Thanks Georgem, much appreciated and I'll keep on entertaining :-) I'm the last one to claim I'm clued up, in fact, I'm constantly looking to juice up my fundamental knowledge. I've been heckled about having too much info, and that's ok, each to his own method. Thing is that I earned my spurs in FX over the past 8 years and that's the most unforgiving of all markets. In FX your fundamentals, macro indicators, and the news comes first, and only then do the charts confirm whether what you see is in fact what is happening. I'm simply bringing that experience over to my 'regular' trading because, again, FX showed me that what happens to currencies always spills over into the regular markets. I now trade FX for fun because it moves faster than any other market; ALSI futures is the only comparable market, and regular stocks a snail by comparison. But regular stocks and their derivatives are bread and butter when you understand how to interpret macro fundamentals. My approach is simple: FX and Futures I trade on the moment and the trend. Stocks I simply trade on Daily, weekly and monthly trend and chart pattern systems (with a few indicators OBV, RSI, MOM). That way I get to straddle much broader trends than intraday volatility by using derivatives to hedge my longs, which in turn the derivatives give me back the losses so I can average down on my longs. It just amazes me how many traders get caught up in 1min and 5min charts and forget the golden rule of always checking back on the longer term charts. It's a simple strategy and it works for me, and also reduces stress. Think of it this way, in stead of using stops on my stock, I use derivatives to hedge. If used correctly, it works better than stopping out and buying back lower. But, again, for me the fundamentals and news comes first. Don't misunderstand me, traders who go for 100 to say 300 pips don't need news, they just need good TA. For me though, I prefer to mitigate my risk by knowing whether the news and fundamentals confirm what the chart tells me.
