THE COMMON ELEMENTS OF SUCCESS:  A really good synopsis of Van Tharp’s latest book over at the Kirk Report. 

CONFIRMATION BIAS:  You better put it in your basket of mind games.  You are going to face it whether you recognize it or not.

TRADE WITH AN EMPTY MIND:  or just be stupid! 

TIGER WOODS AND LOSS AVERSION: Playing it safe could cost you more money than the risk.  Just ask Tiger?

IT IS NOT ABOUT THE SYSTEM:  It is more about learning and developing as a trader in order to use the system properly. 

And with the market playing tricks again, some quotes to leave you with:

“Nobody like change except a wet baby.” Mark Twain

“Success gives you the confidence to be patient with your failures.”  Eric Rohmann

“The only worse thing than waiting is

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In shades of Mark Twain, history doesn’t repeat but sometimes it rhymes – and sometimes the rhyme has a twist. In that light, the “exploding debt dynamics” shoe could wind up on a Western foot this...div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.taipanpublishinggroup.com/~ff/taipan?a=9NjW1_pUTFQ:AckoHO5HFjo:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/taipan?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.taipanpublishinggroup.com/~ff/taipan?a=9NjW1_pUTFQ:AckoHO5HFjo:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/taipan?i=9NjW1_pUTFQ:AckoHO5HFjo:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.taipanpublishinggroup.com/~ff/taipan?a=9NjW1_pUTFQ:AckoHO5HFjo:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/taipan?i=9NjW1_pUTFQ:AckoHO5HFjo:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.taipanpublishinggroup.com/~ff/taipan?a=9NjW1_pUTFQ:AckoHO5HFjo:wd9GD17jvC4"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/taipan?d=wd9GD17jvC4" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.taipanpublishinggroup.com/~ff/taipan?a=9NjW1_pUTFQ:AckoHO5HFjo:l6gmwiTKsz0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/taipan?d=l6gmwiTKsz0" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/taipan/~4/9NjW1_pUTFQ" height="1" width="1"/

When it comes to healthcare reform, people believe some very strange things. Or so says Cliff Asness, founder of AQR Capital Management. Today, the seven biggest “myths” are exposed…

My little brother and his fiancée dropped into Reno/Tahoe for the weekend. They were wending their way west to go apartment hunting in San Francisco, visiting friends and family along the way.

On Saturday we took a two-hour catamaran cruise up at the lake. It was as perfect a day as I’d ever seen it. The water was so clear and blue, you could see 30 feet down through the netting of the boat. The sky was just as blue – not a cloud to be seen – and the day was just hot enough to be perfected by a crisp Tahoe breeze.

At one point in the cruise we sailed past the “Ellison project”

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“Recession easing, but not over: survey.” This morning’s headline, as far as we can tell, only goes to prove that Mark Twain should be quoted far more often: “If you don’t read the paper, you’re uninformed. If you do, you’re misinformed.”

The news story above, which will no doubt be taken as Gospel by all and sundry who ingest it over the next 24 hours, summarizes a quarterly survey from The National Association for Business Economics.

Sara Johnson, one of the geniuses who helped read the report from its original stone tablet, told Reuters that it “provides new evidence that the U.S. recession is abating…

“Industry demand was still declining in the second quarter of 2009,” Johnson continued, “but the breadth of decline had narrowed considerably since late 2008, raising prospects for stabilization in the second half.”

We’ve gone over the “less bad as good” point many times here

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Mark Twain once said that

 

“the inability to forget is infinitely more devastating than the inability to remember.”

 

Traders, after they have traded for a while, have a vast store of memories (boy do I have some!) that can affect the way they trade. They’ve had trades that worked perfectly as planned, even ones that provided twice as much profit as originally projected.  But they’ve also had perfect set-ups go terribly wrong.

 

The question then becomes, which trade do you remember when you are about to enter the next one? Your worst trade? Your best one?  Your last one?

 

We have the free will to choose what we think about in all areas of our lives and this same free will is also available to the trader.  What you do with it can make a difference in

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This post is a guest contribution by Vitaliy N. Katsenelson*, author of Active Value Investing: Making Money in Range-Bound Markets and director of research at Investment Management Associates.

The stock market has dropped. Corporate profits have collapsed. And profit margins have reverted toward the mean. What is next?

Before I dive into the discussion, let me explain the chart below, which I named appropriately, “The pain of mean reversion.”

I looked at reported earnings for S&P 500 and compared them to the “average case” earnings scenario. In the “average case” scenario I took reported earnings of S&P 500 in the early 1990s and grew them at 6% – an average growth rate of GDP over the last century which happens

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Looking past the poverty and ahead, if you sit on Indian investments you could be rewarded with plenty of profits. This from Chris Mayer writing for the Daily Reckoning: Of all the crazy events in 2008, seeing the Taj Mahal Palace hotel in flames on TV is one I’ll remember for a long time. Last year, when I traveled throughout India, my first stop was Mumbai (or Bombay, as people still call it). I stayed at the Taj Mahal Palace. I remember what an oasis of calm that hotel was after spending a day in bustling Bombay. I remember its onyx columns and archways and domes, its hand-woven carpets and crystal chandeliers, its exceedingly polite staff and impressive Sikh doormen. Built in 1903 by a Tata, the Taj was a place of grace and old-world charm. From the hotel, you got a panoramic view of the bay, where the ...

Of all the crazy events in 2008, seeing the Taj Mahal Palace hotel in flames on TV is one I’ll remember for a long time. Last year, when I traveled throughout India, my first stop was Mumbai (or Bombay, as people still call it). I stayed at the Taj Mahal Palace.

I remember what an oasis of calm that hotel was after spending a day in bustling Bombay. I remember its onyx columns and archways and domes, its hand-woven carpets and crystal chandeliers, its exceedingly polite staff and impressive Sikh doormen.

Poor India, the old stomping grounds of the great Hindu kings, the playground of the Mughal Empire, had a rough year in 2008. India has had such a good run - five years of nearly 9% economic growth and a booming stock market - that it had reason to feel it was Fate’s spoiled darling. But in a long and checkered

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In this week’s article, I wanted to follow up my piece from the week prior – Predictions for 2009 – and this time offer some offbeat predictions for 2009. First, however, I wanted to make a few observations about making prognostications. Many times prognosticators look to the past for patterns which will repeat themselves in the future.

I myself look to history quite often, searching for parallels to what is happening today. However, I always keep in mind that famous Mark Twain quote – “History doesn’t repeat itself, at best it sometimes rhymes”. The consensus Wall Street deflationists are ignoring this bit of wisdom.

The deflationists are assuming that hard economic times, like the 1930s, will lead to massive deflation. I predict that our current hard economic times will “rhyme”. The actions of the Bernanke Federal Reserve are completely different than …

The gold price straddled the $740 mark throughout most of trading in the Far East on Monday, although a smallish rally began at 3:00 a.m. New York Time. That tiny rally ended shortly after London opened and began a gentle decline right into the Comex…where both gold and silver had the rug pulled out from underneath them. About 9:00 a.m. Eastern, the selling pressure disappeared and another rally began which got capped just under $750. As of this writing, $12 has been carved from the peak price of the day…and 22 cents for silver. Volume was extremely light…even lower than Friday…so it wasn’t hard to push the price around. Having said that, the US$ was down 95 basis points, but the powers that be wouldn’t let the precious metals prices reflect that. One wonders how much gold and silver would have declined if the US$ had actually risen on the

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