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

CHAPTER 17

The Base Is Everything

HCPG, @HCPG

The HCPG team is totally professional. Their mantra—“The base is everything”—just works and you can see it in their solid trades on the StockTwits stream over and over again. They have a consistent, focused game plan around this thinking, and it makes trading easier. The elimination of ideas is as important as the addition of them.

SURVIVING THE CRASH

We are three traders who started trading in the late 1990s. It was a different time back then—everyone talked about stocks; they were in the air you breathed. You went to your family physician for a checkup and he would tell you about some tech stock he had just bought. You would go to your dentist for cleaning and she would tell you about some initial public offering (IPO) a patient had gotten her into.

The three of us went through various undergraduate and graduate schools that didn't have much to do with stock trading before we started. We were young, thought we were smart, and were ready to make some money. We started out as retail traders who simply bought and sold momentum stocks. Back then you couldn't lose money, as everything just went up until, of course, the crash.

The bear market was vicious, especially in 2002. Today we realize how little we knew back then. We shudder when we think about the type of cowboy trading we used to do in the early days. There were some wild fluctuations in our accounts from 1997 to 2002. It was a do-or-die time, and thankfully we adapted and survived. ...