Posts Tagged
‘trading stocks’
by ilene - June 11th, 2010 4:00 pm
A solution that does nothing to address the problem while reinforcing the notion that prices aren’t based on value but rather the result of automated trading programs. But we knew that. – Ilene
Courtesy of Jr. Deputy Accountant

Again, it’s good to have a "just in case" or twenty readily available, right?
Business Week:
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s plan to impose halts on some stocks that swing more than 10 percent starting today may be followed by more measures to slow down trading.
The circuit-breaker test, a response to the May 6 plunge that wiped out $862 million of share value in 20 minutes, will begin as a pilot covering five stocks before expanding next week. SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro said yesterday the agency is considering regulating the speed of stock orders as part of a broader effort to rein in electronic markets.
Call me crazy but aren’t we trying to seduce money into our exchanges and not scare the pants off of it? Note to the SEC: This sort of sh*t scares the money. You’ve been warned.
Tags: circuit breaker, halts on stocks, high frequency trading, SEC, Stock Market, trading robots, trading stocks
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by ilene - June 3rd, 2010 12:59 pm
Courtesy of TraderMark at Fund My Mutual Fund
As I type this the S&P 500 is flat after running into the simple moving average just as the ISM Services report was released. All set up for a "rocket fuel run" based on a "surprise" beat. But alas, not to be.
However a flat session in the first hour is deceptive. We are actually down 0.5% in my book. Why? Because all of today’s gains came in the first minutes as premarket futures were marked up half a percent on essentially no reason.
So a pattern we’ve seen for much of the past year and a half
Premarket move: +0.5%.
Regular session: some sort of loss.
Today they happen to cancel each other out… leading to a flat day. That would be a negative day (at this moment of course) if not for premarket magic.
And this is why the premarket movement the past few years has become beyond annoying. And lest we pin the movement on ‘great news’ in premarket (a) the news was benign and (b) futures were up 0.4% before any news came out in the U.S. – and there was nothing of note overseas. It was just random magic.
There seems to be something unbalanced when a thin market, easily moved by a small slice of money (in the big scheme of things) can affect our day to day action so much.
Tags: futures, low volume moves, premarket futures, Stock Market, trading stocks
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by ilene - May 11th, 2010 5:09 pm
Karl Denninger may be calculating the odds of this, coupled with the odds of Goldman Sachs’s results – I’m thinking something in line with the odds of the sudden birth of a new universe. (And if you’re trading the markets, it may feel like that.) – Ilene
Courtesy of Larry Doyle at Sense on Cents
First Goldman Sachs. Now JP Morgan.
The shop where I worked from 2000-2006 released a report highlighting the fact that it made money each and every day of the 1st quarter. Thanks again to Matt for bringing this story to my attention. Bloomberg highlights, JP Morgan Traders Match Goldman’s Quarter with No Trading Loss,
JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s traders matched those at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. in making money every day of the first quarter, a first for both companies.
Daily trading revenue averaged $118 million on each of the 64 days in the first quarter, JPMorgan said in a regulatory filing yesterday with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
JPMorgan’s trading revenue from investment banking, its chief investment office and consumer lending division exceeded $90 million on 39 of those days, or more than half the time, according to the filing. Trading revenue surpassed $180 million on nine days, or 14 percent of the time, the second-largest U.S. bank said.
Believe me, having worked in the industry for 23 years, traders and firms do not make money each and every day. These results are a reflection of easy money provided by the Fed, lessened competition leading to a financial oligopoly in our country, and a variety of programs and mechanisms which are conduits funneling money into the banking system.
While the traders on Wall Street may believe it is their talents (and plenty are truly talented), the system is rigged and the game is fixed. Uncle Sam is the accomplice to the fix in hopes that revenues being generated currently on Wall Street can be utilized to write down the values of loans which are mismarked, have defaulted, or will default.
Is JP Morgan taken aback by these revenues? Publicly, I believe they are. How do we know? Listen to the statement put forth by the bank.
JPMorgan said it doesn’t expect the same trading revenue throughout the year. “The high level of trading and securities gains in the first
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Tags: fixed markets, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, liquidity, market domination, perfect trading records, trading stocks
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by Chart School - May 4th, 2010 4:03 pm
Courtesy of Joshua M Brown
One has been accused of serially poisoning investors, the other of serially poisoning the environment.
Call it an oversold bounce, but in a wash of red stocks both BP ($BP) and Goldman Sachs ($GS) are trading higher today.
Here are the two Axis of Evil Stocks versus the S&P 500 as of 2pm:

Curious….
hat tip Eddy Elfenbein who noticed this too.
Tags: BP, GS, Stock Market, trading stocks
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by ilene - March 16th, 2010 11:19 am
This is interesting. However, the conclusion that "individuals with antisocial personality disorder may not be unaware of… consequences… but instead that their intense reward-seeking motivation consumes their attention wholly until they have fulfilled their desire for reward" seems overstated, and only a small piece of the psychopath puzzle.
For a different perspective, that of a financial writer, and an even farther-fetched conclusion, read the second article below. The same data can be interpreted to show that a trader taking on excessive risk is "hopped up on dopamine" so they can’t see negative consequences, making them "kind of a psychopath." Take all this with a grain of salt haloperidol. - Ilene
Courtesy of TIME, by Tiffany O’Callaghan
An overactive dopamine reward system in the brain may help explain why psychopaths pursue rewards without regard for consequences, according to new research published this week in the journal Nature Neuroscience. Previous research has found that individuals who suffer from antisocial personality disorder—often referred to as sociopathology or psychopathology, despite debate over whether these are distinct conditions—lack empathy and fear. Yet this new study, from researchers at Vanderbilt University examines what these individuals may have in excess. According to the study, led by Joshua Buckholtz, a graduate student in psychology at Vanderbilt, individuals with antisocial personality disorder traits show signs of dysfunction in dopamine reward systems—suggesting that, in psychopaths, the drive toward reward can overwhelm all else.
Prior to participating in two different experiments, study subjects completed personality tests to identify presence and severity of psychopathic characteristic—including aggression, lack of empathy, and capacity for manipulation, among other things. Drawing on previous research that has established a strong link between substance abuse and psychopathology, in the first experiment researchers gave participants amphetamine, then used functional Magentic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) brain scans to monitor how dopamine release was affected by the stimulant. In a second experiment, study participants were told that they would be paid for performing a simple task, and researchers conducted brain scans while they completed the tasks.
In both experiments, researchers found that participants who had psychopathic characteristics according to the personality test, were more likely than those without those traits to have greater activity in the nucleus accumbens, the area of the brain associated with dopamine reward processing—whether in response to the chemical stimulant, or the suggestion of monetary reward.
The findings suggest that individuals
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Tags: antisocial personality disorder, brain, mental health, mind, neuroscience, psychopath, reward-seeking, risk taking, sociopath, trading stocks
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by ilene - July 11th, 2009 11:00 pm
Click here for a FREE, 90-day trail subscription to our PSW Report!
Courtesy of Allan
XLF – Market Club Triangles -Daily Chart

Their are actually two systems shown on the chart:
(1) Enter trades on appearance of WEEKLY TRIANGLES and exit on appearance of reversing DAILY TRIANGLES. If flat, RE-ENTER on appearance of DAILY TRIANGLE in direction of most recent WEEKLY TRIANGLE;
(2) ENTER/EXIT on appearance of WEEKLY TRIANGLES (disregard DAILY TRIANGLES).
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Tags: basic trading, market club, stock charts, trading 101, trading stocks
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