One route to success in the markets is the when and the other is the what. We want to march down both ways at once!

The quotrader.net site is about stock picks that could become trading signals. A post about a stock generally means that this is a trading candidate. There are exceptions, like comparisons of similar stocks or earnings reports, but it should not be too difficult to interpret which stocks I find interesting right now and which not.

Interesting right now? Yes, these stock picks are no buy recommendations or entry signals, but they could be. It is up to the reader to trade them and this can be done with different systems.

This site offers its own trading system, the quoTrader system, which focuses on stocks that could rise substantially, on stocks that are in the middle or better the beginning of a steep growth phase, on stocks that are in the best phase of their life.

These stocks are clearly the best investment choices, but they are also advantageous vehicles for traders. For swing traders this is true anyway, but even for day traders stocks in a sharp long-term trend offer the better liquidity and intraday coherency on average.

Many people either tend to be traders or investors, by which I mean they neglect one aspect. “Real” investors buy into falling prices, which is sort of antitrading, and traders often cling too long to the same selection of stocks that they monitor. Investors like to fall in love with a specific stock, no matter how daunting or dull its chart looks, and traders often do not even consider to hold a stock longer than what they are used to.

With this blog I try to present stock ideas, roughly at “the right time” and then my readers should feel free to use the quoTrader system or enter the position using their own trading style. While posts about stocks could be interpreted as buy signals, at least in principal, there will be no follow-ups for sell signals.

Why? Many times a trader gets in just to be shaken out a short time later. This is the very nature of the market. In other words, your trading system has to work with tight stops! The quoTrader system works only this way and yours should by no means deviate from this practice!

High flying growth stocks can change their flight direction like the wind, no matter what you think you know about the underlying company and its prospects. These stocks often have a high expectation built into their price and so a high-flyer can quickly become a deep-diver. This is the flip side of a momentum stock that could have easily doubled or tripled.

So, please remember, stocks mentioned on this site are only tradable with a system that incorporates the stop-loss component. Moreover, there will be generally no sell recommendation. Instead you will see many of my well-meant trading ideas languishing around or even falling severely, shortly after they got discussed here. Don’t be astonished! This is also the very nature of the market, and I don’t pretend to be a prophet. Trading is a game of probabilities.

If you are on the hunt for an infallible trading system that consists only of some simple parts, is easy to understand and executable without the slightest effort, I also have to disappoint you. Such a magic trading automat doesn’t exist.

Instead this blog offers at times reflections about interesting methods, tricks and systems for trading, highlighting their good and bad sides, or comparing them to my own system.

The quoTrader adventure is about currently interesting stocks and a trading system to ride or trade their “once in a lifetime run”. It is for both trading investors and short-term traders who understand that success in trading is nonetheless difficult.

On the other hand, combining fast moving stocks with more potential and the right trading system can produce exceptional results. For my own trading and for others I try with quotrader.net to find new trading ideas early and offer opinions about the currently admired growth stocks that are on the move. You won’t find here anything about stock picks that are falling back or don’t move at all.

Of course, eventually a stock has to be sold, and if you are curious, which you should be in this very second, the trading system I use has its very own method for finding the exit. This special exiting behavior is the second reason why we have here no sell signals.

With starting the category “System” of this blog, I am going to give you a short overview about quoTrader’s trading philosophy.

People seem to understand very different things when it comes to trading systems. Some main interpretations go like this:

1. A formula or an algorithm that puts all trading decisions at its best completely into the hands of a computer, in order to build the most automated trading robot.
2. A simple but ingenious trading trick or piece of knowledge that gives its user an advantage, to which all trading behavior than could be adapted.
3. A complex description of how to become a better trader or investor.

The first route is the enticing one. Nothing more to be done and the money keeps on rolling in. It looks logical, because you just have to explore the universe of all possible trading methods, possibly again with the help of a computer, and then you have something all others don’t have. This secret is a relatively simple algorithm and as such it can be transformed easily into a program.

So far so good, there is just a little problem. If there is indeed a secret trading strategy, made up of a few parameters of a simple program, it will not remain very long secret. There are large trading houses, creative and hard working programmers, and similar wizards who search with tremendous effort the markets for such auto-traders. Very soon too many exploiters of this regularity will smooth it away. This approach is in my opinion more wishful thinking than anything else.

The second idea, looking for the trading trick, is not much better. It is merely a clone of its predecessor in this little abstract list of trading systems, just without the computerization aspect.

Naturally we arrive at item number three, the one that is not the magic bullet and that still sounds like much work and risk of failure. Right! Think about it, if you expected it to be easier, you will eventually find that a market consisting of many smart participants inherently means the opposite. Making money with trading and investing can’t be as easy as hoped by admirers of the first two magic money ways.

Consequently the quoTrader system is only a type 3 trading system. It tries to embrace some powerful trading patterns, but it concentrates on the individual trader who has to apply these in varying market situations, executing a trading strategy so that it actually works. So far I have not been able to create the magic bullet system consisting of a very few mechanical things.

In order to make it better understandable what is wrong with the first two approaches, I plan in the category ”System” to introduce various great traders, interesting trading systems and also pieces of them like type 2 trading methods and compare all these with the quoTrader system.