Thank you for continuing to show a traders process. IMO, too many people buy stocks for stories, without any idea how to put together a process that they feel comfortable with. I am sure that some of your articles regarding this have helped out many.

Here's to Teaching How To Fish.

Bill - This week is options expiry. It often seems to me that the week before expiry belongs to hedge funds trying to drive the equity price up or down to where they mostly own the strike, then the week of expiry belongs to the options issuer who often brings the equity price back to the level of "max pain".

Not as an investor would do, but rather as a ST trader, what tactics/strategy have you found best to use during these two weeks of literal "turn on a dime" price movements?

Thanks.

Spot - There are many tactics you could deploy but let us be realistic and ask the question as to which tactics you have at your disposal?

I'm curious as to why you're trying to be a ST trader and extract alpha constantly unless it is your job or you're helping facilitate huge clients to place trades.

Why not keep things simple, pick a classic company like PG or JNJ and forget about the noise. Do you really care to know how short term traders feel on the inside? They lose as much as they gain but hopefully gain a tad more.

If you were asking from a knowledge perspective I understand, but if you're trying to pull it off please have the market tools and capital to deploy without hesitation.

I'll say it like this..

"Don't try to work like a Nascar Pit Crew when you have Sears Tools to work with"

I don't even look at options expiry anymore. I don't care for fed hikes, my stocks are chosen to stand the test and are occasionaly rotated if management dissapoints two sequential quarters in a row.

Forget trading :) Enjoy the investing.

/d

ok i just took started taking positions back on gold....this is the worst...buying as it ticks lower....

bullring-

I am waiting until I see where support comes in. We are kinda in no man's land here on the charts.540-45 was support. That needs to be recovered. If not, this could fall to next logical support at 515-20 or all the way to 490.

This is very instructive.

markm...i bought 20% of my planned total dollars...so this is not a rush in...and I set stops....i don't know that a marginal break of the 540 means a great deal....and i would not be surprised to see some fear selling tomorrow with a reversal during the day...but you never know....sometimes buying on the dip works and sometimes it doesn't...

b/r-

Not meant as criticism. Just a different approach.

M

dinov - Thanks for your comments. I always enjoy courteous challenges, such as yours, to my trading thoughts because they help to prevent my falling into the trap of rigidly trying to follow just one trading method or technique. Questions force me to re-analyze why I am doing what I do, and whether it is still working. Trading still works for me, but I agree that it isn't for everyone.

I do not wish to imply that your technique(s) are not as good as mine, if they are working for you, but at my age I can no longer afford to try to outlast a major cyclic downturn in the markets -gg. I started investing in 1970 at a time when a similar strategy as your simple: buy the "classics such as PG and JNJ" was in vogue. I think brokers referred to them as stocks that "widows and orphans" could own without a care. Of course, the oil embargo came along, et al, and a lot of "widows and orphans" lost their happiness for quite a while. Since then, I "traded" through 1987 and '89 without a loss. I didn't get out of Gold in the early '80's quick enough, but I did a lot better in keeping my earnings than many investors did who kept buying the dips. I avoided the effects of the last bubble-bust. And so on ...

Tools? Heck, there were times when I wished devoutly for Sears to come out with something that I could use. I kept stacks of newspapers in the closet and hand charted stocks that I was interested in. I also used Chart Books that were made available in the City Library each week. When the Commodore-64 came out, I hand programmed sorting algorythms on multiple columns (this was pre-worksheet programs) to get some of the tables that Bill loves to use. All this to say that fancy tools are NOT necessary - just the work and skill.

Most of the common techniques that are so much in use, today, have been popularized only during the last 15 years or so. Metastock had a devil of a time getting started, but did a lot to make such techniques quick and easy (until Equis sold out, imo, but that's a different story).

There are always new tools, and they should all be studied to see if they might work for each person as individual. The real problem is whether a person has conquered "greed and fear" in his process of decision making - then just about any tool, if properly used, can be helpful to determine when to get in and when to get out with maximum retention of earnings - but that's "trading".

I can usually make some money going into Fed meetings, but OpsExp is for me like trying to solve a multi-variant equation with some hidden variants, and I wondered if Bill might mention something out of his experiences that I have not put to use.

Good luck in your investing!