A Trade A Day

If my blog doesn’t have traffic, I might as well be talking to myself. I’m still learning the nuances of web 2.0 and blogging. I thought it might prove useful to readers to document my attempts to gain more blog traffic. What I’m doing, how I did it, and how it works.

My first push for blog traffic came from adding sites to my blog role. All good web 2.0 bloggers know that blogging is a community and without the support of our fellow bloggers our success is limited.

My second push for more traffic centered around blogging directories. They’ve been useful to a degree. I’ve found more blogs that I like, but I’ll detail the impact to my traffic at another time.

The third push is blogrush which has generated many impressions, but hasn’t yet delivered in terms of actual click through’s. I do have high hopes for blogrush.

My fourth push for more traffic involves social networking and is the subject of today’s post. It involves StumbleUpon. If you don’t know what StumbleUpon is, then let my pull it right from their webpage to explain it to you: ‘StumbleUpon lets you “channelsurf” the best-reviewed sites on the web. It is a collaborative surfing tool for finding and sharing great sites. This helps you find interesting webpages you wouldn’t think to search for.’

This is how it breaks down:
1. Go to Stumbleupon.com and sign up for an account. I downloaded the firefox extension. If you don’t have firefox, you should get it.

2. Once the extension is installed, The “Stumble!” button on my tool bar will send me to webpages based on my preference settings.. I then can rate a blog or website with the “I like it” or “No more like this” buttons. It seems the point is, the more I stumble and rate sites, the more the stumble results become customized based on my likes and dislikes.

3. Great, now can someone explain to me how it drives traffic to my blog? The first step is to submit your site by bringing it up in your browser and rating it. Make sure you rate it with the “I like it” button (I know what you’re thinking, but I have to say it.). That will put it into the StumbleUpon database for further submission. The higher my site gets rate, the more stumblers will be driven to my site. Here’s an article that raves about StumbleUpon’s ability to drive traffic.

Here another great article on how to maximize StumbleUpon Traffic.

Here’s another that details how to increase StumbleUpon Traffic.

I will post my results next week.

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In Part II of this infinite part series, I am adding three more blogs to my blogroll. I read these blogs regularly and I have found their content to be relevant and profitable.

Clever Dude is a personal finance blog that I have found extremely useful. I admire his determination to get out of credit card debt, and his posts are very original. I highly recommend the blog.

Next blog to be added is Dividends Matter. I mentioned this blog yesterday in my Link Love Friday post. The blog deserves an add to my blogroll and your rss feed. I am a technician, but average joe at Dividends Matter is a good fundamental analyst and he does a really good job. I think his posts are always relevant which is why I read his blog. My long term portfolio has certainly benefited from his analysis.

Final blog of to be added this time around is Stock Rake. I like this blog because it details the experiences of another trader. I find immense support and encouragement in other traders. I especially enjoy his “what worked” and “what sucked” posts. He also posts a couple times a day.

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It’s time to check out some of this week’s interesting posts from around the blogosphere:

Average Joe at Dividends Matter is launching the dividends investors network. Sounds like an interesting concept. If you are a dividend investor or need more knowledge in this area, I recommend his blog.

David Merkel at The Aleph Blog wrote this week about how to invest in a stagflationary environment. My gut feeling is we’re headed there. David has some ideas that I’ll be looking into.

Corey at afraid to trade.com offers insight into the mind of a winning trader and how losing traders need to shift focus for greater success.

Ben Bittrolff , aka The Financial Ninja, has some strong opinions for this week’s rate cut. Would you characterize this week’s Fed action as the first suicidal cuts? Dollar collapse? Inflationary pressure? I couldn’t agree more.

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An object in motion tends to stay in motion. Newton’s first law has application in the stock market. AGU is a great example. In late August the stock broke out and has been in motion since. At the end of last week, the move begin to slow, we just needed a chance to jump on the stock.

I like AGU over 51.50. I’ve seen this pattern many times over the years, but I don’t have a name for it. If you know what it’s called please let me know. In any event, it looks like the stock is going to push higher after a short consolidation. I’m hoping the general market helps, but consider this, When the general market was languishing at the end of August, AGU was moving higher. That is power.

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I have two charts to talk about this evening.

TNH engages in the production and distribution of nitrogen fertilizer products for use in agricultural and industrial markets. But who cares what they do, I like their chart! Being a technical analyst that’s really all I care about. So without further ado…

Why do I like TNH? Well for starters it’s forming a classic cup and handle. The cup and handle are the bread and butter pattern of the CANSLIM method of trading. My method is a slightly modified version, but basic CANSLIM is a great method for investors who like to trade.

Now if I were going to be strict about the pattern, it looks like it’s already broken and failed. According to traditional CANSLIM, the breakout would have happened over 122.35. But you’ve got to keep in mind that this stock moves. It’s ATR is almost $8. So a .10 breakout isn’t going to cut it. Based on my experience, a breakout would occur at $2 to $3 over the pivot(122.25).

The key for me would be to watch a stock like this during the day and make my entry based on the intraday activity. If it breaks out during the day and continues to run up through my entry price, I would be scaling into the trade until I had my full position. If it gaps into my entry price, I’m going to wait for the gap to base then scale into my position if there’s an intraday breakout from that base. Finally, if the stock just gaps into my entry price and heads down or nowhere, I wouldn’t take the trade.

I know it seems like this is micromanaging the trade, but execution can be a trade breaker. Learn to execute well. Learn to have a plan.

My other chart is CSCO.

I don’t really like CSCO because it moves slower than death. It has almost 6 billion shares outstanding. So if the stock is going to move it will require an enormous amount of volume to get this stock going. I think that this stock would be good for a newbie to trade. The reason being that you can make some money, the stock is very liquid so gaps and manipulation will be less, and the trading range is small enough to offer some protection against extreme price swings. Having said that, any trade you make is your own decision. I don’t recommend any stock, and if you buy a stock you could lose everything. Now let’s look at the chart.

CSCO is forming some kind of cup and handle. I could even argue that it’s an ascending triangle. It doesn’t really matter. Based on the chart you can see that 32.48 to 32.50 is a very strong area of resistance for CSCO. If the stock moves through that area by even .10 or .15, I could see the stock continuing its move. Well into the $36.00 area. It might take months to get there, but if you’re new to trading or just have a low tolerance for loss, CSCO is worth a look.

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