Do you guys want me to make a post about intraday price action? I can't cover everything obviously but I think I can cover the things you guys screw up often!

If you're willing to take the time to share your knowledge, I'm in.

No trading in the AM tomorrow. 3 back to back meetings that I can't avoid. I expect chop or puke.

It will take me a couple days to write a post but I'm going to talk about the 2-3 things I know you guys repeatedly make mistakes on: FOMO'ing into trades and knife catching. I actually understand the first one but I don't understand the second one.

Per my early note on being occupied or mentally compromised, if you can't fully focus for intra day - no.

To start, let's talk about some basics. Remember that I am trying to condense books into sentences, so this won't be every possible thing. This applies on every time frame, but some things you need to ask yourself for base conditions:

1) What is the overall trend on a higher time frame? Forget something like yearly trend because duh it's always up, but what's the daily/weekly position. Think back on 2022: the prevailing trend changed in January from up to down. If you were short biased the entire year and you had a sell the rip mentality, you would have done well and had less stress than trying to be a long only trader in a down year. Within this macro trend, there were micro trends when you wouldn't want to oppose the market on a short term basis. You didn't want to be short in late September for example. Don't confuse who you are either. Right now, I am favoring very short term trades, but I am about to switch back to pure swing trading because the conditions are changing again. You can be a macro trader or something else, but don't forget your strategy.

2) What is the trend (or is there one) right now? Markets only trend or consolidate and go through patterns of accumulation, marking up, distribution, and marking down. That's it! Markets spend the majority of their time consolidating and getting ready for a move. These moves when they happen can almost always be seen in hindsight by some type of technical pattern. Consolidation ends with a break down or break out. You can get in trouble when you expect the market to do too much. The market also does not move in a linear fashion. There are posters here who I think on some subconscious level believe that everything should be logical and should move in a straight line up and a straight line down, and anything else is the market being 'rigged'. The reason for this is that there are buyers and sellers, which create imbalances with either other that drive price in one direction or another.

3) What external factors and correlations impact the market? Commodities, central banks, currencies, and a slew of other factors directly influence price. Strong dollar tends to be bad for equities, high yields / rates suppress bond asset prices. Legislation and things like debt ceilings are other factors. Try to day trade on fed day before the minute come out. The market is going to be stuck and premiums are going to be elevated. There are better and worse times to swing the bat, but you must always be aware of what is going on around you. Remember that correlations aren't formulaic and if A happens B happens, but rather probabilistic: if A happens and the conditions are right, B has a better than 50% chance of happening, therefore the odds are in my favor and I feel good planning on this. You should always look at what bonds are doing.

4) Which assets and asset classes are in vogue at the moment? Sometimes you get those banner days where they're buying everything. However, assets rotate: "they're selling high beta and buying staples" or they're piling into financials. At this exact moment, biotech is popular. In Q4 of last year, energy was where the action was. Once trades get crowded or saturated, money flows out of it and into something else. This cycle repeats itself over and over and over. It is always easiest to trade when you have relative strength on your side because they're buying the sector. You'll be victimized a lot less often when you start to see this. While this may seem painfully obvious, it's just easier when the wind is at your back. A great way of gauging trend is to look at moving averages: Is something above it's 8 day but not too extended? Is this sector up? This has good odds of continuation. Obviously it's not THAT easy, you just want the odds to be in your favor vs. random. I know some of you are just doing stupid stuff like saying (in Steve Carrell voice) "I like TSLA" and just randomly. Wouldn't you rather make that trade when QQQ is going up, VIX is going down, and DXY is declining?

More later, but let me know your thoughts.

Important edit: many of us here posts charts and look at charts, but they are just not the only thing that matters in your decision process. They matter, but the outside work and context is equally if not more important. For example, are you gonna fade the S&P when AMZN, GOOGL, MSFT, AAPL, TSLA, and BRK-B are going up and VIX is going down? Hell no, you're not. Gonna short XOM if XLE is trending with increasing volume? It doesn't matter what the chart says sometimes. Oversold can get more oversold (look at BOIL), overbought can get more overbought.

I can't post photos from my iPad anymore, Brandon is getting cheap, but I'll eventually post what i watch intraday. It's sectors, VIX, DXY, and the tick. Sometimes I'll watch TRIN and currency pairs for extra edge, but you don't want info overload either.

Part of it is self doubt. There are several picks I've made that I think I've been alone on and it messes with my confidence. FGEN is a good example of that. It eventually did exactly what's I thought it would, but it took time and one bad day shook me out of my position. Not complaining an about profit, but I could have had such a better return If I ignored the daily noise and stuck to the 3-6 month chart.

My mistakes (that I perceive as mistakes) happen when I don't listen to my own analysis. For instance BOIL. My research told me to wait until February to buy in. I'm not sure if FOMO is the right term here, but I was afraid I would miss the bounce back because it's so dang volatile so I jumped in at 12. My own charts said to wait until 10 and change.

I've counted the number of picks I've made correctly and it blows me away how often I've been right, but executed poorly. I think it all comes down to patience and a fear of failure.

There are so few people here that post ideas anymore, please don't be shy about bouncing them off anyone here. I think the analysis program you built has some edge, seriously.

I do think it's easier to "buy quality at fair prices" to quote Buffett, but we can also "buy crap at great prices" and make money too.

BOIL everyone can escape from on a long enough time horizon using covered calls.

https://www.atlas-lithium.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/ATLX-Investor-Presentation.pdf

This is really promising!

Current market cap of 45 million. Their neighbor, SGML, has a market cap of 3.1 billion. ATLX has a larger footprint of lithium with an SLR report signifying commercial grade lithium of 6+%. NDA with global partnerships. Still no word on who that might be obviously. Uplist to NASDAQ has occurred earlier this year.
Current stock price is 7 dollars. Tiny number of outstanding shares. If market cap reaches their neighbor, SGML, the stock price would be 600 dollars. Probably won't get there, but a boy can dream.
Keep in mind, SGML has no revenue currently. ATLX also has partial ownership in iron, quartzite, (Apollo Resources 45%) and gold (Jupiter Gold 28%) mines about to begin production. They have mineral rights to nickel and rare earth metals as well. So far, they have followed through with their plan accordingly. The Nasdaq uplist was a huge step forward. Projected Lithium Concentrate Production (150,000 tons/yr) with plant installation planned for 2024/2025. Current price of lithium per ton is 8300.

It's a long play still but I thought I'd bring it to y'alls attention.

/NG & BOIL are both up ~7%. That doesn't really make much sense to me since BOIL is 2x leveraged.

Thank you so much 30K!!

You are truly a blessing with your willingness to teach and help beginners like myself with so much to learn!!

Thank you again!!

I too appreciate your insight. Haven't digested it all, but just want you to know.

I think we should probably all give 10% of our gains to an NIL collective, or the AFS for an endowed scholarship in your kids' names.