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

CHAPTER 35

Trading Is an Art

The Fly, @the_real_fly

The Fly is one of my favorite reads on the Internet—not always clean, but always passionate. The Fly has a tremendous feel for the market and it shines through in his writing. He writes about the inevitable bad trading streaks, which makes his winning streaks even more fun to follow. Behind the aggressive chatter and style lies a trader with deep insight who respects the market and its mechanisms and always stays in the game.

Death is nothing, but to live defeated and inglorious is to die daily.

—Napoleon Bonaparte

BORN TO WIN

In high school, I won a writing contest with a heartfelt article about a tragic occurrence that had happened to me and my family when I was just five years old. It was a big deal, as my work was published in the local New York City rag and ABC News visited my house for an interview. A mutual fund manager from Seligman & Company must have been touched by my story, because he contacted my school and asked to see me. Upon meeting him, I was offered a summer internship. At this internship, my job was to open his mail and organize his things. This was before the wonderful invention of e-mail, so he was absolutely inundated with wirehouse research. I read it all. From that point on, I was obsessed with stocks.

After college, I entered the money management business. At the beginning it was tough, especially for a kid from Brooklyn with no well-to-do contacts. However, with a little hard work and some space-alien ...