Featured Articles

By: Larry Williams

Sometimes a market makes a move in one direction, decides it has made a mistake and then reverses course in the other direction. One such pattern is what I call an 'oops' signal.

Oops signals are most effective when they occur at the beginning of a regular daily trading session in a liquid market. I do not take all such opening signals. I filter them with fundamental and technical indicators, as I teach at my seminars.

By: Jon Najarian

If you have seen me on television or read quotes from me in the press, you may remember that one of the primary catalysts that I use for placing short-term and long-term trades is unusual activity in the calls or puts of a given stock. My reasoning is tied to an old Wall Street adage that fear and greed are what move the markets. I focus on the greed side, as I believe individuals who have information they deem market-moving will all too frequently tip me off to their intentions by accumulating calls or puts in unusual volumes.

By: Russell Sands

Okay, let’s get down to business.  There are many types of animals roaming around Wall Street (and LaSalle Street).  Bulls and Bears and Turtles to name a few.  There are also a whole lot of Pigs.  Now it’s long been a famous axiom on the Street that “Bulls make money, and Bears make money, but Pigs do not make money.”  I’m here to tell you that is wrong.  One of the most successful traders of all time, none other than George Soros, by his own admission is a Pig.  The quote heading this article is attributed to Soros by his head trader, Stanley Druckenmiller, in Jack Schwager’s excellent book Market Wizards II.   Now let me qualify this by saying that I’m sure Mr. Soros is not always a Pig.  There are time to be a Pig, and times not to be a Pig.  As with many other choices in both trading and life, the great trick is knowing when to be which.  But during the time when it’s right to be a Pig, it nevertheless takes great courage to actually be one.  And that brings us all the way back to the very basics, “knowing the rules is the easy part of trading, but having the discipline to follow the rules, that’s the really hard part.”

By: Don Fishback

If you are serious about treating your trading like a business -- and you should be because it is -- here are four steps to trading success and how I approach them:

1. Select a stock with opportunity

Use volatility indicators to select a stock that is likely to break out. We are looking for a stock where we can make money in the options regardless of the direction that the stock takes.

* Look for stocks that go flat temporarily for no apparent fundamental reason. Within two or three months after an active stock goes flat, the share price typically starts to fluctuate again.

* Use software that allows you to analyze volatility history and options prices, along with free Internet news sources to find stocks where opportunity exists.

* There are low volatility exceptions. For example, do not use this technique on stocks whose price is less than $10 because the edge you get is too small when the price is that low. The value of an option whose stock is less than $10 will not change that much, even if the volatility changes dramatically.