Covel’s ‘Trend Following: How Great Traders Make Millions in Up or Down Markets’ will certainly be regarded as a classic investment book. Everybody involved in the markets should read this book.

Moving averages (MAs) are very simple, yet extremely useful tools for investors. A moving average is simply the average of a series of numbers over a period of time which is constantly updated by dropping the oldest value and then adding the newest value and recalculating the average. So a 5-day moving average of stock prices would add up the closing prices for the last 5 days and then divide that total by 5. After the next trading day, we would drop the oldest day and calculate the average with the latest days’ price in its place. So over time the average moves as new data is added and old data is dropped. There are other, more complex, types of MAs (exponential, triangular, variable, and weighted are some of the more popular ones ) but for this discussion we’ll focus on the type I just described, which are called ’simple (a.k.a. arithmetic) moving averages’.

What MAs do is smooth out fluctuations in prices, thereby making it easier to spot trends. We’ve all heard the expressions “the trend is your friend” and “trade with the trend” but often it’s difficult to identify the trend. That’s because stocks don’t move in straight lines as well as the fact that the trend may be different depending on your time frame. For this discussion I’ll define three different time frames as follows: