I’m a huge college football fan.  From my days in The Ohio State University Marching Band (no, I did not dot the “i”), I’ve cheered the scarlet and gray to a multitude of wins, including multiple national championships.  I even had to study Ohio State football history to win the favor of my future father-in-law, who took coaching class with the great Woody Hayes.

As I was just getting started as a technical analyst, an early mentor of mine warned me that I was getting into the dark arts. The way he put it, “A technician’s phone always rings more in a bear market.”

I first read Julia Cameron’s fantastic book The Artist’s Way years ago, and it impacted my life in a number of positive ways. I started writing a three-page journal every morning. I reflected on how I could better incorporate creativity into my routine. And I made a list of five “Imaginary Lives” that I might lead.

I’m down in Orlando for FinCon 2018 which is a gathering of personal finance writers, bloggers, Youtubers, and everyone that helps them provide great content for individuals. A little out of my comfort zone but I’m quickly realizing that people here understand marketing, social media, and audio/video production way better than I do.

I was in New York last week to visit clients, also for interviews for Bloomberg as well as thestreet.com. I’ve stayed downtown on the last couple trips, partly for convenience and also just to take in the history of the city.

I'm often asked about market cycles and how I incorporate something like seasonality into my process.  The short answer is I bucket them under "interesting, but not vital." Here's the somewhat longer answer...

I just got back from a fantastic trip to Seattle for the stockcharts.com ChartCon 2018.  It was a pleasure to reconnect many whom I consider mentors in my own career.  Also great to meet others with a passion for technical analysis and data visualization. As with any productive conference, I took copious notes and have enjoyed revisiting some of the insights that I picked up during the two-day event.

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."