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But if you think about it, a microscope is designed to make small things large, not large things larger. We have to be careful that the day-to-day market activities don't distract us from keeping track of the longer-term trends. While I have my own time frame for tracking various indices and stocks, I still like to read the viewpoints of those with a much longer-term perspective.
For such a viewpoint, check out the STOCKS & COMMODITIES interview this month with Louise Yamada, the director of research for Salomon Smith Barney. Her focus is on sector analysis of US and global markets. She makes a number of key points about long-term market trends, including why companies with an international exposure should continue to do well and the impact of high technology on productivity. She also made other observations I found intriguing, and I'm sure you will too.
At the other extreme, in "Daytrading stocks," Mark Conway discusses trading using today's access to Level II quotes, in which all the market maker bid and asked prices are shown. Even if you are not interested in this time frame (remember what I just said about looking too close?), you should still find this article of interest, as it gives insight into the way short-term traders operate. And while you may think that these traders are the ones who cause a great deal of the day-to-day noise in the market, their activities play an important part in supplying the liquidity necessary for large traders to move in and out of large positions.
And speaking of short-term traders, in "Statistics and trading behavior" by Ari Kiev and Ken Grant, the performance of professional short-term traders working at a hedge fund is examined with either an eye toward changes that a trader may consider implementing or issues that a manager of a trading desk would take into account to optimize return on capital. For many of you, the key issue to consider from this article is the value of taking a hard look at your own trading statistics to see where you might find room for improvement.
One final note. I know that many of you had temporary data problems recently with the problems relating to the Galaxy IV satellite, and now, because of it you have holes in your intraday charts. If you need very clean data for futures and currencies, I would check with the CQG Data Factory at 800 525-7082, or go to the Web and look into www.cqg.com and click on Products. They have a variety of time intervals available, and you can purchase clean data on diskette, via FTP or CD-ROM. And clean data's the place to start when you start trading, isn't it?
