At The Close  |  JAN 2011

At The Close by Brandon H. VanLandingham

Has this ever happened to you? You go long the market or a particular security and it immediately goes down; you go short and it immediately goes up. That is two back-to-back losses. Now extremely anxious, you ignore your trading rules and skip the next signal and of course that trade immediately becomes profitable. You hesitate whether you should take that last position this far after the trade signal. You continue monitoring the trade you failed to react to in the beginning, and now see a support and resistance trend developing. Every time the price pulls back to the support level, it rallies off this bottom. Your trading rules are telling you to sell the position (which in this situation means not to enter a long position), but you know better and place your trade anyway, ignoring your trading rule.

by Brandon H. VanLandingham