I have a confession to make:

My confession:

I’m addicted to learning.

I’m talking about books, courses, formal education, YouTube “university”, podcasts, newsletters, coaching, masterminds, on and on it goes.

My great fallacy is in believing that success is driven by the right information. Thus thinking that if I learn everything there is to learn about a subject (an impossible task) then I can make the best, most informed decision that leads to success.

In other words:

Paralysis by analysis.

I struggle with procrastination disguised as learning.

The good news for you is that when it comes to sharing my thoughts on a subject -- for example, trading thoughts -- know that I’ve done years of learning in it. In fact, about six years of digging into the markets, staring at thousands (literally) of charts, tens of thousands of hours watching the markets, and learning at the feet of better traders inside closed trading communities.

All that to say, when it comes to trading, I have an “instinct” honed by lots and lots and lots of learning.

Now I simply glance at a chart and know if I like it or not.

Some people call this unconscious competence -- that is, I don’t know what I know. It just sort of ... happens.

The best I can do is try and share what leads me to the conclusions I make. It’s like breaking down dozens of little decisions made in a micro second into step by step analysis.

Difficult, but a worthy challenge.

Yahoo Finance

Why it matters …

Well, yesterday’s crystal ball was pretty good, albeit a little blurry. The Fed cut rates 0.25% as expected and the market shot up, then settled back down to finish largely unchanged.

In the Fed Chairman's remarks, he indicated that there would be more rate cuts this year to help the job market, but that might be at the cost of slightly higher inflation that they want. (Life is a series of compromises…)

Comments: The markets are deep dark forest green. On a percentage basis, the Russell 2000 small cap stocks seem to have been boosted the most by the rate cut as expected because this frees up money to be loaned to smaller businesses to invest in capital and hire workers to expand their business, to build the economy and the beat goes on.

Tomorrow could be interesting. Historically, quadruple witching day, is a very crimson day of profit taking. The conservative thing to do is to close positions today which are close to expiring. The less conservative thing to do is hold on and hope for high-premium ATM calls to roll on a pullback. It’s your money and your risk tolerance…Have fun!

I’ve got a trade idea this morning that’s going for around 1.20% return on risk into next Friday’s expiration.