09/03 Tools in the toolshed

I want to share a few tools and web-sites I use almost on a daily basis, these are great source of information and specially perspective. Even though I trade non-directional options strategies, many times we'll be leaning long or short deltas, and these can give us a directional bias. It is very good practice to double-check such bias to make sure you are not the only one thinking the market will go one way or the other.

So I usually double-check my assumptions, and validate my thinking by reading information from sources I deem useful. Here are a couple of web-sites I read on a daily basis:

1) Traderfeed: By Brett Steenbarger, he is great! I really appreciate the fact he is honest and sincere in sharing his thoughts, lessons learned, and trading knowledge. Brett has great articles on phsychology and he usually gives insights as to how the trading day is structured (trending vs. range-bound, buyers or sellers in control, etc). I really like his blog and the twitter updates.

2) Finviz.com: You must check this site out! I saw it before in one of Dan Harvey's presentations, and got connected to it again after I read a posting from Brett's site. I consider it an X-RAY of the market's structure, right on the home page you'll see all the S&P 500 components and how are they trading. You can also see how many stocks are making new highs/lows, how many are trading above/below the 20, 50 and 200 Moving averages. I have started tracking these numbers in a daily basis and you can tell how they're evolving from day to day. I might start publishing a few charts on that as part of my daily summary.

3) Vertical Solutions Forecaster: I just started reading through the site, will start following it on a daily basis, I'm intrigued by the "trend forecast" indicator, if this works, it will be a great tool. Sometimes we have a "feeling" for whether we're trending or range-bound, and it is a great idea to have a mechanical and probability based indicator to double-check our assumptions.

4) Dan Sheridan Mentoring: well, this one isn't free, and I'm one of Dan Harvey's die hard fan. So I'm totally biased.. But in all honesty, Dan Sheridan is a honest guy and he trully likes to help his students. He has attracted to him what I consider to be the biggest value the community of traders. There are a lot of traders, different styles, strategies, but one thing in common: we all help each other. So, I really get good the value out of it. I've been there for 1 year, during the worst market conditions, learned a lot, and still download the web-ex videos and watch them on a daily basis.

I'll keep adding to this post as I find more interesting sources of data.

Gustavo