Don’t be a Tavern on the Green Trader

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With all of the focus on silver and seemingly every commodity or macro news story under the sun this morning, it is awfully easy to lose focus of the most important thing that matters if you trade stocks–The price action in equities. If you are primarily a stock trader, then everything else is basically a distraction, and you should treat the noise as though it were specifically designed to trap you into making mistakes. You wouldn’t go to a restaurant solely for the scenery would you? In a similar vein, you should not let the scenery of silver and other headlines distract you from what you really came here for–To profit from high probability trade setups in equities.

Even if those “macro” traders do not end up filing for bankruptcy like Tavern on the Green, the Central Park restaurant in New York City whose food was no match for its scenery, they are bound to be thrown off by too many red herrings and false premises based on the news. As an example, they might infer that a parabolic move in silver simply must mean that silver stocks are a great buy here. The reality is that equities will simply do what they do, without regard for the obvious logic of traders trying to game the news and price action in other asset classes.