Blog Posts

How do you start a successful trading career today? What are the best ways to ensure you have success? Let’s take a look.   Key Takeaways – How to Start a Successful Trading Career Choose a time horizon that fits your personality. Most discretionary traders these days operate on multi-week to multi-month timeframes. Learn markets […]

When people think of bubbles, we think of high and rising asset prices that far exceed the fundamental value of the underlying assets.  The expectation, or at least the risk, is that at some indeterminate point in the future prices will reverse and cause large losses.  But can bubbles actually be a good thing?    […]

What actually stands in the way of trading success? Let’s go up a level and think about the big things that hold back success in anything. We practically all have something (or many things) holding us back from achieving what we’d ideally hope to achieve. Sometimes it’s a certain way of thinking. It might be […]

Are trading gurus skilled, lucky, or playing a different game altogether (sales)? We’ll present the different angles, common narratives, and see what the real story is.   Key Takeaways – Trading Gurus: Skill, Luck, or Neither? Trading can be skill-based depending on edge and execution. Casino gambling is always a negative-expectancy game where the house […]

Gold is not used in most portfolios, which are typically a stock-bond mix. Gold nonetheless has value because of its unique properties as a non-financial store of wealth that has a strong track record of offsetting equity and bond declines. If we ignore other asset classes (most notably bonds), how would we optimize a gold […]

Inflation is a key worry for market participants, as both stocks and bonds are exposed. It’s especially a worry for those holding nominal bonds. For this reason, traders and investors can turn to instruments like Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS) or other inflation-linked bonds to shield their portfolios.  With these, you get a stated return plus […]

Over the years, markets have become increasingly made up of quantitative oriented traders, both in market making and actively setting prices.  Math, algorithms, and specific rules are used in these strategies to strip away emotion, gut feel, and behavioral errors that are common with humans. At the same time, intuition-based trading is still part of […]

Whether day trading is worth it as a financial strategy depends on various factors including individual skill level, risk tolerance, market knowledge, and access to trading tools and technologies. Let’s look in a bit more detail.   Key Takeaways – Is Day Trading Worth It? For Day Trading: Potential for Quick Profits – Can capitalize on […]

The phrase “it’s a stock-picker’s market” means that there’s enough performance dispersion in the market’s components such that it benefits those armed with better information, analysis, or insight on which securities will outperform (or underperform).  The phrase is typically promoted by active managers and those paid to pick stocks. Naturally, it’s a controversial claim/slogan given […]

What do central banks own in their portfolios and why is it important? Fundamentally, understanding why markets are doing what they’re doing is a function of who’s buying and who’s selling and for what reasons. Since central banks are some of the largest asset managers globally, it helps to understand their influence and their motivations […]