Preparation and Opportunity to Start the Week

"Chance favors the prepared mind," Louis Pasteur observed.  Here's some worthy preparation to start the week and place yourself in a position to benefit from chance:

*  Great post from Abnormal Returns on avoiding the monsters in the financial industry;

*  Here's an excellent article on the dark side of backtested trading strategies; see also this post on testing the predictions of market gurus.

*  Worthy effort from VIX and More on tracking emerging market volatility and its implications for trading;

*  Valuable post from Derek Hernquist on using breadth data to define the market opportunity set and become more systematic with discretionary trading;

*  Good article on why rising interest rates aren't necessarily bad for bonds;

*  Interesting "gap up" trading pattern from Quantified Strategies;

*  Trend following has not performed so well of late.

*  Why selectivity is so important to trading performance.