I got an email from a student this week asking about using intuition in trading.  He gave an example where using intuition worked in his favor (by keeping him out of trade that signaled then lost), but then wondered if that is really a good idea. One of the reasons I recommend SO much backtesting [...]

Last week I talked about the importance of really understanding what it is you want.   I wrote about the importance of nailing down what you want; not just out of your trading, but what you want out of your life. This week I want to make an important distinction that could have easily been missed [...]

I don’t know if it is an age and stage thing, or what, but I seem to have a lot of similar discussions with the people around me about evaluating where they are in life versus where they want to go.  My first question is always, “Well, what do you want?”  The response I usually [...]

I read an interesting piece by Sebastian Siegel recently that while it seems a bit contrived in its poetry and somewhat meandering in its structure did have a couple things to say about Consciousness and Intuition that I thought were intriguing.  He says, “Intuition is the pull of something beyond you, deeper than you, subtle [...]

I have a somewhat regular conversation with my kids about the difference between pain and suffering. Despite my efforts at applying and reapplying sunscreen, they’ve both gotten burnt on their shoulders once. They’ve scraped knees, stepped on sharp objects, and taken hard hits from the balls they use in their respective sports. They’ve also spent [...]

Something has come up for me these past couple weeks, that hasn’t really been an issue for a very long time.  I’ve been known to espouse, repeatedly, the wisdom of “don’t marry your bias.”  And yet, knowing that the USD buying frenzy was due for a pullback I couldn’t let go of the fundamental picture [...]

About 3 weeks ago, while shopping for summer workbooks to keep the kids’ skills sharp over the summer break my 6th grade son asked for a printing book.  You know, the ones that Kindergartners use to learn their letters.  He’s been frustrated with his handwriting and all of his attempts to improve it just haven’t [...]

Gideon Rachman, of the Financial Times, wrote an editorial on Tuesday titled The West Re-Examines the Rat Race.  In it he cites a book in progress by Lord Skidelsky, How Much is Enough:  The Economics of the Good Life. Skidelsky states that an unhealthy preoccupation with wealth accumulation has dominated Western culture in the last [...]

It can be really frustrating when your trading is on a roll and then something crops up in your ‘real life’ that interrupts your routine and positive trading habits.  However, I have learned that most of those times that is when the market goes bonkers anyway.  That was a hard earned lesson, actually. I used [...]

Last Thursday I made the case for the upside of backtesting in the first part of this series about…can you guess it?… Backtesting!!!  (Background noise of “Yea!!”) I discussed, in that post, the benefits to a trader’s psychology when they regularly backtest their theories and ideas.  Today, however, I’d like to take the opposite side [...]