From the category archives:

Start

Swing Trading Option Resources

January 23, 2010

We’ve come to the end of our mini course on swing trading options. I thought I would take a moment just to list all the resources I use in one place. As you can see the list is not long. But it doesn’t have to be.
Charting Software:
I use Stockcharts.com to look at my timing chart [...]

Read the full article →

You Can’t Win If You Don’t Play

January 22, 2010

Risk management is the most important skill any trader can acquire. In the world of trading you can’t play if you blow out your account. So… don’t blow out your account. Or you definitely won’t win!
Don’t risk a lot of capital on any one trade.
It seems obvious. But in the heat of the moment, when [...]

Read the full article →

Constructing An Option Position

January 21, 2010

Using options when swing trading provides you with many choices… but not all choices are the best one. Option prices are made up of two components; intrinsic value and extrinsic (time) value. The time value component of an option price is the one that decays with time.   
Avoid using options with lots of time premium when [...]

Read the full article →

Swing Trading Options Quick Reference

January 20, 2010

The following quick reference guide for finding swing trading option candidates. It’s a summary of all the steps you need to take to find the right trading candidates:
1. Look at an S&P500 chart to determine the type of trade to look for.
BULLISH when the 10 day simple moving average is above the 30 day exponential moving [...]

Read the full article →

Trading Strategy – Earnings

January 19, 2010

If there’s one event that can move a stock… it’s earnings. The problem is you never know how the public will react when the earnings are released. It doesn’t matter how much research you do. It doesn’t matter how accurate your earnings estimate may be. The only thing that matters is the market’s reaction to [...]

Read the full article →

Trading Strategy – Relative Strength And Weakness

January 19, 2010

Relative strength or weakness is the next hurdle that a stock has to pass in order to be considered a trading candidate. There are many different ways of assessing this characteristic of a stock. What I prefer to do is check what sector/industry it’s in (that’s easy because we put some code in our filter [...]

Read the full article →

Trading Strategy – Support and Resistance

January 19, 2010

Our filter helps identify stocks that have pulled back with the zone (that area between the 10 day and 30 day moving averages). The next step is to identify the ones that have encountered some support (in the case of bullish stocks) or resistance (in the case of bearish stocks).
Why is this important?
Because putting on [...]

Read the full article →

Trading Strategy – Stock Scanning Code

January 18, 2010

With our StockFetcher code complete, let’s first take a minute to review. Then we can turn it into a filter for bearish positions.
Show stocks where price is above 40 and optionable
and ma(10) is above ema(30)
and price is below ma(10) and price is above ema(30)
and ADX(10) is above 20
The 1st line Show stocks where price [...]

Read the full article →

Trading Strategy – ADX Indicator

January 18, 2010

The last element we need to add to our stock filter has to do with trends. Though our option positions can benefit even if the stock goes sideways, getting on the right side of a trend just adds to our odds of success. The indicator we’ll use to determine if a stock is trending, is [...]

Read the full article →

Trading Strategy – Pullbacks

January 18, 2010

Next up in the construction of our stock scanning criteria is specifying the pullback. Remember, we’re looking for stocks that have pulled back into “the zone”. We define this zone as the area between the 10 and 30 day moving averages. This is how it looks in StockFetcher.

The last two lines in our filter specifies that [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries