Gets your attention, doesn’t it? The unfortunate thing though, is that most people will react negatively to this intentionally inflammatory, media-ready, title statement. Has some Wall Street virus attacked our financial experience memory chip? Bouncing around unpredictably is precisely what the markets have always done. In the last forty years, there have been no less than ten 20% or greater corrections followed by rallies that brought the markets to significantly higher levels. Volatility is not a bad thing— a non-event, even.

Ironically, it is this routine volatility (caused by hundreds of human, economic, political, and natural variables) that is the only real certainty existent in the financial markets. Would anyone be happy with market prices that didn’t change? Should anyone expect market valuations that only go up? So what’s all the anxiety, scrambling, and crying about? As absurd as this may sound at first

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Today was nearly a mirror of yesterday, minus the bigger point losses and the higher volume. But that to me doesn’t matter as what is more important is the fact that for the second day in a row the market appeared as if it was ready to crack WIDE OPEN but instead caught a heavy bid rallying into the close to pair back a lot of the damage. Yes it was a down day but it was a “good” down day. The selling was pretty bad intraday and in fact I did get a bit nervous. However, when I get nervous it is normally a good sign as the market normally doesn’t move well with my emotions. So the fact that I got a bit fearful was a contrarian signal. If I would have come back in the final hour, however, and the market would have been lower the entire tone ...

The point of showing my order book yesterday was to emphasize how my number one focus is always risk management. At the time I entered many of the stocks, I expected them to continue to trend for most of the day. Even with expectations for continued movement higher, I sold partial positions into strength early on. I tend to go in aggressively as momentum builds and then scale out into continued strength. It is never my thought that I am selling at the top, instead, I am trying to reduce risk by realizing some profits and reducing my exposure. There are many times that a stock will continue to go higher without me and I am comfortable with that because, as we saw yesterday, the market can reverse quickly and erase all profits if you do not aggressively manage open positions. Some people say ...