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It starts with one: habits, excellence and 112 push-ups
Aristotle said excellence is not an act, but a habit. What he was telling us is that excellence does not begin fully formed, but builds over time through habit. Excellence does not start excellent. Dream big, but start small. With one. At the beginning of the year I told a…
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The Emotional Dreams of a Small Account Trader and Paul’s Time Machine
Yesterday I asked for blog post ideas for an epic post I plan to write on Bulls on Wall Street. There were a lot of great ideas, but two emails received from small account holders sealed the deal for me. One was a time machine, taking me back to a…
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The Fallacy of Backtesting and Adapting to Current Market Conditions
I recently engaged in an interesting chat with a novice trader this weekend. It got me thinking about the fallacy of backtesting and why I don’t rely on past statistics. You heard me correctly. My take on backtesting is controversial and puts me in the minority. Some have called me…
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Trading Meditation: Is It Your Head or Your Trading?
There is is nothing wrong with your mental game. Your head is fine and there is no need to go to a trading psychologist. You have got it all wrong. It’s not that you don’t know how to control your emotions, it’s just that you don’t know how to –…
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Trading Meditation: Perception Is Nothing But Fiction
Fact: Perception is fictional. You never see full reality, only what your brain wants you to see. Basically, your brain is lying to you every second of every minute of every day. Are you a contrarian? Then that opening gap looks like a slam dunk parabolic short. Do you like…
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Trading Meditation: Uncertainty Is The Way
Certainty is a problem for traders. They want the answer to the question, “What will the market do”. I do not know. Does that make me an idiot? No, it makes me smart. I know that I do not know, and I accept it. I know that I am not…
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Trading Meditation: Taking Small Losses Is Not So Bad
It hurt bad, yet it wasn’t so bad. Once when I was 9 years old my dad hit me with 10 straight pitches in a row. This was after I kept jumping out of the batters box while Pablo fired off 3 strikes right down the middle of the plate.…
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Trading Meditation: The Early Bird Gets The Profits
Hesitation gets you nowhere. It is linked to fear and fear guides traders to the poor house. But Paul, I want confirmation. No, you are just afraid. So you wait. For the safety of the move. Seeing the stock move feels safe. So you act. And now you lose. That…
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Trading Meditation: Be The Wolf, Not A Sheep
If every trader is doing the same thing, how does anybody make money? Trading is a zero sum game. Somebody wins, somebody loses. And the split is not 50/50. It is more like 10/90. For those who are making significant percentage gains, it’s more like 5/95. To the few victors…
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Trading Meditation: How to tell if it’s intuition or guessing
Intuition is a swing trader’s best friend. When we intuit it seems as though there is no conscious reasoning. To the outsider it seems like guessing. In reality it is a function of the mind that glimpses greater knowledge through experience and pattern recognition. Traders often confuse intuition with guessing.…
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Trading secret for those unwilling to understand that they can not predict the future
Traders know less about the future than they think they do. And if the trader knows she does not know, she thinks someone else does. It’s why you hang onto every word of woefully inaccurate CNBC pundits. It’s why you love and hate Cramer. It’s why you follow 3654 members…
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Pattern Recognition: What Traders Get Wrong Wrong Wrong
Pattern recognition is the key to becoming a successful chartist. Through practice and experience the best chartists have seen the same pattern thousands of times. It is all about noticing, but what is it that the chartist must notice? Please retweet if you liked this article! http://platform.twitter.com/widgets/tweet_button.baa54ded21a982344c4ced326592f3de.en.html#dnt=false&id=twitter-widget-1&lang=en&original_referer=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.themarketspeculator.blogspot.com%2F&size=m&text=Great%20Post%3A%20HowPattern%20Recogntion&time=1455633396912&type=share&url=http://themarketspeculator.blogspot.com/2016/02/pattern-recogntion-what-traders-get.html&via=PaulJSingh Notice the patterns that…
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51 Essential Swing Trading Posts From 2015
This has been an incredible year for both me and this blog. Personally, I hit a major level in my trading accounts, moved my family to San Diego, mentored 14 new students, continued to run the part-time swing trading program over at my former student’s industry leading website and started…
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9 Steps to Making Your 2016 Trading Goals Stick
The new year is always a good time to hit the reset button and create new trading goals for the coming year. Most traders set fantastic goals, but few actually achieve them. In fact, after a month or two, most don’t even think about their 2016 goals because most have already…
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5 Steps That Will Save Time and Create the Perfect Swing Trading Watchlist
Every trader knows time is money Beginning swing traders make trading way too complicated. The beauty of swing trading is that once you know what you are doing, it does not take much time to trade like a pro. This is why swing trading is great for part-time trading. If…
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How to Embrace Your Fear in Trading: The Trading Intelligentsia Has it Wrong
Most trader’s and coaches think of emotion as if it is trading kryptonite. The worst of these emotions is thought to be fear. If you Google “fear” and “trading” you will see a host of “how to overcome fear in trading” articles. No disrespect to those authors, but they are…
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Chart of the Day: PANW and Relative Strength During Market Selloffs
Today’s chart of the day is PANW, which gapped and broke out over it’s 50 dma yesterday, and is holding that level this morning. This makes PANW a relative strength stock. During market selloffs, it pays to keep a list of relative strength stocks that have the potential to beat…
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Chart of the Day: Facebook and the Round Number Breakout
Today’s chart of the day is Facebook, which despite a tepid earnings reaction this quarter is showing strong relative strength versus the market and looks to make a run to $100. Keep an eye on this $100 level, which also is near the all-time high breakout level. Entry can be…
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Chart of the day: PYPL
Today’s chart of the day is a recent IPO that almost all of us use for online purchases, Paypal. PYPL has formed a few key levels that we can now trade off. First are the IPO lows and highs, which form an 8 point range between $34 and $42. Watch…
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Chart of the day: CALA
CALA is a biotech stock that has shown some buying interest while in the midst of a down trend. The recent volume surge has the stock over it’s 50 dma, which could start a remount and give it the momentum it needs to make a short term run. This is a…
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Paul J Singh 