What the $%@&* Trading!

Well, I’ve hardened the blog feeds so that I don’t keep getting invalid feeds…that was a bunch of $h!t. But It’s been a week and a half with no problems…yeah baby

As an enhancement, I’ve added 2 plugins from Andy Hill, Stock Quote Sidebar and Stock Quote Tooltip. The stock watchlist in the sidebar is now a bit more orderly with the day’s changes added. If you mouseover a stock symbol you’ll get the name of the company and if you mouseover the change in price, you’ll get a chart of today’s activity.

In the blog posts, you can mouseover the stock symbols and get a pop-up also. Just put your mouse on this: IVAN. It helps me, so I hope you enjoy it and use it also. Happy trading

Please let me know if you have problems subscribing to this blog or getting updates. I’ve been having troubles with Feedburner, so I’m trying to track it down. Thanks!

Here is a web-based stock screener that lets you analyze the market visually : FINVIZ.com Registration is free. Check out the Maps page…I spent most of the day exploring

As you can see I haven’t posted since Monday….all because my hosting company screwed up my website again. But that didn’t stop me from participating in the markets.

Monday was an indecisive day, with a wild range but only up 21 points, the Dow that is….advantage bulls. Tuesday was a wild up day from the start, but really liked the Fed-speak, ending up 420 points….advantage bulls. Wednesday we gave back more than half of our gains from the day before, down 293 points….advantage bears. Friday we gained back what we lost Wednesday, up 261 points…advantage back to the bulls…3 out of 4 ain’t bad….but we have to see follow thru on Monday….please, please.

Reports that may affect the markets next week: Existing and New Homes Sales, Q4 GDP, Core PCE Inflation, Initial Claims. And don’t forget the Fed-speak…we have two Fed Governors making speeches on Thursday.

Happy Easter!

While snowed in this past weekend and spending way too much time on the Internet, I came across a DonHarrold.net video. This particular topic, while touting his own service, reminisces through last year’s pumping of our “great” market and economy. Since I have CNBC on in the background during the day, I remember many of these interviews and dialogs. With 20/20 hindsight, you have to scratch your head and say, “What were these guys talking about?”

The blog has been inaccessible for 4+ days…I apologize. I guess 24/7 tech support does not mean 24 hours a day / 7 days a week. Or maybe 7 days does not include Saturday and Sunday.

Back to trading. We had a follow thru day from Friday, but recovered into the close to have a doji day. Still not bull-inspiring, but also not bear-inspiring. At this time U.S. futures are up slightly, as is the Nikkei. I think tomorrow will tell us the direction of these markets…for the short term anyway.

If I don’t get this rage for tech support out of my head I may not trade. You always need to be in a cool and calm frame of mind. Time for a cool beer and a good night’s sleep. See you tomorrow…if the site holds up

The markets maybe…my computer for sure. I spent most of yesterday on my knees working on my machine. Ouch. Either the computer was slow or it was me crippled by having three out of four displays not functioning. Time to start looking. I think I may try building my own this time around.

The markets? Well the pattern has been broken. We started down and ended down…red across the board. And it looks like it will continue today…futures down, Asia and Europe down…and I think I’m down

Now when I go to post my entry, my hosting service is down with cgi and php problems….wah wah wah

I wrote about this a week or so ago, but I had to delete the entry because it was messing with the feed.

I had to go see my orthopod because my shoulder had been bothering me. And he asked me, “What do you sit on?” Of course I said, “A chair.” But he explored how I did my work (mousing, keyboarding, looking at screens) and he suggested I change my chair! And he passed on some info:

The SwingSeat adjusts in height, depth and angle of seat and back. Once you have adjusted the SwingSeat to fit your body, SwingSeat’s “smart motion” is automatic. No other chair can support you dynamically as you move through the many seated tasks that you do each day. BALANCED, EFFORTLESS MOTION found only in the SwingSeat. Your body will know the difference.

Check out the SwingSeat. Is anyone using it? I’m looking at getting one. Please leave a comment if you have one and what you think of it. And it’s cheaper than one of those Aerons.

NYSE MarkeTrac.…not quite sure what it is telling me or how to use it, but I’ll play and explore to see what it does. Since it is on a 20 minute delay, I’m not sure if it will be beneficial.

When I’m talking with family, friends and even some newbie traders about looking at charts to find stocks to trade, they get very confused on how to look at 8,000 charts every day (even more if your looking at pink sheet and OTC stocks). I tell them I don’t. I first create my own “trading universe” before going through the charts.

Using TCnet, I first tell the program I want to look only at stocks priced between $1 and $15 dollars. All of a sudden those 8,000 stocks have been reduced to 3,300. Cut more than half, but still too many. So, I need to check volume. Since my universe is in lower priced stocks, I need to make sure that there is enough volume to get out whenever I want. Getting in is easy no matter what the volume, but if you need to get out in a hurry, low volume stocks can be rough. So I look for stocks that have averaged at least a quarter-million shares a day over the last month. Now my list of 3,300 stocks has been shaved to 872. Approaching manageable but still too many.

Using those 872 stocks, I now scan for particular chart patterns or indicators. I can look for a bullish engulfing candlestick pattern and now I only have 43 charts to look at. If I add stochastics to be in the oversold area, I’ve reduced that to 26 stock charts to review….not bad. Or lets look for bullish harami patterns from the previous day that were confirmed today….only 4 charts to look at. (BIOS FINL PMI BKT in case you wanted to know)

Here’s a neat one….let’s find stocks whose 20 day moving average is greater than the 50ma and the 50ma is greater than the 200ma…uptrending stocks for sure. I came up with 5: MFA AIQ VIV COIN and TIVO

So you see, scanning the stock market looking for charts that you want to trade is neither time consuming nor difficult. There are several stock scanning programs and websites out there. I have to pay for TCnet, but I feel it pays me back more than what I paid for it

If you’d like a copy of my scans, let me know.

My trading platform is TradeStation, which provides all kinds of charts, but I do nightly scans to find my setups using TCnet by Worden Bros. The charts you may see here are from TCnet. If you’re a technical analyst and need to find the signals I’d recommend at least trying their 30 day trial…but it did take a bit more than 30 days to get good at the software