Some things never change. Regardless of what the FB bankers did or not do, and regardless of what happened at the NDAQ exchange, the blame game is alive and well. This is not to say that responsibility for errors of omission or commission should be ignored.

The recent big moves in APPL after the earnings announcement lead to a lot of bashing on analysts. People were screaming how could the analysts 'miss that piece of data', how could they have been so wrong? Analysts are usually very bright people. The question is not whether they are smart enough or even whether they missed something - well, that does happen, but not as often as you think. Read on to find out why.

The prediction is that I'll get a large number of emails by EOD and later tonight after traders survey the damage.

Yes, some things never change. Fighting a strong tape is a time honored tradition among many intra-day traders. Unfortunately.

What are you analyzing? How do you make your trading decisions? I'm sure some of you will say, 'I don't think, I just trade what I see...or you think that's what you're supposed to do.

This post was inspired by another blog entry. Specifically, the line that caught my attention the most in that post was:

"It is not possible to reduce trading decisions to a simple set of rules or patterns to be applied blindly."

The cure for New Years resolutions - NYR Let's get real for a moment.

It is the second week of January and I'm assuming many people have made at least some progress in forgetting about their NYR. Seriously. These things rarely work. Why?

When I left graduate school to become a trader it was 1994 and there were a goodly handful of books specifically about trading psychology and a few more specifically about expert traders. I, as many new traders, couldn't get enough of this stuff. I would even sometimes just skip the Chicago social scene and go home to read - on a Friday night! I was definitely hooked.

Emotions get a bad rap in trading. The prevailing thought among many traders, including trading educators, is to rid oneself of emotions, or ignore emotions. The fact is that if you are alive and you don't suffer from an unusual brain disorder or brain injury, you will have emotions.

Sometimes I wonder if I should create an email indicator for my trading, or maybe I already have one. You may have heard the old adage that the market does a good job of keeping the majority of market participant's off-sides.

Is it against the law to cross the street against the light when there are no cars coming? Technically speaking yes. Steph knows a woman that crossed the street, when there was no cars coming but against the light. A traffic cop just so happened to come around the corner and see her do it. He gave her a $200 ticket. The woman scoffed at the idea of the ticket she felt was unnecessary and a joke. She blew it off! A notice in the mail came a couple months later telling her that since she ignored the fine it is now $400. She went to court and the judge reduced the amount to $300. Valuable lesson? Well for her, it was, because she got caught and she is now preaching up and down the street to everybody she knows to not j-walk.