I have been in cash waiting for the perfect entry point. Perfect never comes…
In this life, pretty good will have to do.
You can never pick the perfect entry point. That moment, that stock tick…
Ranges. Think in ranges…

Panic! Everybody PANIC!!!
Now is the time for you to watch and learn.
Watch the crowd panic, now listen and see…

Relax and get to work. Watch for opportunities. Look for the opportunities that others will miss because they fear…

Know your time frame to take advantage of opportunity. There is no need to be in a rush to catch the market bottom. Few of us catch that single point. Don’t get greedy. Sacrifice some of the upside, to see the start of the new uptrend.

Know your goals, as opportunities present themselves. They will pass.
Be ready, but if you miss this opportunity. Wait. Watch.
There will be more…

Investors will ride the tide. Hold on through this. Sleep well and let it pass.
Traders will play. Carefully. Try to outsmart the market and let the market teach them, that they can’t…

My retirement money stays invested, but when it comes to trading. It is time to play.

Be careful out there. Protect yourself. Profit or pay for the education. The market will now teach us that the perfect entry point is unobtainable…

So here I am. Adapting to the new normal. New schedule, new workplaces, new tools. Less access to information, fewer opportunities to trade. New perspective and new opportunities to learn. New problems. The new normal… Every day we are learning something new. I guess, in a way, every day is “back to school”. If you are open to the lessons that the market is teaching you.

So what is the market telling me?

PANIC!

EVERYBODY PANIC!!!

That is always the case, right? We have to deal with the crisis of the day. And there is always a crisis out there. The market is always telling us to panic and buy gold, even when that is not the right thing to do…

By trying to time the next pullback, we miss the rally…

So with cash to deploy, I have been waiting for the right time. Trying to time the market and waiting and waiting and waiting… By trying to time the market top I have successfully missed the past couple rallies. The market was telling me one thing and doing another. That is often the way it works.

Part of the reason that I have not been in the market is situational. Dealing with family emergency after family emergency. But they never stop coming. Life goes on and so must we. We have no choice. We must continue to prepare for retirement even if it may never come…

You have to trade amid the crisis and turmoil. In some ways, that is all there is…

Looking at the charts lately, I could easily see that the market was toppy. Listening to the talking heads you could hear everywhere that the market was ready to pull back. All this information confirmed my assumptions. I knew the pullback was coming. I just knew it! So I waited and waited and waited as the market ground higher, I waited. I am still waiting…

The charts tell me we are at a top. The doom and gloom out there, tells me we are at top. The news cycle is always ready to throw a new crisis into the mix to crash everything and when you throw market fundamentals, economics and politics into the mix, you know that that pullback is coming any minute. So you play it safe and wait for the market to pull back and for everything to go on sale.

Problem…

No one told the market it was supposed to pull back… So it didn’t. It just went on, to do what it does. Price in all information at every given moment. To integrate it all into a single price at every instant and to continue on…

The economy, international politics, terrorist threats, the weather. It is all so complex and it all adds into the market price at a given instant and who knows what will change at any given moment. No one can predict the future. Especially not the people who are so confident that they can predict the future. The market will do what it does and it will continue to. That is what makes it so interesting and so dangerous.

So what is a trader to do?

Trade the market you have, not the market you want… You never really know what you have, so you have to learn to play carefully. Defensively. To protect yourself while taking advantage of opportunity. Carefully…

Just as swimming in the ocean can be fun, it can be dangerous. So can swimming against the market…

Waves can crash anytime, in the ocean and in the market…

So today might be the next crash. Or it might be another day of the slow grind higher. The slow grind up that can make you rich. If you are in the market. The grind up that can leave you poor if you don’t participate. But beware the crash, the crash that can take it all away in an instant…

So now that we have defined the problem – the market will do what it does and we can’t predict the future – what am I going to do? When you want to profit from the market, you have to be in it. You have to play to win and you have to pay to play. The costs are money, time and opportunity…

How to play, without the benefit of prophesy?

Defensively…

So to play, lately I have been in cash. A good play in down markets. I leave my conservative retirement alone to work. I play with the money we talk about here. Play to learn…

Retirement money, working the magic of compound interest… Trading money, in the game to learn…

I use the relatively small trading money we talk about here to learn, from the market. As I gain experience and knowledge over the years, I trade the market to beat the market and I learn that I am not as smart as I think I am and I still can’t predict the future.

So what to do?

For me, I need to get out of cash because the slow grind higher may continue. Buy in to protect against missed opportunity… However, I need to protect myself on the downside in case that crash comes. Protective stop limits on all my trades…

This is how I will play it. Until this becomes obviously wrong. Then I will adapt. You have to adapt to what the market does because the market will do what it will do. It always will. The market doesn’t care what you or I think and it really, really doesn’t care about that guy who claims to predict the future. It just does what it does and keeps doing it… So understand that and be ready to trade the market as it is and protect yourself from what will be.

The only constant is change… Accept the world as it is and be ready for change. Adapt and succeed…

After my last post about being prepared for the market reaction to an emergency, that makes the national news, I was hit with my own personal family emergency. It didn’t make the national news…

As I went from emergency mode to the new normal, trying to adapt to the situation personally and professionally, I tried to get back to blogging as usual. I take my duty to you and this blog very seriously and when I write something for you, I want it to be of value to you. That takes time. Finding the time that I used to be able to find, in order to do this work, has been difficult. So I started to write and then something came up, so I saved a draft. Then I started to write another post and something else came up, another draft… Time after time…

Writing the perfect blog post takes time. In an emergency, you don’t have time. So I haven’t written the perfect blog post yet. No one has…

I can’t tell you how many drafts I have written, trying to get back to normal. Life will never get back to normal. Not the way it was. Life has changed. I have to learn to adapt to the new normal.

Over time as I looked back at my last post and wrote, what I thought was going to be the next post. I kept looking at how the market reacts to a national emergency and how we adapt to a personal emergency. There is the full out emergency response, the pull back and then we adapt to the new normal…

If you look at your life and watch how the people around you react to events, you will learn how the big guys in the big markets react. This is so simple, yet so complex. Let me explain here so you can see…

I usually get about this far in my draft and then try to tell you everything you need to know for your next personal emergency, all in one blog post! I want you to know how to deal with personal emergencies and professional emergencies as well as the next national emergency.

There is so much to tell you. So little time to write the perfect blog…

Perfection is the enemy of progress, so I will officially end my quest for the perfect blog post here and now and I will work to serve you better with a little more frequent “imperfection” in the future, as we learn to deal with life and the markets.

So let me leave you here for now and work to give you the same quality information as before in smaller bites, more frequently. I hope this serves you better.

Remember, as you watch me, you are watching a person, a professional and a business. Here you get an honest and open look at the things I do right and the things I do wrong. That is what I have to offer you. See the business mistakes I have made, think of how they apply to the people you know and the businesses you invest in. Watch, learn, plan and adapt so you can do better…

So today, I am writing to you to apologize for the long delay and my unsuccessful attempts to adapt to the new normal. I will try to move forward with good quality posts for you, posts that may not be perfect, but may just be good enough to help you get through your day a little easier as well as help you understand the markets we live in a little better…

Damn… I really want to rewrite this to make it better. “More perfect”. This is really hard…

Thanks for staying with me through this, as we learn to navigate the waters ahead together, I will work to do a better job for you…

You must plan for an emergency. In case of fire, you have to be ready. If you have an accident you have to know what to do. You must always be prepared for an emergency, in life and in the market, you have to be prepared.

What will you do when something bad happens? You must prepare, have a plan, execute the plan and adapt.

Yesterday there was another attack on innocents, this time it was in Boston. Pray for the victims, their rescuers and care givers. Pray for the investigators and those who will bring the cowardly attackers to justice…

In the coming days as the dust settles and the scene of the emergency becomes a crime scene, the markets will react to the incident.

Yesterday we were thinking about a North Korean threat, today we are reacting to an unexpected attack in Boston. You can’t predict the future but you can prepare and plan. Do the preparation and the thought experiments now and you will be better prepared each time you confront the unknown in the future.

Today as I change my plan to adapt to the world as it is, at this moment, I draw on past experience. I will use the observations that I have made after similar incidents in the past. I will think back to how the market reacted each time and I will adapt my plan today, to how I expect the market to react in the future.

If you have a plan and experience, trade your plan carefully…

If you don’t have a plan or experience and don’t know how to protect yourself, just observe. Now is the time to start your planning for the future. Watch what happens next. Learn. What has happened in the past? Look at the market history over the years. How did it react in an emergency? Get your thoughts in order.

Pay attention to news and commentary. Collect articles, bookmarks, resources and information. Take notes and save all you need, in order to prepare for next time. Take advantage of any information that you can.

Watch and learn with the goal of understanding what happens in the market, how it happens and why. Learn who to trust as an honest resource. You will see all kinds of things in the market after a crisis like this. You will see the best and the worst in people. Watch and learn, be ready for what comes next.

Plan, execute and adapt. Succeed and help others…

Last week everyone expected North Korea to launch a missile. This news would have been a concern for military, political and business types all around the world. Since the market is at an interim high and everyone is looking for a reason for it to pull back, the launch would have been the perfect signal for all who are looking for an excuse to sell. So everyone who looks at this short term trading time frame was ready to pull the trigger and sell. Problem. North Korea didn’t launch the missile. Actually that is not a problem. That is a good thing.

This week experts are predicting the same thing. Missile launch, market drop. Again, we can’t predict the future. Why? Because we can’t read the mind of the military leader with the launch codes.

As always we have to watch the news and the commentators to be good investors, but we have to keep in mind that no matter how confident the commentator, he can’t read the mind of the North Korean military leaders and he can’t predict if and when they will launch…

Even if you could predict the launch time with 100% accuracy, you can’t predict what comes next…

Launches go bad under the best circumstances and in North Korea they aren’t working under the best circumstances. Maybe the thing will blow up on the pad. Maybe it will blow up in mid air. Maybe someone will shoot it down. Maybe they won’t. We just don’t know. No one does. No one can predict the future or how the market will react to the unknowns as they come to be known.

So we have to be ready for anything. We have to invest based on what we think might happen and we have to be ready to be wrong. Remember trading success is as much about protecting yourself from loss when you are wrong as it is about taking profits when you get it right.

So we need to understand the geopolitical risks of the North Korean missile launch and how it plays into the market these days.

This news cycle people are looking at commodity prices. Gold and oil prices are falling. So while they look at “the new new thing” in the news. Be sure to watch what they are watching, but keep an eye on the other news too and don’t forget North Korea. You must be ready for anything at any time. That is how you have to trade. Be ready for the next news cycle but don’t forget the past. It all matters. It all adds up to set the price at any given time.

Last week we saw the latest and greatest from the land of The Euro Crisis. We anticipated what the market would do and it did something else. That is the way it usually works. You can’t predict the future, but you have to try. You make a guess, take a calculated risk and then adapt to the world as it changes on you unexpectedly. Protect yourself.

The best stock analysts don’t get it right that much more than the rest of us. The best get it right around 60% of the time. What they do well is protect themselves when they are wrong. Limit their losses and adapt to the changes, they make good course corrections.

Today the Euro Crisis continues, as it will for some time. So now that we know more than we did before, what will we do differently? What did we learn from the past week and what can we do better in the future? How fast can we adapt when we find that we are wrong?

Tomorrow when the banks open in Cyprus, will there be a run on the banks or an orderly restart to the system? How will the big depositors react to having 40% of their money taken from them? Will they run on the bank? We won’t see them in the street… How will the markets react to the news and how can you best position yourself? How can you best protect yourself?

Right now I am still totally defensive. Missing the rally. That is the cost of playing it safe, missing the opportunities…

This morning when the European stocks started to pull back, I felt like a genius! Here it is, the pull back and I am ready for it! But I have to look back at all the gains I missed to be here. It isn’t about picking the market top at the instant of change. It is all about getting enough of the upside to succeed. I am not going to do that if I remain in cash forever. They all tell you that “the market rewards risk taking”. What they don’t mention is that it penalizes risk too.

So I am still shopping for stocks and options. Hoping for a pullback to buy at a discount, but I am becoming motivated to buy at a premium just to get back in the game…

What if I am wrong about this whole pull back genius thing? I will anticipate, adapt and change course as required…

The news cycle seems to be saying that it is time to panic. Again… Panic doesn’t help, so we will remain calm and look for opportunities while others panic…

The Financial problems in the Eurozone are in the market news again today. This time it is Cyprus. Since we are all looking for a reason for the recent rally to end, this might just be it.

Is this a surprise? Nope. The Eurozone problems are nothing new but the market sends us signals and sometimes we will all react to a signal in the same way and move the market. Most analysts seem ready for a pullback from the rally highs. So is this Eurozone news the catalyst that will be the start of a market pull back? I don’t know. I can’t predict the future, but markets were down in the Asia/Pacific Region, Europe and the US is opening down. So that is a clue that something is happening.

Who knows how much this will change things by the end of the week, if at all. For now it is something we need to be aware of and react accordingly.

I missed the rally. I have been in all cash. So the time for me to get in the market is coming. Will this be a pullback that creates a buying opportunity? Will it be a non event or maybe the beginning of a crash? You never know…

So I have to deploy resources strategically, planning for a buy if the pullback comes and having a plan to protect myself if I am wrong. While the others out there panic, I will remain calm, watch, learn and work to take advantage of the right opportunities.

This weekend I was thinking about stock trading, business, the world we live in, and the whole system. You probably were too. So what did you do? What did you learn and how can you profit from it?

I wanted to know how things were going in commodities, health care, retail, transportation, media, advertising, technology and housing. That was just to start!

So what is the best way to gather competitive intel on all this? Like any good spy, you watch, listen, make contact, and start the right conversation…

So when I got gas, I chatted with the gas station attendant about the traffic. When I bought coffee, I looked at the price and looked at the crowd in the store compared to my last visit. When I bought some snacks at the local convenience store I asked the clerk about how busy things have been lately. When I visited a local health care facility I looked at the staffing and wait time for services and I asked the nurses how things were going. I checked the parking lot of another facility. I noted traffic patterns on the roads and shelf stock in the retailers. Price changes… Looking for everything I could learn from and asking about all that I see, every chance I got.

The goal is always to consult the right expert, in this case, the person who is at the point of sale and doing the selling.

Services or goods, I look, listen and enjoy a nice conversation with the people I do business with. Then ponder profit. Theirs, mine and everyone’s.

Learn the trends. Watch your world. Listen. Ask…

Make friends with the people you do business with. They can help you each day. Let them. Be sure to help them too. It is how the American System of Business works in The United States and around the world. It is life. Engage and enjoy!

Some of the most profitable business intel comes as the result of simply asking a friendly question. Listen to the answer, learn your resources and watch your world…

We talk about the stock market here so much, but the idea is to learn how our world works so we can control all that we can. How does that work? Follow the money…

I remember a guy who had a pretty good handle on life, saying “follow the money trail.” So every time a businessman, politician, celebrity, or anyone else says one thing and does another, I follow the money. I can usually figure out what happened, why they did what they did, and I can usually get a pretty good idea of what they will do next.

Money is a tool that shows commitment and true belief, as opposed to what people say they believe…

If you tell a friend about great idea you have for an invention, they will usually agree with you and be supportive of you and your great new idea. Until you tell them you want to sell them one. When you go from friendly chat to business proposition, their story changes. Why? Follow the money…

So as we watch the market, politics, news, entertainment, and the rest of the world, we will always start by listening to what people say. Then we will watch what they do. We will follow the money.

The best way to follow the money is to follow the market. So we will…

As you go through your day, listen and watch. Follow the money. It will tell you many things that you need to know. It is useful and fun and that is why we are here.

So I am all in cash and want to get back to where I am all in stock.

Problem. It looks to me like the market is ready to pull back.

Problem. I can’t predict the future.

I think there may be a pullback soon, but I have to be ready to be wrong and position myself accordingly. There is never a perfect time to make the move, I just have to make a move…

One time I saw some statistics about the success rate of some of the big time stock analysts. The best were right only 60% of the time. That told me that market success isn’t about always being right. It is about being right and being wrong and being in the game!