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

CHAPTER 44

Massive Trends and the Trajectory of Noise

Phil Pearlman, @ppearlman

Dr. Phil Pearlman is our community psychiatrist and therefore has the hardest and least rewarding job at StockTwits. Phil can be gentle when he needs to be and quick with the block. That is both skill and art. Phil has a fantastic eye for winners as well. I would trust Phil with my last dollar. Oddly, he trusts me with his.

Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right.

—Robert Hunter

Ibegan trading equities in the mid-1990s and at the time I had no idea what I was doing. I opened a Datek account with $10,000 I had won as an award teaching special education and began buying tech stocks that my brother Vic and brother-in-law Barry were telling me to buy. It was fantastic! Cisco Systems, Intel, and Microsoft were some of the names and it did not take a pro to win.

In hindsight, it worked in my favor that I did not fully understand asset allocation or risk management, as I put my whole account in just a few names and held on. If I had been allocating and managing risk better, I might not have established such a substantial account. I was getting long stocks that were moving and making a significant amount of money.

I had just moved back to Washington, D.C., to pursue a doctorate in clinical psychology, and it was fortuitous that I lived in a building with a group of people who worked at America Online (AOL). They were caught up in the excitement and I recognized ...