Reblogged from Passages Through: Whatever your rules are, no matter how mechanized or autonomic your methodology is, if there is any discretion left to you (and there is if you aren’t a bot) as a technical trader, remember this: Trends are a tidal wave of bias. They self-replicate bias. They enable us to profit tremendously [...]

Marking up my charts for the start of the week, it occurred to me this one is strikingly, scarily similar in construction to $SPY. What chart is it? Astute observers will notice it cuts off around mid-September. So what was the outcome? First came the collapse. Then a rebound. Dead cat bounce? Yes…no: the low’s [...]

Brave New World: more prophetic than Nostradamus. As full of existential pique and pathos as Camus ever was. Huxley’s insight is staggering, laying so much bare about our shared condition that is more comfortably left hidden; especially in the confrontation/denouement between The Savage and The Controller in Chapters 16-17. One of the few books I [...]

The October 2008 crash really began in earnest 09/22.  The previous week had brought with it the announcement of the Lehman bankruptcy, resolving in a bullish doji star at SPX 1225-1260 support.  Talk about a Trojan horse.  Once 9:30 a.m. 09/26 rolled around, equity indices opened where they left off at 1255 and saw virtually [...]

One of the virtues of technical analysis, in my experience, is that it doesn’t look down on intellectual curiosity or besmirch outside-the-box thinking as it enjoins a stagnant orthodoxy.  No doubt that’s more about the culture in which I developed than anything inherent to the discipline, but you also pick up on this in just [...]

Direction continues until it proves that it will not. Easily said, but when this proof emerges is for the trader to decide (read about how trends can work against this here). There’s no better way to test than by posing substantial technical counterarguments. This week equity and currency markets, especially are on the precipice of [...]

There’s little question regarding relative strength in the Eurozone.  Core countries such as Germany and France – while not without their own challenges – are the engines of growth and guardians of relative fiscal responsibility in an economic bloc encumbered with the profligacy of its more peripheral members. There are some sticky problems here.  Countries [...]

I’ll still be throwing up charts here and at Chart.ly, but check out my new blog on minimalism in trading at http://www.passagesthrough.wordpress.com

  After two quixotically bullish risk-off days, safe haven assets (except the JPY, which we’re all buying if only to prove to the BOJ intervention doesn’t work) have taken it on the chin, perhaps none more so than the gold.  With Margin hikes here and abroad exacerbating the downward pressure already brought to bear by [...]

I am not a contrarian (whatever it really means to brand oneself as that), but have felt like a voice crying out in the wilderness this weekend.  Though I’m certainly not a bull at the moment (or maybe I am; what timeframe?), sentiment from sources credible or not seems uniformly and despondently bearish right now. [...]