Every once in a while, the market will open below the point where you would have stopped out your long position or above where you would have covered your short position. 

The best practice is to offset the position right away. Bad situations become worse. 

Your first loss is your best loss. 

Aggravating as it might be, this has not happened enough to me to convince me to stop holding positions overnight or over the weekend. In fact, I'll go so far to say that holding my positions are what I attribute the majority of my gains to. 

You need a great deal of help when you're getting started. That doesn't mean you have to give away the house in order to get it.

For one, I'll help you as much as I can with what I know that will save you time and money. 

Second, pay as you go compensation plans have the most flexibility, as opposed to "you were here at the beginning, there are two of us, so you get 50%." That's a bad deal.

When you align your goals with your overall behavior, you'll have harmony in your life and business. 

Coach your clients about what they should expect. It will save you tons of time in work and having to explain things, and in the process make you look like a pro.

It's the differences that sell. Your potential clients are looking for more than just performance from you. 

Spend some time taking notes on this episode if you're looking to get new assets from potential clients.

There are a ton of moving parts to your trading business. Pick your partners carefully - sometimes you can't unwind things as fast as you set them up. 

Everyone flirts hard to get your business and the best deal you can strike is on the day you walk in the front door - it only gets worse after that - and that's why people change firms. 

Measure 8 times and cut once. 

If volatility increases while you have an existing position on, you should probably cut the size of the trade down to reflect the new vol. 

Market vol is increasing due to higher level of discomfort and uncertainty, but don't go adding new indicators now. They're not as telling as you'd think. 

In this episode, Michael Martin discusses the various reasons you might consider to add short selling to your portfolio.

You can short sell for real returns, or you can use it to cut the vol in your long-only strategy. 

If you enter a short sale late as can happen with breakouts to the downside, you might have it rally in your face before it becomes meaningfully profitable.

In today's episode, Michael Martin discusses one way that you can enter the market short with a more improved entry - and potentially less risk.

The most valuable information is not necessarily the recent data. 

Michael Martin discusses what you can learn from a historical chart. Names mentioned CMGI, Munder Net Net Fund, Vertical Net, Cronos, Bitcoin, and Cisco. 

Most rookies are looking to take profits when the have a winning trade. Professionals look to continue riding the trend for all it's worth. As I've said here before, inexperienced traders need the boost to their self-esteem by posting smaller wins to validate their behavior as traders. Small or not, a win is a win and that's what's important to them. We advocate something that takes a little more evolution. 

I have found in almost 30 years of teaching that a trader's unwillingness to add to winners is more of an uncomfortable, emotional problem than it is to understand the math involved.

Like any behavior, it takes some getting used to, but if you do it enough times, you can make it a good habit and replace the bad habit of having price targets.

You're doing the work anyway, you might as well get paid for it. 

Study how the security behaved after you took profits at your price target. What percentage of them continued to move in your favor?

What was the average gain beyond your price target that you might have earned had you stayed in the trade?

It looked like some of the markets were about to run, but they all came back. 

How do you handle snap backs? 

Michael Martin discusses how he handles quick reversals in the markets immediately after he establishes a position.

When it's time to chill, it's time to chill. Spying on the market during the time you've earmarked to put some distance between yourself and the market defeats the purpose of the break. 

I don't use them per se, but I test the intraday data around key inflection points in a simulator. I don't look at nor study intraday charts. 

Your max risk per trade is just that - your max. You might consider trading within that risk measurement. Why? Murphy's Law. Take that into account when you are position sizing your trades. 

You can normalize risk across all instruments so that you can think of each security in terms of risk units, that is, shares or contracts per unit. That's achieved by calculating the volatility of each instrument. In position sizing this way, you won't trade one more aggressively than another. They'll all be the same risk % to your overall account. 

For example, given the prevailing volatilities, 26 contracts of Sugar might be equal to only 6 contracts of Crude Oil in terms of percentage risk to your capital. Each would be a 1% risk unit even though Sugar has 4x plus more contracts than Crude Oil. 

You have to surrender control for this strategy to work for you.

If you're hyper-vigilant once you're filled, or you have a strong emotional need to monitor your trades tick-by-tick, this isn't for you. 

Despite the enormous "want" from investors from this growth opportunity, the stock is low priced. Why is that?

Does price move first and fundamentals follow (as PTJ said), or is it the other way around?

IMHO, price is the only thing that will tell you the truth, and in this case it doesn't matter if you uptime and downtime the chart - the answer is the same. Investors are in a "wait and see" mode. 

Two things the price tells you are 1) what everyone is thinking about the prospects for growth; and 2) the overall trend of the security. If it's cheap, it's cheap for a reason. 

Ultimately, blockchain technology is solid, but Bitcoin is a tulip bubble.

Don't put all your hope in one trade. If you trade a basket of names, the net upside can be greater than that of the one name you're counting on - and you've diversified your risk.

Trade smaller positions and manage risk with protective stop order placement.