The StockTwits® Edge: 40 Actionable Trade Set-Ups from Real Market Pros

CHAPTER 18

Trading People, Not Stocks

Joey Fundora, @downtowntrader

Joey Downtown is a solid-as-a-rock trader. He has a great eye and he's patient. He's aggressive when the time calls for it and he goes to play golf when the market is choppy and erratic. He sets stops and sticks to them. But most important, he knows himself and he knows the setups that he plays best. Absorbing his sense of self-awareness is likely his greatest lesson and may be more important than any specific trade that any of us will share on these pages.

When you are trading shorter time frames, you're trading people, not stocks!

—Joey Fundora

FROM ENGINEER TO FULL-TIME TRADER

I started out as an investor, primarily with a focus on technology stocks. My background is in the information technology (IT) field, and I have been involved with that area for almost 20 years. I felt that my expertise in that arena would help me as an investor, and though I did latch onto some winners, I quickly learned that there isn't always a positive correlation between great products and great stock performance. I realized that on shorter time frames, investors' psychology is more important than the underlying fundamentals in a stock. For instance, Apple is a great stock and company, but in a five-day window, market sentiment is infinitely more important to fluctuations in its stock price than the fundamental story behind it. In the long term, the fundamentals should eventually carry the stock, but as a short-term trader I ...