I'm out in Seattle this week to speak at the stockcharts.com ChartCon 2018.  Excited to be a part of a conference that features many speakers that I consider mentors, including Greg Morris, Martin Pring, and Tom McClellan. So far we've heard from Greg Schell, Dr. Alexander Elder, and Bruce Fraser.  What struck me is that all three of them have discussed the importance of using stops.

It's so easy to reduce Behavioral Finance to a bottomless list of biases.  As with many aspects of the financial industry, we get way too focused on labeling things instead of understanding them. A recent article from Behavioral Scientist pointed out the limitations of defining Behavioral Economics (which I tend to use interchangeably with "Behavioral Finance" because as far as I'm concerned they're the same thing) as a series of fallacies.

At a recent meeting of the Northern Ohio Chapter of the CMT Association, we had a roundtable discussion where each attendee shared a best idea. One of the junior members of the gathering gave a rather dire outlook for stocks, followed by the remark, "I've never traded a bear market before."

I wrote an article back in November highlighting the way that ETFs are often launched once an investment thesis has become way oversubscribed.  We looked at the recent example of the ProShares Decline of the Retail Store ETF, ticker EMTY (no kidding).  Can you guess what happened next?

A respected former colleague of mine absolutely loved to play devil's advocate.  Whatever investment thesis was posed, he would always take the other side of the argument. Over time, I began to understand and respect this approach.  Sometimes his challenge would expose behavioral biases such as confirmation bias or the endowment effect, leading us to reconsider our outlook and positioning.

I was a guest speaker again this week on MarketWatchers LIVE over at StockCharts.com.  Always a pleasure to speak with Tom Bowley and Erin Swenlin who demonstrate straightforward and powerful methods to understand the markets through charts.

I've been chipping away at articles I've stored in my Pocket and just made it through a series of pieces on the "Sell in May" phenomenon. If you're not familiar, the proclamation "Sell in May and Go Away" speaks to the perceived seasonal trend where the US stock market tends to be weaker in the summer to fall period than the winter to spring period.

I am naturally quite disorganized.  Early in my career, I learned that if I wanted to compete with others in a professional setting, I would need to address this glaring personality flaw.  Thus began a lifelong effort to make sure my time and energy was devoted to what is most important to me.

It is with a heavy heart that we acknowledge the delisting of Long Blockchain, a stock that quickly became the poster child for Blockchain Bubblemania.

We've fallen into a sort of daily routine for our Spring Break in Sicily.  Lazy morning at home, load the car up around 10:00, go exploring.  Lunch on the fly and a bonus gelato stop when we need a morale boost.  With very little English spoken, every step of this journey has been an adventure.  However, the most hair-rising and invigorating challenge has been driving in Sicily.