Hello, my name it Todd. I’ve been trading stocks and stock options since about 1998. What I learned in the beginning was that stocks always went up. Buy the dip. Write a put spread (my favorite thing) and all that.
When I got in literally all tech stocks were going up exponentially. Dell computer would go up, split, go up again, split, go up again, etc. It was crazy.
Then the day came, 1/1/2000. and airplanes didn’t fall from the sky. Street lights kept going. ATM machines worked. The world just moved on. But, some of that was real threat and we really did avoid a world wide catastrophe because there was vision, planning, and really good management.
Suddenly, for the first time, I found out that stocks can go down. So I lost a bit of my own money and had to step away from all that for a while.
I’m going through the Babypips school of Pipsology. I read the News and Trading section of Babypips as soon as I can every morning. And I’m starting to figure out how to use MarketMilk to scan for strength and weaikness (trading opportunities.) But sitting in this office looking at my screens with nobody to talk to has become taxing.
So I’m here to hopefully make some friends and become a more skillful trader.
A friend saw me reading Currency Trading for Dummies and he started telling me about his Forex experience. I didn’t even know he was a trader. And he highly recommended BabyPips.com
Yes you’ve learned that really important lesson that what goes up must come down. This is really useful to know when trading volatile commodities such as oil and copper. It’s those big changes in direction that keep me profitable. Just when you think it’s going to go higher forever it reverses and vice versa. The hardest thing when planning for a reversal (i.e shorting a commodity when it’s reached a historical high) is to ignore all the news which will be pumping it up and up cos it’s a great story.
I made some decent profit on the recent crude oil reversal while Goldman Sachs and MorganStanly were yelling in my ear about $175 and $250 per barrel respectively…
I hear you. There was a guy on Bloomberg the other day that was talking about the Magazine Indicator. It goes something like this: When you pick up a Barron’s or some financial magazine and there is a picture on the cover of an angry bull charging with smoke coming out of his mouth and headlines like DOW 100,000 that this is surely the end of the bull market for a while. You’ll remember that when Bitcoin was over $60,000 everyone was asking when do you think it will hit 100,000.
And conversely I believe that when you can watch Bloomberg and hear over and over that “the majority of institutional investors in this survey say Bitcoin is going to 10,000” They used to call this the Contrarian indicator. Anyway, problem I have is that if we are in fact falling into recession then there may not be much to prop up the market for a long time. Fortunately I trade Forex now. And it does not seem to be influenced by corporate earnings and such. I’m finding out that some commodities influence pairs. Just beginning to wrap my head around this.
I did not know there was an issue specifically for Forex.It even been a topic of a thread on here" where do all newbies go ’ they introduce themselves and then don’t post again. It was mentioned in one of the no nonsense video s on YouTube that how I found out
Yup. I’m a great believer in the contrarian indicator. When everyone’s saying the same thing it’s time to question the narrative. I don’t really trust analysts cos my impression is that their predictions just follow the market, then they just revise their forcasts when things change. Seriously, what use is that to man or beast?
Trend following def has it’s place - it’s what I do most of the time, but be cautious in v overbought/sold market. Everyone’s got their horror stories, but v clever colleague of mine (but no experience in trading) bought Bitcoin near the peak some months ago. Reading between the lines re: when he bought it and how much, seems he’s lost around £30K.
I hate when anybody loses money on Bitcoin or any crypto. But when my friends ask me about the cryptos I always tell them the same thing, which is this: Some very clever people found a way to print their own money and get some very rich people to buy it.
When I first learned about Blockchain it was all about smart contracts and creating a sort of secure vending machine way of purchasing things like insurance contracts, homes, cars, whatever. To me, the designer of Bitcoin had one singular purpose in mind. To print his own money. Its genius really. If you counterfeit $100 bills the government is going to stop you and put you in jail. But if you make your own money government cant even figure out what to do with that…