Great Resources to Start the Week in Markets

*  We continue to see massive divergences among stock sectors, as nicely tracked by the Finviz site.  This has created weakening breadth for stocks overall, as interest rate sensitive, US dollar strength sensitive, and commodity sensitive shares have significantly underperformed healthcare and growth-related sectors.  It is difficult to imagine a resumed bull market with China/Asia/commodity weakness; it is also difficult to imagine a true bear market unless concerns over global growth start to hit U.S. growth-related shares.  That has me watching the strongest and weakest sectors and their relative price performance going forward.

*  If we truly treat our trading as a business, then it makes sense to look at ourselves not just as traders, but also as managers and leaders of our enterprise.  Surprisingly, there's been little attention paid in trading psychology to this aspect of performance and success.  My latest Forbes article covers a very important theme in the management literature:  we best lead by creating standards of excellence and managing toward those.  Many trading failures boil down to failures of leadership, and those boil down to shortcomings in managing ourselves, our resources, and our work processes.

*  Two excellent conferences coming up this fall that I'll be participating in:  1) Traders4ACause in Las Vegas and 2) Stocktoberfest in Coronado, CA. Both promise a great lineup of speakers and plenty of opportunities for networking.     

*  One topic that recurs in my conversations with traders is refining the quality of their information networks.  It's not at all common to read lots of things and come away with very little.  Just as important as taking in information is synthesizing it into meaningful views.  But those views will only be as good as the information we synthesize.  For those with a bent toward numbers, good information via Twitter can be found by following @sentimentrader, @paststat, and @RyanDetrick. Broad perspectives can be found by following @dashofinsight, @abnormalreturns, and @Quantocracy.  Trading perspectives can be found by following @crosshairtrader, the Stock Twits STUDY stream, @NewTraderU, @seeitmarket, and @ivanhoff.  A good source for trading psychology ideas is #tradingpsychology.  I'll have many more good links and follows to suggest shortly!

Have a great start to the week!

Brett
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