Finding a Trading Lesson in Each Market Day

 

10/21/2025 - Growth as a trader is a continuous process of starting over, but always from a higher starting point.  As markets change and as our understandings of markets evolve, we become new traders who are experienced traders.  During this most recent vacation period, I've remade my research databases to highlight trading patterns based on market and sector breadth and now am integrating that information into my market views.  Yesterday was a rewarding day in which old understandings of trend days in markets joined together with backtested historical patterns of sector and market breadth to reveal opportunity early in the trading session.  

One new practice I'm following in my journaling is to identify a single, valuable trading lesson each day based upon what I experienced and learned.  The idea is to ensure that each session is a learning opportunity that can be carried forward to improve performance.  Yesterday's lesson was that, when we see unusually strong NYSE TICK, advance-decline stats, and sector performance from the earliest minutes of trading, we want to be prepared to trade a trend day by holding positions and taking advantage of short-term pullbacks.  Identifying the kind of market we're in provides us with a valuable game plan for the trading day.