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Dr. Thomas Carr
"Dr. Stoxx" has been actively trading the markets since 1996 following several years of studying technical analysis. He holds a doctorate from Oxford University and is a tenured Professor to liberal arts students. He has been interviewed by the Wall Street Journal and US News and World Report for his insights into trading psychology and has had a series of articles published in Stocks and Commodities Magazine. He is the author of the forthcoming book, TREND TRADING FOR A LIVING (see exerpt below).
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My first introduction to the stock market came through a recurring image in the pages of my favorite comic book serial: Richie Rich. There stood "the poor little rich boy" in front of a glass enclosed machine, slender tape in hand, scrutinizing the ever-growing Rich fortune he was destined to inherit. The neural network this image hard-wired into my six-year-old brain must have been permanent, for I have been striving ever since to understand what Master Rich must have understood as he stared at that long stream of paper. If I wanted to live like he lived (and what young boy wouldn't?), I knew I would one day have to unlock the secrets of that mysterious ticker tape...
My next childhood association with the stock market came when I turned twelve and was old enough to walk on my own to the downtown public library after school. The first book I remember checking out with my new library card was... How I Made $2,000,000 in the Stock Market. It described how a young professional dancer named Nicolas Darvas amassed a fortune by trading stocks on only 3 bits of information: the high of the day, the low of the day, and the close. Darvis invested in fundamentally sound, growing companies breaking out of consolidation bases on strong volume. Once he made a purchase, Darvis would simply record the "boxes" the stock price made as it moved above the base. A "box" was what Darvas called the trading range the stock tended to trade within based on its daily highs and lows. If it broke above the upper edge of the box, he would move the box up to a higher level. But if it broke the lower edge of the box, he would sell the stock and cut his losses.
Although I didn’t know it at the time, Darvas' book was my first introduction to systems trading... and I was hooked! But I also knew that the kind of fundamental analysis Darvis applied to the companies he traded was beyond the competencies of my 12 year old brain. So a couple years passed before I picked up another stock market book. And when I did I found a real winner, one that taught me how a profitable system can turn the stock market into a virtual money machine. It was Robert Lichello's 1977 bestseller, How To Make $1,000,000 in the Stock Market Automatically! Written in response to the 1970's bear market, Lichello developed a system that exploited the type of volatility that typically appears at market tops and bottoms. Like Darvas' "box" method, Lichello's system was simple and mechanical: after buying an initial position in a stock, you buy more shares if the price goes down, and you sell shares if the price goes up. A mathematical formula was applied to the closing price at the end of each week to determine what to do with your position: buy a little, sell a little, or hold. In this way, Lichello claimed, a stock could move up and down within a range – netting the buy-and-holder very little – and still yield a handsome profit to the one using his "automatic investment management" (AIM) system.
After I finished Lichello's book I decided to experiment with his system to see whether it worked. I asked my father to explain that odd section of the paper with tiny print that listed all the NYSE companies and how they fared in that day's trading. He showed me how to read the numbers and suggested I focus on a company I was familiar with. I chose McDonalds. We ate their hamburgers at least once a week, and though I didn't know that it was the fastest growing franchise in the U.S., I was well aware from the big sign out front that the number of hamburgers served at our local restaurant kept going higher! So I put the "AIM" method to work with an imaginary 500 shares of McDonalds.
Lichello's AIM method requires only a weekly glance at the closing price of a stock in order to work the system. I decided that was too infrequent so I checked the price every day. I still remember feeling absolutely elated that first day after my imaginary purchase upon learning that MCD had closed +1/4 point, netting me a paper profit of $100. By the end of that first week, as I recall, MCD was up a whole dollar! $500 return in one week! This was much more than I had ever earned at any of my other entrepreneurial efforts. I had peddled light bulbs door to door, started an "errand boy" business, and had sold all sorts of syrupy concoctions from the curb in front of our house. But nothing compared to the idea that by simply reading a few numbers in the newspaper I could make this kind of money!
The problem with Lichello's method is that it only works with stocks making large up and down swings. However impressive a one dollar move might be, it did nothing to trigger AIM's signal to sell shares. That would have required at least a three dollar move. So I watched again the next week. Each day I checked the paper to see how my shares did on the big board battlefield. And each day my hopes would rise and fall with each quarter point advance or decline. This went on for about two more weeks before I finally gave up out of sheer boredom...
I grew up a bit after that. I got interested in sports, girls, parties... the usual adolescent distractions. At eighteen I went off to university to study medicine, until I discovered I hated being in hospitals and felt nauseous at the sight of blood. So I switched to religious studies and philosophy, and ten years of graduate study later found myself with a doctorate in the subject teaching the rudiments of Plato and Aquinas to undergraduates.
Having weathered through a very frugal decade as a starving graduate student, and with a mountain of student loans and credit card debt to pay off, not even a fulltime professor's salary could tempt me back into the trading game. But when I took up an offer to teach summer school, the $5,000 bonus brought with it, rather unexpectedly, a return of the old trading bug!
The year was 1996 and a new trading tool was all the rage: 24-hour financial television. First came the CNN-Financial Network, and then CNBC and Bloomberg Television. When this input coupled with internet trading chat rooms, online discount brokers, and cheap charting websites, Wall Street quickly became Main Street. The market had just put in a huge year in what was then the middle of the great bull market of the 90’s. Cab drivers shared stock tips, bus boys traded between shifts…the age of the "daytrader" had dawned. The smell of quick profits was in the air and I wanted to inhale as deeply as possible. So I opened an online brokerage account that summer and put the entire $5,000 into it. In those days, there were no "pattern daytrader" rules so with $5,000 one could buy up to $10,000 worth of stock on margin and trade it repeatedly throughout the day.
I decided that with such a small amount of capital to work with I had better stick with lower priced stocks. So I scanned the chat rooms and investor threads for ideas. I soon found one. On all the major sites traders were buzzing with talk about a small public company that was developing a process by which to turn sewage into safe drinking water. There were rumors that the CEO was going to be interviewed on a network news show sometime that week, and that he would drink a full glass of former sewage in front of the cameras to prove his confidence in his company's system. Speculation ran wild that this exposure to millions of viewers would drive institutional investors to buy up shares in droves.
This seemed about as close to a "sure thing" as I could find. So I decided to make my first real money stock purchase in this waste water treatment company. This smallcap Nasdaq issue was trading around $2.00 at the time, so I bought a starter position of 1000 shares. I anxiously watched the news that night, but there was no mention of the company. Still the rumors persisted, and on the next day the stock opened around $2.50. In my euphoria I bought 1000 more shares. When just before the close the stock hit a high of $3.00, I bought 1000 more shares bringing my position to 3000 shares at a total investment of $7,500, one third of which was borrowed from my broker on margin.
That night my heart raced as the news promo mentioned a feature story on a "miracle" water purification system that could revolutionize the way water is used and supplied around the world. This purification process was heralded as having the potential to save the lives of millions of children around the world who would otherwise have no access to clean drinking water. At that moment I clicked onto the discussion thread monitoring the stock and shared in the pre-announcement revelry along with dozens of other investors who like me had bought thousands of shares in anticipation of this moment. I had never imagined trading stocks could be this easy, or this fun! We were all going to "clean up" on this one, pun intended!
I waited restlessly through the other stories of the evening until Tom Brokaw finally announced the feature we were all waiting for. The preview clip even showed the CEO of an "innovative water treatment company" being challenged by Brokaw to drink a glass of what was formerly sewage, purified by his system. The CEO announced, "Sure, I'll drink that!" With those words, I began a mental process that I have repeated numerous times since: I began calculating what I would do with my sudden windfall! My conservative estimate was that the stock would double overnight, giving me a paper return of at least +125%. I planned to sell half my shares and hold the rest as a "free trade" as the stock ramped up into double digits. With a fresh account of $7,500 in cash, I would then begin stalking my next conquest and do the same thing over again... and again and again... until like so many of the other daytraders I had been hearing about, I would retire young to a seaside mansion and spend my days lounging poolside.
The commercials ended and Brokaw stood again on screen, ready to introduce the final story of the night. He began by outlining the global problem of polluted water, which accounts for a massive number of deaths in developing nations. Then with that segue, he ushered in the concept of using ultraviolet radiation along with microfilters to sanitize waste water. At that moment, there flashed over Brokaw's right shoulder a company logo and name; a company that held the patent on and exclusive marketing rights to a machine that is capable of transforming raw sewage into something that even Evian could bottle. There it was: plainly visible to millions of television viewers – including hundreds of hedge fund managers, mutual fund analysts, brokers and daytraders – was the logo and name, not of the company whose shares I owned, but of its primary competitor!
Once the initial shock wore off, I immediately plunged into denial. Surely, there must have been some mistake. NBC miscued the name of the company, and tomorrow a public relations campaign would swing into action to correct the misinformation. Or perhaps, I quickly reasoned, this is in fact very good for our company. People will now invest in the whole sector, and our little company will get swept up in what would become the great water purification bubble of 1996!
As I tuned back into Brokaw's interview, I watched intently as the CEO drank a full glass of water taken from his machine. We were told that the water had been reclaimed runoff from the city's drainage system. No doubt this display of confidence in the capacity of the process to produce potable product would go far with industry analysts. I imagined thousands of calls being placed the next day to brokers asking about any and all companies working in this niche market. Again, my euphoria returned.
All was well and good... until Brokaw asked one final question. "So just when will your machine be available to the market?" It was a reasonable question, the kind of question one would expect a top-notch journalist like Brokaw to ask. And to this day every bit of the CEO's answer – the tonality, the meter, the syllabification – remains embedded in my brain. "Oh, the process is too expensive right now to make it marketable." "So..." Brokaw pressed, "just how long will it take to get the costs down?" "Well, we are 15, maybe 20 years out," replied the CEO.
And that was it. There was nothing to be done about it. In those days there was no post-market trading available to make a quick exit. All I could do was wait it out. I knew that throughout the night traders would start piling up the sell orders, and in the morning at the market's open the price of the stock would plummet, and along with it all my hopes for early retirement! Sure enough, the stock opened the next day at $1.75 per share, well below my average cost basis for the position. There were far too many orders ahead of mine to get so many shares out easily and by the time my order filled, I received $1.38 per share for a loss of over $3,500 if you include the commissions. My trading account was devastated. In a fit of shame and self-disgust I wired the money out of the account and closed it the next day.
Well, even after that embarrassing experience I simply could not shake the trading bug. The next summer I taught summer school again, and again I opened a small trading account with my extra $5000. This time, I decided I would do things the right way. I would transform myself into a long-term "buy-and-holder", a value investor, a champion of sound fundamentals and fiscal responsibility. I read just enough Lynch, Buffett, Zweig and O'Neill to know that what I was looking for was a company with that magic combination of regularly increasing earnings, increasing pricing power, lots of cash on hand with little debt, a hot, new set of products, and solid growth prospects. I believed the road to market riches lay in finding the next Microsoft, Walmart or Starbucks before the rest of the investing world. You buy before the growth phase hype hits the streets and then hang on until, after a dozen splits, you sell your nest egg for a small fortune.
Bolstered by this hope, I went searching for "the next big thing". What I found was a series of stocks destined, through no fault of their own, to separate me from my hard-earned money. There is no way I could have known it at the time but that summer, 1997, was not the most opportune time to initiate new long positions. Despite a raging bull market in tech and internet stocks, the broader markets were overdue for a consolidation and they sure got one: the S&P chopped sideways for four months and then mid-year began a decline that took it 13% below its high. And it was in that environment that I had determined I would begin my career as a successful, long-term investor!
So after several days of research, I bought a small company that provided diagnostic equipment to the airline industry. The stock's press releases referred to the company as holding exclusive contracts with several large carriers. New management on board had been weaned away from successful careers elsewhere. There was little debt, and plenty of cash on hand to begin buying up the competition. This company had the smell of Buffetology all over it. It had the right products, under the right management, and with the right business plan to take me and my nest egg to the zenith of financial security; unfortunately, it was in the wrong sector. As profits in the airlines began to dry up my little company and its "exclusive contracts" were quickly shown the door. The stock went from $5 per share to under a buck and was then delisted from the Nasdaq before it eventually went bankrupt.
Next I bought a boutique electronics dealer with an absurdly low p/e ratio, no debt and lots of great press. It had weathered the market pullback well and had recently hired a new CEO. Moreover, the company had just finished a series of small acquisitions which would ensure their stronghold in the industry. But, as luck would have it, Walmart, Best Buy and Circuit City were just beginning to expand their operations and my little firm just couldn't compete. Again, I lost money.
I decided to give the buy-and-hold strategy one more try. With what little cash I had left (about $1000), I bought into a company which was being hyped as the next big "momo-cult" stock. After DELL and CSCO, this was supposed to the "must own" stock of 1997. The stock was in a company that went by the unusually Latinate name of Qualcom.
In late October, the broader stock indices had rallied off their lows and looked to be breaking out to new highs. So with what was left of my trading stake I bet it all on QCOM. Immediately it dropped 40% within three weeks! But this was a long-term hold, so I dutifully held onto my shares. I held the stock for six more months. It went up, it went down. It went up and down again. And again. Finally, at just slightly worse than a breakeven price, I sold my shares just to get rid of the nausea. Imagine how heartbroken I felt when less than a year later, the stock ramped up +2,500%! Had I held onto those few shares worth around a thousand bucks, I would have had the opportunity to cash out within the year with a quarter million dollar nest egg! Arrggh!
It was at this point that I decided to formulate three rules that I have held to ever since:
• Don't trade on chat room tips!
• Don't trade on news reports!
• Don't trade on economic or business forecasts!
I decided that I needed in all humility to admit the shortcomings in my preparation as a trader. While I possess an embarrassing amount of formal education, I am trained in neither economics nor business management. I remember the "supply and demand curve" from my bone-head economics class in college, but the finer intricacies of micro and macro economic relationships escape me. Thus I decided to leave fundamental analysis to the professionals. As for hot stock tips or trading news flashes, there is already a healthy crowd moving in on that action and I’ve never had much of a liking for crowds.
No, if I was going to succeed in the trading game – and by now this was a matter of resolute determination – I would have to come up with a trading methodology that was well-suited to my experiences, temperament, and the constraints on my time and energy as a fulltime professor. Following several weeks of research, I decided that what I needed to learn more about was technical analysis, a methodology that relied on simple mathematical relationships along with intuitive price pattern recognition.
Think about this for a moment: fundamental analysis relies on an almost infinite array of inputs, from balance sheets and earnings projections to changes in management, sector cycles, product development, and a whole host of other things too numerous to mention. How can any single human mind, however well trained in business theory, keep track of it all? And not only do you have to know everything about the company you want to invest in, you also have to know everything about its competitors, its sector, its industry... and then you have to weigh this knowledge against a background of national, and indeed global, economic analysis. And frankly, who has the time for all that?
Now consider this idea: what if everything you needed to know about a company's future prospects were already there in the price of its shares? This is the key assumption of technical analysis. If the price of your shares is going up, the market likes your company's prospects. If the share price is going down, it doesn't. It's as simple as that. Technical analysis saves a ton of time, is accessible to anyone regardless of education, and if rightly applied works pretty darn well!
So I decided then and there that I would focus exclusively on technical analysis to trigger my buy and sell signals. The combination of disciplines inherent to technical analysis seemed to mesh well with my academic training: as a scholar of ancient texts, I had experience in both the objective discernment of linguistic relationships and in the more subjective art of interpretation. Technical analysis seemed to me to be the closest thing to putting these two skills to work on the markets.
Instead of income statements and balance sheets, technical analysts work with price charts. Price charts graphically portray the historical movements of a stock's price and trading volume. They are fixed pictures of a stock's past price behavior over time. The analyst who works with charts is thus part historian, part psychologist, part philosopher: with an experienced eye she reads the chart to understand its past price patterns, which then allows her to generate a psychological profile of the stock's current state, as well as project a conceptual framework within which the stock is most likely move going forward. In other words, technical analysts are to the financial world what liberal arts professors are to the world of academia: highly experienced in the arts of evaluation, interpretation and application.
So with my newfound commitment to learning the finer points of technical analysis, I went in search of mentors. The first thing I did was to enroll in a seminar taught by a fellow whose name I won't mention here since he was later convicted by the SEC of fraud! But while this trader's marketing tactics were suspect, he did in fact teach a valid, if basic, technical methodology, the skeleton of which forms the basis of several of the systems outlined in this book. In the seminar I was taught how to use moving averages to determine trend direction and strength, and the Stochastics indicator to time one's entry and exits. To this day, I still use both to advantage and consider this particular setup the most reliable of all possible setups. To this fellow I truly owe the foundation of my entire "befriend the trend" system.
An Amazon.com search led me to a second mentor, Alexander Elder. His 1993 bestseller, Trading for a Living, now deemed a classic in the field, is a highly readable introduction to both the mathematics and meaning of the various tools used by technical analysts. Elder is himself a professional psychologist, so I immediately felt at home with someone who, like me, came to the world of trading without a Wall Street or B-school background...
From Elder I learned most of what I now know about the most common technical indicators. I learned what technical oscillators and price patterns tell us about the psychological state of equity markets. I learned about trendlines and how to use them to apply patterns of containment to future movements in price. Most importantly, perhaps, I learned to recognize and evaluate divergences between price and oscillator behavior. These disjunctions between price trends and the visually portrayed mathematics of those trends provide important psychological clues to the current health and likely forward projection of trends.
Other seminars were to follow. I spent time with Welles Wilder, learning how to combine various indicators with projection trendlines. I learned the finer points of Japanese candlesticks from Steve Nison. In addition to reading all the bestselling books about daytrading, I read widely about the stock market itself, the history of Wall Street, and the biographies of several of its biggest players. With these resources under my belt I began to put together and experiment with various technical systems that could be used to recognize profitable market probabilities. It is this set of systems that I am referring to in this book when I talk about "trend trading". I use the technical systems I have personally developed to determine the nature and strength of a stock’s trend, and then use those systems again to alert me to short-term buying and selling opportunities.
There are four different sources of input used in these systems (in no particular order):
• Price patterns (as determined by the use of trendlines and channel lines)
• Moving averages
• Technical oscillators (the exact mix I use changes with the markets, but the "core five" are: MACD, Stochastics, RSI, CCI and OBV)
• Japanese Candlesticks
Essentially, successful technical reads of stock charts are all about two things: present price and past price. Price patterns supply the historical context portrayed by past price that in turn gives meaning to present price. Moving averages give us a visual smoothing of the changing temporal relationship between the two. The various technical oscillators render a visual account of the mathematical relationships between the two. And Japanese candlesticks graphically mark the relationship between the current closing price and the range within which the stock traded on an intraday basis.
Together these four vectors map out the relationship between a stock's past and its present state much in the same way the tools of the philosopher (logic, theories of knowledge, metaphysics, etc.) allow him or her to apply ancient wisdom to the current issues of the day.
So, to make a longish story short, I set to work hammering out my systems in real-time trading. In order to do this right, I knew I needed the support of an experienced community. To that end I joined an online trading forum called Silicon Investor. In July of 1998, I started a discussion thread there named, "Befriend the Trend Trading", and it soon became one of the most popular threads on the site. In dozens of daily posts, I thought out loud about how to best combine these elements into a series of workable, profitable systems. I posted my picks for the day, and followed up with a record of profits and losses. Soon other more experienced traders joined me, offering their advice and contributing to the overall methodology. We became a tight, mutually supportive network. And within a year, we were consistently, even at times radically, profitable.
Though no one knew it at the time, 1999 will always be remembered – by traders at least – as the year of the infamous "tech bubble". The Nasdaq market was ramping in parabolic fashion. Waiters and barbers were retiring on their investments in Qualcomm, Cisco, Yahoo and Amazon. Everyone was trading stocks, talking stocks, hyping stocks. Traders were trendy, sexy, and (so everyone thought) rich. They were treated by the media like rock stars, making appearances on Good Morning America and The Tonight Show. Bankers, doctors, dentists and lawyers were leaving their six-figure salaries to stay at home, sit in front of computers in their bathrobes and daytrade. A year and a half later, the markets would crash and "daytrading" would become a dirty word. But until that time the party was on and there was no shortage of revelers.
A few made an amazing amount of money in those heady days. One well-known example was Dan Zwanger. In 1999 he turned $11,000 rescued from his greedy but incompetent broker into a $14 million fortune. Another fellow who goes by the name of "Waxie" sold his trading card collection for $150,000 and after his broker reduced it to $30,000, he took control of his portfolio and turned it into $7 million.
We did ok too. The Silicon Investor thread narrates my experimental venture into the world of high-turnover trading. Because my capacity to stomach market fluctuations is not that strong, I mostly stuck with well-known, larger cap issues as I continued to refine my systems. We did not yield as much return as the Nasdaq did that year (+86%), but we managed to turn in our first full-year of profitable trading.
Then came the year 2000, a year of reckoning. Once all the Y2k fuss had died down, several words that hadn't been heard much the previous year began to be tossed about on the financial shows: words like "valuation", "sustainability" and that dreaded "b" word, "bubble". The intraday volatility increased five-fold as prescient profit-takers clashed with bullish late-comers. The get-rich-quick gold rush was over, but it took about six months before most traders and investors realized it. During that time there were regular intraday swings on a scale of wildness that would have made even the late Steve Irwin, the "Crocodile Hunter", recoil in fear.
It was in that environment that I began to experiment with a trading system I called "BTTT-MAX". BTTT stood for Befriend The Trend Trading (our company name) and the "MAX" part of the acronym stood for "Moving Average Crossover". In this system one was fully invested 100% of the time in one or more of the most volatile stocks trading. One watched the intraday hourly chart, and on bullish crossovers, one went long; as soon as a bearish crossover was spotted, one sold the shares and immediately went short. Since in that environment signals came every few hours, and given the violent nature of the intraday swings during that period, BTTT-MAX quickly piled up huge returns.
I'll never forget my first real-money experiment with BTTT-MAX. I was on spring break from the College and spent the week glued to my computer, trading stocks. In my first experiment with MAX, I traded NOVL, then priced in the 30’s but headed to single digits before the year was out. I started with 100 shares per side, taking every signal on an hourly basis. After three days of trading I was up nearly $800. Easy money! Encouraged, I added size and began to trade a basket of 4 stocks per the system. Two days later I was up another $2,200! While my colleagues were out fertilizing their lawns, I had banked a cool three grand simply clicking my mouse every couple of hours! Nor did the fun stop there. Three months of extreme market volatility managed to exploit the MAX system to such a degree that by the end my account had increased over 500%!
Word soon got out about the simple system with the catchy moniker put together by a religious studies professor who was turning a messy market into a pot of gold. The Silicon Investor thread shot to the top of the "hot list" and stayed there for weeks, and I soon found my phone ringing with requests for interviews. The Wall Street Journal wanted to know whether I thought the markets would come back and take out the March 2000 highs. I don't remember now what I said, but I'm sure it was something like this: "It really doesn't matter. What matters is having a great system (like BTT-MAX) which can make money in any kind of market!"
Then the US News and World Report did a feature story on part-time daytraders, using me as their poster-child. The story included a full-page color spread of "Dr Stoxx" sitting in his cramped college office. Unbeknownst to me, the story intended to focus on losing traders, and since I was coming off a hard week my only quote after a 3-hour interview was about losing $1500 on a JNPR trade! After that, I wizened to the fact that the media wished to portray traders negatively (as greedy, irresponsible, sociopathic dropouts!) and so I declined all further interviews.
As seasoned traders know well, a system like BTTT-MAX which exploits particular market conditions only works well until those conditions change. And sure enough, they did and our profits began to dry up. I have since refined the system to keep us out of the markets when conditions are not right, but I doubt we will ever see returns with the system like we saw in that magical summer of 2000!
In the years since the market’s bubble burst, since those ecstatic days of BTTT-MAX, I've been hard at work expanding the universe of Befriend the Trend Trading systems. In 2002 we launched our website, Befriendthetrend.com, along with a free weekly newsletter designed to highlight one new stock pick each week derived from whatever system was working best at the time. Today, five years on, we are still going strong with over 6000 subscribers to that original newsletter. Over the years we have launched three additional newsletters for paying subscribers and have seen brisk sales on the six trading manuals and two seminars we have published. Our latest venture began in March of 2005 when I incorporated a capital management company and partnered with RBC Carlin Equities and Goldman Sachs to oversee the Befriend the Trend Fund for accredited investors. And yes, I still teach (and enjoy teaching) undergraduate students the finer points of philosophy and religion.
Nothing has been easy since the nearly vertical market ramp of the late 1990’s. The broader indices have been trading within tighter and tighter ranges as the SEC and Federal Reserve are quicker to clamp down on excesses. Currently as I write this... global and local economies have had to discount things like terrorism, rising oil prices and natural disasters. The current buzz-word among market prognosticators is not "valuation" or "bubble" but "geopolitics". Daytraders are out and hedge fund managers – a far more powerful influence on market volatility – are in. Recently both Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs have fired dozens of traders because they were not making any money! The markets are just that tough!
But the good news is that in any market condition, with the right systems in hand, trading can nicely supplement your income, and if you have the patience to stick with it for a while, it can even make you very wealthy. It takes some work getting up to speed on the terminology. Learning to read a chart is a little bit like learning a foreign language. But the hard part has been done for you. You hold in your hands the culmination of years of intensive labor, done on your behalf. Here you have all the information you need to find stocks poised to move, to take positions in those stocks, and to exit those positions with the greatest exposure to profit and the least exposure to risk. The trading systems outlined below have been designed to be as 100% mechanical as possible. And each system is complete. You are not taught here a few fundamental principles and then left on your own to apply them to the markets. I've done all the necessary applicational steps for you. All you have to do is copy my work.
All of this is to say: if I can do it, so can you! Regardless of your education, your trading experience, your fluency with numbers, you too can trade for a living. Can you tell whether a line is moving up or down? Can you click a mouse? Then you too can trade for a living! We at Befriendthetrend.com wish you all the best as you start this wonderful adventure of trend trading.
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