Share Trading: Tips and Core Selling Rules

Trader Tip:

• Use a plan and stick to it.
• Study and educate to a sector. Become an expert at something.
• “You will be wrong, you will be wrong often, and, occasionally you will be spectacularly wrong”-Barry Ritholtz, Real Money.com
• Just like a good exercise program, with trading you must build your strength, NOT rush to lift 200 lbs the first time. Paper trade. This builds muscles
• Stop “noise”. Do not approach the markets randomly, trying and studying many approaches, reading versions of charts, and “mixing up” rules and systems. The # 1 problem we see is “impressions” people have off their study, but only in the “partial” they have learned. It's much like learning to play golf wrong; it's hard to unlearn.
• After you trade, study what happened. Keep careful notes on what you did, and what you didn't do. Learn from successes and failures.
• Develop your odds of success by finding what you do best. This is where studying your “journal of trades” shows where you focus in best, and should allow you to duplicate the emotions and rules when you do right.

Core Selling Rules:

1. Pay NO attention to bid/ask. This is what other traders, just like you, want.
   Put your order in at a limit order, good for the day, for the price you want to sell the option, and reduce this price during the day if market conditions so warrant.
2. Work for mark ups of 40% down to 20%. Risk traders may hold for higher %'s, and many successful traders use the .50 to 1.00 a contract profit model.
3. Lower your selling price to the averaged cost you have paid, and sell the position clearly within stop loss.
   DO NOT HOLD IN HOPES THINGS WILL CHANGE. THE ONLY REASON PEOPLE HOLD OPTIONS TOO LONG IS HOPE.

It is hard to sell a stock at a loss when we believe that we are skillful investors. But are we really that skillful? We can and should control basic investment things like minimizing taxes, keeping trading costs down, and maintaining the quality of our investments.

But no matter how much effort we put into beating the market, we’ll probably be disappointed. We figure that if we spend enough time hunting for hot stocks and searching for the superstar mutual funds, we will spot them.

This is an illusion. We can only control our investment results in a basic way. The rest, for better or worse, is just good or bad luck.

• Sell if your stock drops 8-10% from the price you paid. I can't repeat this often enough. If the price begins dropping on high volume, don't wait for an 8% haircut - sell it now.
• Continually re-evaluate to see if the same reasons are still there for owning the stock. If it isn't one that you would buy today at today's price, sell it.
• If the stock creeps up for several days on very light volume and there are other sell signals, this is a good time to sell it.
• If after months of advancing, the stock suddenly jumps way up on heavy volume, maybe 25% or more in just a week or two, it will probably pull back significantly. This is called a climax top. When it makes its biggest one-day rise, sell.
• When a stock suddenly jumps up on weak volume, sell.
• If a stock closes at the bottom of its day's trading range on high volume, consider selling half your shares.
• If a stock drops below its 50 day moving average on heavy volume, or closes down on record volume, sell.
• If there are 3 days with the market dropping on heavy trading, reduce your positions. This may be signaling the start of a bear market, or a baby bear.
• If the Put/Call Premium Ratio (found in the Wall Street Journal and IBD) rises to over 2.0, begin reducing your positions. A big market drop is on the way within a few months.
• Don't ever sell and take a profit if your leading stock runs up 20% or more in only 2 or 3 weeks. Most market leaders last a year or more
• On any bad news about a company whose stock you own, sell. Wait until the air clears and the stock begins rising again before repurchasing.
• When you review your portfolio of stocks, the laggards will clearly stand out. Sell them and buy more of your winners. As many wise investors have found, it’s a good practice to weed your garden regularly.

Resources:
http://www.oexoptions.com/pages/SampleAlert.pdf
http://www.atozinvestments.com/selling-stock-advice.html
http://www.actwin.com/kalostrader/CANSLIMDesc.htm

How to Write a Press Release

A press release is pseudo-news story, written in third person, that seeks to demonstrate to an editor or reporter the newsworthiness of a particular person, event, service or product. Press releases are often sent alone, by e-mail, fax or snail mail. They can also be part of a full press kit, or may be accompanied by a pitch letter.


In baseball, it's said that you know an umpire is top-notch when you never notice his presence. If he's doing his job, he won't call attention to himself in any way. It's much the same for the writer of a press release. When the recipient of a press release focuses only on its content -- and not on its creation -- the writer has succeeded. With that in mind, here's how to develop a style that can help give you a big edge in placing your press releases.

1) Master News Style By Reading News Stories

The folks who write wire copy for the Associated Press are masters at presenting information without calling attention to themselves. Read all the AP wire copy you can and get a sense of the rhythm and flow of their writing. Examine their choice of words and sentence structure (typically, they choose the simplest way of saying things) and their overall tone of solid objectivity. This is the style to which you should aspire.

2) Write a Great Lead

The lead paragraph in a press release should, theoretically, be able to stand alone as a news item. A standard news lead answers the Five W's -- Who? What? Where? When? Why? Successfully answer those five questions in one paragraph and you've summarized everything beautifully.

Bad lead:

The new Acme X100 is drawing raves from customers, who call it the best thing to happen to the flanging industry since the X99.

Good lead:

Philadelphia, August 15, 2007-- Calling it a "milestone day for our industry", the Acme Company unveiled the first flanger capable of creating widgets using only solar power. According to Acme President Joe Blow, the X100 is expected to find wide use in the developing world, where access to traditional electric power is unreliable.

The Five W's are answered! Who: the Acme Company. What: theintroduction of the solar-powered X100. Where: in Philadelphia (the headquarters for our fictional company). When: August 15. And, most important, Why: for use in the developing world.

Remember this: in almost every release that's successful, what put it over the top was the answer to "Why?". You must make plain the significance of your news by answering that question succinctly and without hype!

3) Write in Third Person

Perhaps it's a silly convention, but press releases really should be written as if they're coming from an objective outsider to your company, not from within your business. Of course, the journalist knows better, but nonetheless, they expect releases to be written in the third person. In short, here's the difference between first person and third person:

=> First person: We've developed the Acme X100.It's our most advanced model ever.

=> Third person: Acme Industries has developed the X100, which a company spokesperson called its "most advanced ever"

4) Attribute All Opinions

Never flatly state an opinion. If you want to state an opinion or, as in the above example, make a claim, always attribute it to a representative of the company (which very well may end up to be you!). Anything apart from entirely factual info (dates, store availability, product features, biographical information, etc.) should be attributed. Again, the best way to get a feel for this is to read wire copy. Start sorting out the things a reporter feels comfortable with, including without attribution and things for which he uses a named source.

5) Use the Inverted Pyramid

On the first day of Journalism 101, aspiring scribes learn about the Inverted Pyramid. Basically, it's way of organizing information so that the most important information is at the top -- the widest part of the Inverted Pyramid -- and, as you funnel down to the narrowest point, the information becomes less and less vital. There's a good reason for this: if a reporter's 10 paragraph story gets cut to 6 paragraphs because of space considerations, the reader will still be informed of the most important news. What's cut will be background, quotes and other nonessential material. When writing a press release, the Inverted Pyramid is equally important. First, it's the style the journalist is comfortable with and second, it assures that even if a rushed reporter can only read the first couple of paragraphs, she'll get enough info to decide whether to use the release or not. If you bury the best part of your release in the fourth paragraph, the recipient may never make it that far.

6) Remove all "Stoppers"

A "stopper" is something that will stop a journalist in her tracks and distract her attention. Once that happens, your release is toast. The point of your press release: to present information in the least obtrusive way possible. Consider it this way: the journalist isn't dumb -- she knows full well that you've sent her the press release for purely commercial reasons, hoping to get publicity that will make you more money. She can live with that as long as [a] there's something in it for her (a good story) and [b] she's not reminded of your commercial desires too often. A "stopper" breaks the suspension of disbelief needed for this little dance to be successful. It's the boom mike showing up in the frame of a movie -- once you've seen it, it's hard to convince yourself that you're really experiencing something that happened during, say, the Middle Ages. Here are some "stoppers" to avoid:

=> Clunky language. Journalists keep their language pretty simple. Long words, compound sentences and lofty, pretentious phrases are no-no's. Keep your sentences short. Don't try to present more than one idea in a paragraph. Avoid words you wouldn't use in everyday circumstances.

=> Hype and puffery. The ultimate "stopper". Confusing press release copy with advertising copy is a pervasive problem with businesspeople. Don't call yourself the greatest, the hottest, the coolest, the most unique or anything of the sort. If you must make a claim of superiority for your product, service or company, attribute it. Acme President Joe Blow said the X100 "has the opportunity to revolutionize the industry" is much better than The revolutionary Acme X100 is the greatest industrial advance since the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk.

=> Trademark Symbols. Including TM or copyright symbols that scream, "hey, check me out! I'm a press release! I come from a business! The legal department made me include this stuff!"

The bottom line: write like a journalist, avoid the stoppers and answer the Five W's and you'll succeed!

About The Author
Bill Stoller, the "Publicity Insider", has spent two decades as one of America's top publicists. Now, through his website, eZine and subscription newsletter, Free Publicity: The Newsletter for PR-Hungry Businesses he's sharing -- for the very first time -- his secrets of scoring big publicity. For free articles, including our no-cost report, "Press Release Secrets", go to: PublicityInsider.com.

More Links on How to Write a Press Release:

• http://www.wikihow.com/Write-a-Press-Release
• http://www.lunareclipse.net/pressrelease.htm
• http://www.publicityinsider.com/release.asp
• http://www.prwebdirect.com/pressreleasetips.php
• http://www.ehow.com/how_8793_write-proper-press-release.html
• http://www.pressbox.co.uk/contpr1.htm
• http://www.infoscavenger.com/prtips.htm
  

How to Use Offline Advertising in Internet Marketing

Knowing how to use offline advertising in internet marketing can give you a significant advantage over your competitors, since many do not use offline methods to advertise their products.

Offline advertising is particularly relevant if you are selling a product, or offering a service, that attract customers locally. For example, you could offer a fitness aid at your local leisure center. Many leisure or fitness centers will allow you to put a free poster offering your product, but even if they charge you for it the price is usually small. Perhaps you have a golf training aid that you can advertise at your local golf club.

Local classified ads are also a good means of getting your product some local publicity. The classified ads pages or even adverts placed on selected pages of your local press, frequently provide you with local orders. The beauty of these is that they are very easy to follow up, either with back-end products or new ones. You need not even restrict yourself to the local press. How often have you seen an internet marketing advert on the national press? They are not uncommon, and although expensive, they must produce a good return.

If you have a niche website, it could be worth your while browsing round your local newsagent and checking out the magazines on display. You know the kind - all these racks upon racks of magazines on every topic you can think of. Have a word with the newsvendor and find out some of the more popular magazines that cover your niche. These could be good publications for placing your adverts, especially if they are not too expensive and they have a good circulation.

Poster campaigns can also work well. You can advertise with posters in many shopping malls, and some stores also offer you the opportunity place an A5 poster for only pennies a week. Have your own business cards printed with your internet business contact details, such as website address and email address in addition to your phone number. Put your website address on everything, and have a signature that use on all correspondence. Not just emails and forum postings, but also offline correspondence such as letters, invoices, receipts and anything else you send to other people.

Another form of offline marketing that most people have never heard of, let alone use, is buzz advertising. This type of advertising has been growing in popularity recently, especially by offline businesses. It is used extensively by some auto companies and by cosmetics companies. Buzz advertising involves getting a verbal buzz going about your website or product. Some companies pay people specifically to verbally promote their products by approaching strangers, striking up conversations and bringing up the product in the conversation.

"Say, have you heard about the latest perfume from ----!" While not yet common it is getting more popular. Of course, the buzz need not be started off by someone you have employed to do it, but you can do it yourself. You can get your family and relatives involved as well. Before you know it, everybody might be talking about your product or your great new website. That's how YouTube and MySpace got so popular.

If you have a van or pick-up get your business name and website address painted on the site. It's easier to get a buzz going if people see your website in their face all the time, on vehicles, on posters, in newspapers and magazines, and even chalked on walls! Well, perhaps not the last one, but that would sure get people noticing your website! Do you get the idea? Get your website name known in every way that you can.

How about a local radio slot, with you explaining the virtues and benefits of your product, service or website? Stress the benefits, and you need not restrict it to local radio. Try for a national radio slot or even TV if your business is sizeable enough. There are no restrictions to the advertising methods you can use. Hire a loudspeaker and shout it from the rooftops!

Online advertising methods are very effective in internet marketing, since they can be visible to people all round the world, but if you know how to use offline advertising it can also work very nicely for you, and bring you a lot of business you would not otherwise have.

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About the Author: Andre Sanchez - How to Use Offline Advertising in Internet Marketing was originally published at http://www.affiliatemarketinglife.com

Web Site Performance Analysis and Tuning

There are a number of solutions that can help you monitor and measure the performance of your site better than clicking on a link looking at your stop watch.
How do you know if your web server performs well with respect to server stability, connect time, and download time?
Web Monitoring tools will give you the answers, as well as results of comparative test with other web servers

• Web Page Analyzer
• Internet Supervision Load Analyzer
• Pingdom Full Page Test
• Numion Web Stopwatch
• Iweb Tool Speed Test - multiple site comparison
• Octagate Site Timer
• Free Web Ceo Tool

You could read more about web tools from another article on Useful Internet and Website Tools

Tuning your web site for faster performance

• Checking for bottleneck references on your page to images or JavaScript on external sites (perhaps banner .gifs) and making sure they aren't causing a slow down. Otherwise, you may just want to host that JavaScript or image file from your page (if its legal).
• Making sure your total HTML + image size is less than 50kb, even less if you have primarily a 28.8kb modem audience.
• Reducing the number of images in your site. Use text instead of images when you can.
• Making sure images have been compressed. You may have some .jpg files that you created which you forgot to compress before saving. Sometimes the image files you reference in your Flash files are not compressed either.
• Referencing the same images using the same names instead of different names.

You could read more about Web Site Performance Analysis and Tuning from the original source.

Programming Tips to optimize your code
Source code optimization is an important but often overlooked application of the send as little data as possible principle. As a web site or application acceleration strategy, its chief benefit is that the technique can provide substantial reductions in network payloads without requiring any additional processing on the origin server. Source code optimization should be implemented as a pre-deployment step through which all additions and changes to the front end source code (including markup, style sheets, and client-side scripts) normally pass before being uploaded to the live production site or application.

Read more about Optimizing Source Code from the original source

Caching of Web Objects
It is highly recommended that all Web servers use a scheme for the expiration of all Web pages. It is bad practice for a Web server not to supply expiration information via the HTTP Expires response header for every resource returned to requesting clients. Most browsers and intermediate proxies today respect this expiration information and use it to increase the efficiency of communications over the network.

The most commonly encountered caches on the web are the ones found in a user's web browser such as Internet Explorer, Mozilla and Netscape. When a web page, image, or JavaScript file is requested through the browser each one of these resources may be accompanied by HTTP header directives that tell the browser how long the object can be considered fresh, that is for how long the resource can be retrieved directly from the browser cache as opposed to from the origin or proxy server. Since the browser represents the cache closest to the end user it offers the maximum performance benefit whenever content can be stored there.

Read more about Caching and its usages from the following links,

• Cache Control
  
• Sending Last Modified Header to Browser
  

And finally there is a tool to do all of the following

• Web Server performance monitoring with respect to server stability, connect time, and download time. It also as well provides results of comparative test with other web servers
  
• Help you to detect broken links, and old and slow pages quickly
  
• Will tell you, if you optimized your site pages well for your target words and give you optimization advice if you need it
  
• Will compare your sites search engine visibility to that of your competitors
  
• Will count and return the link addresses to your site and also compare your current results to the past.
  
• Will find your link partners, e-mail them, and control the linking page’s quality
  
• Will create sitemaps and resubmit them to Google, MSN, and Yahoo! after you’ve changed your site substantially
  

You could download free version of Web Ceo to do all of the following tasks and optimize your website for speed and search engine friendly.

Link:How to take good care of your site