16 CANDLESTICK AND PIVOT POINT TRADING TRIGGERS

egy (such as an outright long call or put); a ratio back spread; or, if the best
opportunity exists taking a position in a stock, a stock index future or pos-
sibly an ETF or a holding company depositary receipt (HOLDR).

INVESTMENT VEHICLES

There are all types of trading and investment vehicles. Some are slightly
more complex than others, and some offer increased leverage, such as fu-
tures and even forex currency markets. Some have short life spans due to
expirations, such as an option or a futures contract. A trader or an investor
needs to examine his or her personality profiles, tolerance for risk, personal
time availability to devote to trading, and the time objective or turnover for
achieving specific profit objectives. Once those are determined, then he or
she needs to choose the right trading vehicle or a mixture of asset classes
in order to apply a trading strategy.
Therefore, it is important to have several different types of trading ac-
counts for taking advantage of various investment products and levels of
risk, such as long-term retirement versus short-term speculative trading op-
portunities. A stock account will allow you to trade stocks, stock options,
mutual funds, and ETFs.
A futures account will allow you to take advantage of the many oppor-
tunities of various commodity markets and options, in addition to day and
swing trading the highly liquid stock index futures markets such as the
Dow, Standard & Poor’s (S&P), Russell 2000, and Nasdaq 100 contracts.
Some futures brokerage firms even have access for spot foreign currency
trading on their trading platforms. I have been in the futures and trading
business since 1978. I trade my own money, I have been a broker, managed
a brokerage firm, owned a trading firm, but, most of all, I enjoy trading my
own money. In fact, the principles I am sharing in this book are the same
techniques that I have taught my family. Remember that my father used to
think commodity trading or day trading was like gambling. But at age 71, he
started gaining an interest in what I was doing, especially as he saw the
fruits of my labors. More important, he witnessed the trading successes my
son was also achieving and started to see that the pattern of what I was
doing was teachable. In 2002, I had my son start a retirement stock account
with what I call a core position of select stocks. One such stock was Gen-
eral Electric, which he purchased at 24.60; another stock I had him pur-
chase was Rambus at 5.62. In both cases, he made out extremely well. In
fact, if you know stocks, you may recognize that those prices were darn
close to the exact lows in 2003. Let me tell you it was not by chance or luck
that I had picked those prices; it was by using the methods I am going to de-
scribe in this book.