1/22/2007

Education of A Speculator

In the last five years , I have read hundreds of books on trading and speculation and looked at virtually every bit of academic research on the market.I have over the years researched and built several trading systems and discarded lots of them. While I continue to look at new books and new research and new systems , this year I decided to change focus and decided to reread lot of the old books, articles, academic research and my working files of system development once again.

Experience changes your perspective. Lot of time what you discard in the beginning , you figure out has lot of value if you revisit the same stuff after actual trading experience. Lot of stuff I might have dismissed at first glance, I find now has lot of value. Revisiting it with a much deeper understanding of how market works gives you a different insight which can be implemented in to current models.

This weekend I spent time trying to plan out the reading and group the readings so as to attack it systematically. While I was going through them here are couple of things I thought about and will be fodder for next series of posts:

  • Why there are less than 10 books on short selling
  • Do books that sell for $30 plus have more profitable ideas
  • Theories do not matter in practical life
  • Why there are 10000 books on technical analysis
  • Psychologist have cure for everything
  • Books by traders
  • Books by non traders
  • Learning from those who had triple digit returns
  • The wonderful world of academic research in stock market

5 comments:

Unknown said...

i read william j o'neil's how to make money selling stocks short last year and am re-reading it now - picking up on the things i missed or didnt appreciate the first time

Unknown said...

big gap up on ATI, but not X - might it follow (eventually)?

Pradeep Bonde said...

That gap is due to Rev Shark newsletter, which has lot of followings.

Pradeep Bonde said...

http://www.revsharkblog.com/
Stock of the Week



Earnings season always adds an extra element of complication to stock picking. Earnings are generally just a roll of the dice, and we are usually fooling ourselves to think we have an edge. In addition there always lurks the possibility of a significant negative surprise. However, earnings reports do offer the possibility of playing positive anticipation which is the case with this week’s stock.



Our Stock of the Week, a repeat, is Allegheny Technologies (ATI), and is due to report earnings on Wednesday morning this week. After some recent struggles, many commodity and mining stocks are showing signs of bottoming, and look to be turning up. ATI, which is in the very hot titanium niche, is one of them.



ATI has beat its earnings estimates by 9, 42, 21 and 16 percent respectively over the last four quarters. The chances they beat this quarter’s estimate of 1.60 is very high, but there is still plenty of risk there.



We believe that ATI will trade up in anticipation of another exceptional quarter, and given the technical set-up, we feel it is a good speculation at this point. We are going to take a position with a tight stop around 90. We will look to reduce the position on Tuesday no matter what, but may consider holding a small position for earnings.

Pradeep Bonde said...

Plus there is a news about it. Mostly the Revshark weekly recommendations gap up and many time reverse next day.