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Intelligent Speculator

Technical Analysis and Trading Tools

The One, The Original

IntelligentSpeculator.com took off when Bill Griffeth named it the CNBC Power Lunch site of the day in early 1999.

New Site

Our Story

It all started the year before when Teresa became the host of a free chat room at her new website about stock trading. Pete was one of the first people to arrive. Because we both worked in the investment industry, we did our best to educate people about risk, to remind them that the stock market is an unforgiving Darwinian mechanism that transfers hot money to the smart money. In the long run, most people lose.

The venture was not conceived as a means to make money, but as a way to connect traders from around the world. Mutual funds were hot then. The Dot-com Bubble was inflating fast. It was a time when people dreamed of quitting their jobs to trade, attracted to it by the promise of instant riches.

Books and Publications

Markets have had some big ups and downs since then, and we are still here. Along the way, Teresa’s trading adventures were featured in several books. She has written many articles on technical trading techniques for industry magazines, and created tools for TradeStation and eSignal charting platforms.

Heads Above the Sand

Anyone with average intelligence can learn to trade. This is not rocket science. However, it’s much easier to learn what you should do in trading than to do it. Good systems tend to violate normal human tendencies. Of the people who can learn the basics, only a small percentage will be successful traders.

If a betting game among a certain number of participants is played long enough, eventually one player will have all the money. If there is any skill involved, it will accelerate the process of concentrating all the stakes in a few hands. Something like this happens in the market. There is a persistent overall tendency for equity to flow from the many to the few. In the long run, the majority loses. The implication for the trader is that to win you have to act like the minority. If you bring normal human habits and tendencies to trading, you’ll gravitate toward the majority and inevitably lose.

— William Eckhardt in The New Market Wizards: Conversations with America’s Top Traders

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