The primary motivation for using the weekly time frame is for perspective and to help you catch the big trends.

Ride ‘em cowboy

One of key premises we work with at Stockradar is the weekly time frame. It helps you filter out the daily ‘noise’ and allows you to ride those big trends with confidence. Our natural inclination when profits are growing fast is to ‘take the money and run’, or use a shorter-term chart to try and get the ‘answer’ you want. Restraint and discipline is needed when investing and for good reason. When money is riding on your decision it is important to stay on for the ride for as long as we can to get the best result. Making ‘decisions on the run’ or disregarding trading plan boundaries that you know work is dangerous and can cause emotional conflict and mixed trading results. Of course the decision is always yours and Stockradar is only here to offer you guidance based on my experience. However try and push those ‘natural’ anxious thoughts from your mind and let the markets do the work for you.

Why do we use the weekly time frame? To push the noise of intra-week movements to the background and off your decision making checklist. It adds great perspective and puts a discipline of restraint on your trading decisions. The reason that we use a weekly time frame is highlighted on our daily stock alerts email just to remind you that intra-week noise is exactly that. Our daily stock alerts are purely warnings to you that a stop level or reversal level has been hit during the week. But in fact you will find the majority of stops and reversal levels hit during the week are not confirmed by our weekly time frame, which bases all its decisions on Friday’s close. That’s our price benchmark.

To my constant surprise trends often extend to levels we could only have dreamed of when we entered a trade and too often we throw in the towel too early because the profit is irresistible. I’m sure I can ‘hear’ many of you nodding in ascent. Don’t worry we are all guilty of it at some stage. Trading and investing is not made up of one trade but a series of trades that represents a portfolio of stocks of which through the gentle lifting of stops or the risk management rules of only allocating a maximum amount of your capital to any one trade are there for good reason. Each rule is an attempt to improve your profitability, protect your capital and make your life easier. We may like them or not but often they know best

It’s a choice I made early on in Stockradar’s history because having experienced the massive changes in direction of a stock during the week the Friday close added a quality of perspective to my decision making. It also suits my members who aren’t necessarily active traders but primarily run their own Super Funds and have their retirement in their hands so they must be astute, not over trade, and in the end be steadily profitable.

Retirement money is a necessity not a luxury
and thus your capital has to be cared for.

On a big winner such as QAN or NEC you may elect to take half your profits and run the other half. The weekly time frame is a rule not embedded in stone but is my attempt to guide you in the right direction to achieve the best profitability performance. Selling too early is a common mistake and if we have rules we should stick to them. So again the weekly time frame is there to protect you from that inclination. QAN and NEC are both stocks that ‘who would’ve thought……….’

There are alternatives and that’s your choice. On a big winner such as QAN or NEC you may elect to take half your profits and run the other half. The weekly time frame is a rule not embedded in stone but is my attempt to guide you in the right direction to achieve the best profitability performance. Selling too early is a common mistake and if we have rules we should stick to them. So again the weekly time frame is there to protect you from that inclination. QAN and NEC are both stocks that ‘who would’ve thought……….’

Now QAN and NEC are two stocks that have generated great profits for lots of us but as they start to pull back we may start counting our disappearing pennies with alarm. As a weekly investor it’s a process we need to endure and hopefully as you develop as an investor this will become easier for you as you watch a stock pull back but then go back up again. That’s what trends do. Our objective is not to get the top or bottom but to make the best profits we can so this is the Stockradar way that works well. Part of the reason my stops are set at predefined levels is that as a weekly investor I must make allowances for the fact that a stock will naturally pull back before it rallies again. So QAN has a stop set currently at $5.42 (entry $3.43) and NEC at $1.31 (entry $1.18).

The reason my stops are set at predefined levels is that as a weekly investor I must make allowances for the fact that a stock will naturally pull back before it then rallies again.

What can happen from here? They may hit their stops and we take our profits. My premise is that nobody knows where the top is so why try. You will fail repeatedly. The aim is to be consistent in our decision-making and to make money, not get tops and bottoms. That’s an unrealistic and unachievable objective. So I aim for consistency of actions which breed’s consistency of results. OR they may pull back (as they have done before) and rally to new highs again for this trending move (as they have done before). The one thing I can’t do is answer that for you, but I can give you the benefit of my knowledge and experience as to how to trade trends that inevitably do go up, and down.

Consistency of actions breeds consistency of results.