just a reminder, QE

"As more and more money gets printed, currencies will inevitably devalue and hard assets including stocks will rise. Should inflation start to run rampant, stock markets, as history has shown, could start to rise in a parabolic manner. One would hope central banks would slow QE to prevent this from happening, as the aftermath of such a stock market bubble is always catastrophic."

follow up on one long UNG, and one short SMH

refer to previous posts regarding real time, actionable comments

a trader is a person who earns what he gets...

"The symbol of all relationships among such men, the moral symbol of respect for human beings, is the trader. We, who live by values, not by loot are traders, both in manner and spirit. A trader is a man who earns what he gets and does not give or take the undeserved. A trader does not ask to be paid for his failures, nor does he ask to be loved for his flaws. A trader does not squander his body as fodder, or his soul as alms. Just as he does not give his work except in trade for material values, so he does not give the values of his spirit-his love, his friendship, his esteem-except in payment and in trade for human virtue, in payment for his own selfish pleasure, which he receives from men he can respect."
~from Atlas Shrugged

SMH follow up

fail-safe @ 35.29

SMH- s

@34.79

market is now at the top of a 13 year "secular" bear range

a picture is worth a million dollars

“bandwagon” theory

Traders often hear about “tulip mania,” the “South Sea bubble” and other similar events where traders have followed the crowd to send prices to extreme levels. You might add the technology dot.com bubble of the late 1990s or the more recent housing bubble to the list of those events where traders got carried away with higher and higher prices. Everyone wanted to be part of the action – the “crowd psychology” or “bandwagon” theory. The same type of crowd response applies to price action on a smaller scale, too. For example, when a market is coming up from a basing area on the charts, “smart money” is responsible for the majority of the initial buying. As people jump on board, we see the bandwagon effect, and that bandwagon pushes prices up. Volume tends to surge at its peak, certainly on the buy side, during the markup phase in the middle. Later, toward the end of the trend, smart money is not doing the buying; somebody else is. The smart money is doing the selling. The market tops by rolling over or sometimes with a spike top. We can see the crowd impact expressed in price and in volume. Just think about what happens among professional traders when the stock market goes up even when the fundamentals don’t provide much support for such a move. Prices often rise because institutional money managers feel pressured to follow the crowd and chase performance. How can they explain why their results are below the industry benchmarks if they don’t go with the crowd and buy the stocks everyone else has in their portfolios? That rationale alone can drive markets higher than they “should” go.

trend trading, momentum, swing, price action, trading futures & equities

"If you are ready to give up everything else - to study the whole history and background of the market ... as a medical student studies anatomy. If you can do all that, and, in addition, you have the cool nerves of a gambler, the sixth sense of a kind of clairvoyant, and the courage of a lion, you have a ghost of a chance." 
---Bernard Baruch

I think that expertise is the connection between knowing and doing.

"Some degree of derivative learning is necessary - BUT - much learning does not teach understanding. Only through experience and extensive practice and application will understanding and expertise arise."

-Heraclitus, 475 BC

New trader to Master Trader:

 "Sir, what is the secret of your success"? "Two words."

"And, sir, what are they?" "Right decisions."

"And how do you make the right decisions." "One word."

"And, sir, what is that one word?" "Experience."

"And, sir, how do you get experience?" "Two words."

"And, sir, what are those two words?" "Wrong decisions."