Thursday, March 12, 2009

Charting Ticks

This site offers a very good description of the Tick chart and provides tips in how to trade with it. The tick is so important that I'll never trade without it again.

As we can see in the chart below, today's tick was much higher than yesterdays, and in a very lovely uptrend. For that reason, and since the market was basically up all day, I traded with a smaller share sizes, and tight stops. ARG! While my profits represent an honest day's work, I failed to capitalize on the huge opportunity today presented.

I was having stress all day and poised to exit my meager positions at the drop of a hat. I couldn't believe what I was seeing; surely a sharp profit taking pull-back will begin any second.


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Since the tick is so volatile, I add the 4 and 10 period Simple Moving Averages (the values may change as I gain more experience). These MA's were bullish almost all day and so was the market... hmm... I guess it works.

The tick was difficult for me to find. I still havn't found it in Yahoo! charts. My broker's software calls it the $usm/tick (Chicago), $usn/tick (NYSE), and $usq/tick (NASDAQ). Even that was difficult to find so there may be more of them.

The tick is one of the key market internals and tells us in general, if Price is moving up or down. This is a key piece on information in understanding the way the market is -- Market Tao.

1 comment:

  1. I became interested in the stock market after learning about a stock investment in Mentor Capital (MNTR), but I am hooked now and want to learn as much as possible. I will be hanging around your blog for a while.

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