What do you make of this chart?

Time to dust off your technical analysis skills and take a look at the following chart, and tell me what you think…

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Did you enter the trade long?

For those of you that haven’t read the first part of this trading quiz, please look back a couple of posts and do so now.

For the rest of you, read on and see what happened next…

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Would you trade this?

Hi everyone, I think it’s time for a little quiz.

Take a look at the chart below, and tell me what (if anything) you would do, and why you’d do it.

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Trends for beginners

Despite trying to keep my posts simple and easy to understand, I’ve been guilty of using jargon without always realising it, and in my recent posts on the 1-2-3 breakout trading system I didn’t make much of an effort to clarify trends.

In this post we are going to rectify that and use some basic technical analysis skills to give you a basic outline of trends.

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What are you going to do now?

This morning I woke up to the news that in the US the Dow had fallen 2.8% (387 points) overnight, along with falls in other markets. The ASX XJO, the Australian top 200 index has lost 3.7% today in a 229 point fall.

Having been a member of a private forum that focussed on put credit spreads, I know there are going to be many traders that will have found the last two weeks of trading particularly stressful.

The posts I dreaded reading from members of that forum time and time again after falls like this can be paraphrased in five words; “What should I do now?”

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1-2-3 breakout system exits

In this post we’ll continue looking at the 1-2-3 breakout trading system by discussing an exit strategy for the long entries we covered last time, as well as looking at short entries and exits

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1-2-3 trading pattern entries

In my last post we started looking at using technical analysis to identify 1-2-3 trading patterns in up trending and down trending markets.

In this post we are going to start reviewing how we might use these patterns to provide us with entry signals in a trading system that will allow us to trade profitably.

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What are 1-2-3 patterns?

Readers will have noticed that the posts in this blog to date have been focussed on the trader far more than they have on trading systems. This is for a very good reason which you should all know by now. If not, please read our earlier posts.

This post however is going to introduce some technical analysis and provide some information on identifying 1-2-3 patterns on charts that will help you to trade profitably.

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Essential or optional?

Some time go while learning how to trade profitably myself, I found myself getting frustrated with the amount of jargon and terminology I had to become familiar with.

The terms “option writer” and “option taker” for example didn’t seem to be very descriptive to me, and other terms seemed to be interchangeable, such as Forex and currencies.

Backtesting and paper trading are often talked about that way as well, but regardless of how others choose to use the terms I view them as two separate activities and after reading this post I’m sure you’ll feel the same way.

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What is the first rule of trading?

An effective money management strategy is an essential part of any trading system, and it can make the difference between one that lets you trade profitably, and one which erodes a traders capital until they can no longer trade at all.

In this post, we are going to explain why.

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