Trader's Guide

Sector Rotation: Following the Business Cycle

Jan 11, 2025 · Trading Strategies

Sector rotation is the discipline of moving capital across the eleven S&P 500 sectors according to where the economy sits in its cycle. ...

Short Selling Explained

Sep 22, 2024 · Stock Trading Encyclopedia

Short selling is selling shares you don't own, with the plan to buy them back later at a lower price. You borrow stock from your broker, sel...

Stanley Druckenmiller: The Greatest Money Maker

Jul 28, 2025 · Famous Traders and Investors

Stanley Druckenmiller (born 1953) compounded capital at roughly 30% a year for three decades at Duquesne Capital Management without posting ...

Supply and Demand in the Stock Market

Apr 9, 2024 ·

Every price tick on every screen, from a one-cent move in Apple to a five-hundred-point drop in the Dow, is the visible output of a single m...

Support and Resistance

Apr 21, 2024 ·

Support and resistance are the oldest ideas in and still the two I lean on hardest after eighteen years on a screen. Support is the price wh...

Swing Trading: Capturing Multi-Day Moves

Jun 26, 2024 ·

Swing trading is what most people on a screen actually do, even when they call it something else. Holding period: two days to a few weeks. N...

Tax-Loss Harvesting: A Complete Guide

Oct 6, 2025 · Taxes and Investing

Tax-loss harvesting is the practice of deliberately realising losing positions to offset in the same tax year, with the proceeds redeployed ...

Technical Analysis

Mar 8, 2024 ·

Technical analysis is the study of price action and trading to forecast where a stock heads next. reads the company — earnings, balanc...

The 2008 Financial Crisis

Jul 19, 2024 · Market Crises and Events

I grew up on the third block inland from the water in Buckroe Beach, a neighborhood of Hampton, Virginia, and by the autumn of 2010 three of...

The Asian Financial Crisis of 1997

Aug 16, 2025 · Market Crises and Events

On July 2, 1997, the Bank of Thailand abandoned the baht’s peg to the US dollar, and the currency lost roughly a fifth of its value be...

The Black Monday Crash of 1987

May 25, 2025 · Market Crises and Events

Black Monday set the template. Every market dislocation that followed borrowed something from the afternoon of October 19, 1987 — the ...

The COVID-19 Market Crash of March 2020

Apr 25, 2026 · Market Crises and Events

33.9% in 23 trading days. That’s how fast the fell from its February 19, 2020 record high to its March 23 low — the fastest move...

The Crash of 1929

Jan 28, 2024 · Market Crises and Events

There was an old fellow on the Salomon block desk named Addy Cartwright who’d started as a runner at Hornblower & Weeks in 1931, t...

The Dot-Com Bubble

Jul 13, 2024 · Market Crises and Events

I lost €3,000 on a Solana meme coin in late 2021. That’s my dot-com bubble — smaller scale, 20 years late, exact same mecha...

The Efficient Market Hypothesis

Dec 28, 2025 · Economics 101

The Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) states that asset prices reflect available information, with the consequence that systematically gener...

The Federal Reserve and Interest Rates

Dec 13, 2024 · Economics 101

The Federal Reserve is the central bank of the United States, and the rate decisions taken by its Federal Open Market Committee determine, i...

The Flash Crash of May 6, 2010

Oct 19, 2025 · Market Crises and Events

The cleanest way to read May 6, 2010 is as a feedback loop with no saturation term. A volume-participation algorithm sells faster as traded ...

The GameStop Short Squeeze of January 2021

Apr 14, 2026 · Market Crises and Events

I was 17 when GameStop happened. Watching it on a Discord server full of people my age who had never owned a stock before, refreshing Yahoo ...

The Greeks: Delta, Gamma, Theta, Vega

Jan 10, 2026 · Options and Derivatives

The four Options Greeks — Δ (Delta), Γ (Gamma), Θ (Theta), and ν (Vega) — are partial derivatives of the op...

The Hunt Brothers Silver Corner of 1980

Mar 27, 2026 · Market Crises and Events

March 27, 1980. I was nineteen, a runner at Dean Witter, and I didn't have a silver position to lose. A fellow named Bobby Castellano did. B...

The Japan Asset Price Bubble (1986-1991)

Mar 24, 2026 · Market Crises and Events

At its 1989 peak, the land beneath the Imperial Palace in central Tokyo was reckoned to be worth more than the entire state of California, a...

The LTCM Collapse of 1998: When Genius Failed

Sep 10, 2025 · Market Crises and Events

A balance-sheet leverage ratio of 30:1 means that a 3.3% adverse move on notional wipes out the equity base. That is the arithmetic, before ...

The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE)

Feb 9, 2024 ·

The New York Stock Exchange is the largest securities exchange in the world by aggregate market capitalisation of its listed issuers, with r...

The South Sea Bubble of 1720

Mar 16, 2026 · Market Crises and Events

The South Sea Bubble of 1720 is the episode in which the share price of a chartered London company rose more than eightfold inside six month...

The Tulip Mania of 1637: The First Speculative Bubble

Jul 4, 2025 · Market Crises and Events

The Tulip Mania of 1637 sits four centuries behind us, far enough that it has hardened into a parable: Dutch artisans trading their cottages...

The Wash Sale Rule Explained

Feb 3, 2026 · Taxes and Investing

You sell a stock at a loss to claim the deduction, and then you buy it back the same week because you still like the company. The Internal R...

Trading Psychology: Fear and Greed

Aug 21, 2024 · Risk Management and Psychology

A client came to see me in March 2009. He was 58, three years from his planned retirement, and he had just sold his entire stock portfolio a...

Trend Lines: Drawing and Trading

Sep 25, 2025 · Technical Analysis

A trend line is the simplest tool on the chart and one of the few I still draw by hand on every name I trade. It is a straight line connecti...

Triangle Patterns in Stock Trading

May 29, 2024 ·

Triangles are coiling patterns. Price gets squeezed between two trendlines that converge on each other, volume bleeds out of the tape, and a...

Understanding Penny Stocks

Jan 4, 2024 ·

Penny stocks are equities trading at very low prices — the draws the line at $5 per share, but most traders use the label for names un...

Understanding the Yield Curve

Apr 7, 2025 · Economics 101

The yield curve is a graph that plots the interest rates of US Treasury across the maturity spectrum, from the 1-month bill out to the 30-ye...

Understanding Volume

Mar 15, 2024 ·

Volume is the total number of shares traded in a given period. Most beginners look only at price and miss the second half of the signal. Pri...

Value Investing: Buying Below Intrinsic Value

Aug 10, 2024 · Trading Strategies

Value investing is the practice of paying materially less for a security than a careful estimate of what the underlying business is worth, a...

VWAP: Volume Weighted Average Price

Apr 15, 2025 · Technical Analysis

The Volume Weighted Average Price (VWAP) is the running average of trade prices through a session, with each price weighted by the that prin...

Wall Street (1987): The Film That Defined a Generation

Apr 30, 2026 · Markets in Culture

December 11, 1987. The Dow had bottomed five weeks earlier and most of us on the desk were still half-numb, still adding up what we'd done i...

Warren Buffett: The Oracle of Omaha

Jun 13, 2024 ·

In 1965, the common stock of Berkshire Hathaway changed hands at roughly $19 per share, approximately book value for a failing New England t...

Wedge Patterns: Rising and Falling

Aug 7, 2025 · Chart Patterns

A wedge pattern is a chart formation where two trendlines slope in the same direction — both up or both down — while squeezing t...

What Are Commodities? Oil, Gold, and Raw Materials

Feb 14, 2026 · Stock Trading Encyclopedia

A commodity is a raw material or primary agricultural product that trades on the basis of being interchangeable with every other unit of the...

What Are Dividends?

Feb 3, 2024 ·

A dividend is a distribution of company profits paid in cash to shareholders. When a business generates more money than it needs to fund ope...

What Are ETFs? Exchange-Traded Funds Explained

Oct 24, 2024 · Stock Trading Encyclopedia

An exchange-traded fund (ETF) is an investment fund that trades on a stock exchange the same way a single stock does. Each ETF holds a baske...

What Are Options? Calls and Puts Explained

Feb 7, 2025 · Options and Derivatives

An option is a contract whose payoff is a non-linear function of an underlying asset's price at a future date. The buyer pays a fixed amount...

What Are Stock Splits?

Dec 3, 2024 · Stock Trading Encyclopedia

A stock split is a corporate action that increases the number of a company's outstanding shares while proportionally reducing the price per ...

What Is a 401(k)? Your Employer Retirement Plan Explained

Jul 8, 2025 · Retirement Planning

A 401(k) is an account your employer sets up that lets you save for retirement before income tax is taken out of your paycheck. The money gr...

What Is a Bear Market?

Sep 4, 2024 · Stock Trading Encyclopedia

A bear market is a decline of 20% or more from a recent market high, sustained for at least two months. The label is most often applied to b...

What Is a Broker-Dealer?

Oct 31, 2025 · Stock Trading Encyclopedia

A broker-dealer is a firm (or, less commonly, an individual) that does two distinct jobs: it executes trades on behalf of clients (the broke...

What Is a Budget? The 50/30/20 Rule

Aug 25, 2025 · Personal Finance

A budget is a written plan for what your money will do each month before you start spending it. That sentence is the whole idea. It is more ...

What Is a Bull Market?

Sep 15, 2024 · Stock Trading Encyclopedia

A bull market is a sustained rise of 20% or more from a recent market low, usually accompanied by widespread optimism, rising corporate earn...

What Is a Credit Score?

Jun 22, 2025 · Personal Finance

A credit score is a three-digit number, usually on a 300-850 scale, that summarises how reliably you have repaid borrowed money. Lenders rea...

What Is a Dividend Aristocrat?

Nov 20, 2025 · Stock Trading Encyclopedia

A Dividend Aristocrat is a member of the S&P 500 that has raised its in each of the past 25 consecutive years. The criterion is more dem...

What Is a Dividend Yield?

Mar 13, 2025 · Stock Trading Encyclopedia

The dividend yield is a stock's annual payment expressed as a percentage of its current share price. If a stock trades at $50 and pays $2.00...