Robert Weinstein Trading Blog

I can be found working full time as a trader and investor living with my family in northern Wisconsin.  Although the journey to full time trading took years to achieve, trading in stocks has been a pursuit for over 20 years.  I had an early start, as my first brokerage account was opened while still in high school.  I used the successes and failures that I experienced, and used them to shape and foster my development of a unique investing style. Using a composite of proprietary developed technical analysis and market psychology, I have been able to find and exploit price discrepancies with a high degree of accuracy.    Differentiating further from the crowd, the majority of my trading is shorting during times a stock appears superior to its reality.  Having lived and traveled throughout Asia, I believe in taking a Japanese “keizen” (continuous improvement) approach to trading. I employ a continuous study of markets and economic behavior of market participants.I enjoy spending time with my family, traveling, reading, and cigars.

After reading many books and especially Tom DeMarks books I became convinced of a few things about trading.

1. Most people try to find a trend and trade it. Along with that most people lose money in the markets. So you either need to find the right trend and early or you better be able to find the end of the trend.

2. Most market makers / specialists fade the public / professionals. Along with that most MMs / specialists make huge amounts of money. trend followers have to be very quick to take losses and be able to stay in when the trend is going their way.

3. When you enter a trade by following a trend you normally give up the spread as well as take away liquidity. This causes you to be at a loss from the start and causes you to pay a higher commission (ECN pass throughs ).

4. By fading you can actually collect the spread (usually very small but over the course of a year or more will add up) and you can lower your cost of trades if you use IB or someone that gives you ECN passthoughs( I have used before and will be changing over in about a week from TS to IB for my primary broker)

So what i try to do is find overbought or oversold situations and then ‘fade’ the stock or find the points in a trend where the stock is signaling it will continue further. I use software (currently Tradestation) that scans the market (preselected group of about 900 stocks) with algorithms that I have worked on and off for the last six years and dedicated about the last year or so on. When they started working consistently I thought I would make a journal to improve my results by looking for patterns.

I prefer shorting more than going long so my first push was for overbought signals and now i started working on oversold. I will need to test them for a while before you see very many trades that are long.

I trade intraday as well as swing trade. I am willing to buy and/or sell options to get into a trade and/or to hedge a trade.

I also like to sell EFPs to gain extra ‘interest’ income with the overnight balances.

I currently use Interactive Brokers for execution of trades and because IBs commissions are so small I have not gone with a prop firm. I have average about 5 cents per hundred shares net cost(.0005/share) including ECN rebates/fees.

My swing trades I will post in real time in the journal. My intraday trades I post as calls and in near real time in the paid2trade.com chat.

Of course the calls and the posting is all based on my ability to do so without effecting my trading.