The November settlement price for the SPX was 1221.58. Last year’s settlement price was 1195.73. That’s a mere 2.16% gain over the past year so all you buy and hold market participants can spend that increase and spread some holiday cheer. I wrote a post last year about December’s cycle and how it can be [...]

Ah yes, it’s option expiration week. Hated by so many as a time of market manipulation yet also a time that many get paid, such as myself. Whether or not you believe in option shenanigans during opex is irrelevant. What matters is that you have a trading plan for the week. Perhaps you don’t trade [...]

The indicies are split with the $QQQ and $DIA trading above their 200-day SMAs while the $SPY and $IWM struggle to overcome theirs. That 50/50 split is more than likely going to be carried through next week as we enter option expiration. However, there are a lot of potential catalysts with economic events next week [...]

I’ve posed the question several times before regarding how much of trading success can be attributed to innate ability. The answer is none, as Richard Dennis and Bill Eckhardt so proved with their Turtle Trader experiment back in the early 80′s. What is innate that has an impact on our trading are habits. MIT’s McGovern [...]

As of Friday’s close this is the third worst start to November on record. Things have not worked out too well for the rest of the month when stumbling out of the gate. There’s plenty of opinions out there as to where we go from here and that makes it easy to form myopic opinions. [...]