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Tips & Useful Info

Tips & Useful Info

Running collection of practical wisdom, rules of thumb, and insights from across the course — organised by topic, not by lesson.

Portfolio Management

  • Everything in your portfolio should be in an uptrend (HH/HL) or putting in a reversal pattern. Nothing should have lower lows, lower highs. Seems simple because it is — the only reason people don't stick to it is psychology
  • Frank's rule: drop your worst performer every month. The opposite of what most people do (selling winners to "lock in gains" to cover losses). Over time this improves performance by cutting the drag
  • Don't hold trapped money. If your money is doing nothing going sideways for years, that's an opportunity cost. You don't have to buy the bottom — you can wait for the breakout

Retail Advantage Over Institutions

  • Retail can buy an entire position in one hit. Big money can't — they have to accumulate over time (which is why accumulation phases exist and take so long). You can buy when it starts to trend instead of waiting years
  • Don't try to buy the bottom or sell the top. Buy when the trend starts (breakout of accumulation, change of market structure). Faster gains than sitting in accumulation for years

Market Psychology & Discipline

  • "If you can't handle the zags, you don't deserve the zigs." Corrections are as natural as day and night. Accept them as normal in an uptrend, or you'll panic sell every dip
  • Your biggest enemy is your own psychology. People hold losers because admitting they were wrong is harder than watching money disappear. They sell winners early to "lock in gains." Both are ego-driven, not strategy-driven
  • Process over outcome. Focus on executing the process correctly, not whether individual trades win or lose
  • You can afford to be caught in accumulation or public participation — you'll recover in the next phase. You cannot afford to be caught at the top of excess — the correction wipes out the entire move and can take 6-13 years to recover

Sector Rotation & Money Flow

  • Money never leaves the market — it just rotates. When one sector tops (excess phase), big money is already accumulating in the next undervalued sector
  • Look for sectors that are historically low, not historically high. If a bear market comes, things already at historical lows won't take as big a hit and will be the outperformers. Energy, uranium, lithium, healthcare when beaten down — that's where money rotates next
  • "Bigger the base, bigger the explosion." A long accumulation period (large sideways range) tends to lead to a larger move when it finally breaks out
  • When US tech goes down, Australian resources tend to go up — because money rotates from technology into precious metals, mining, and commodities. Australia didn't really have a recession in 2008 because of resources

Market Mechanics

  • 80% of all market volume is done by bots — and those bots are trained on technical analysis. Good comeback for anyone who says TA is "reading tea leaves"
  • Stock market gaps happen because the market is only open ~6 hours per day. News overnight (e.g. tariff announcements) causes gap ups/downs at open because of supply/demand imbalance. Crypto doesn't gap because it trades 24/7
  • The CME gap — Wall Street trades Bitcoin futures during Wall Street hours only. When Bitcoin moves outside those hours, it creates a gap on the CME futures chart. This is what people mean by "fill the CME gap"
  • Log vs Linear charts: Linear = $100 movement is the same size everywhere. Logarithmic = a 10% move is the same size everywhere. Use log when looking at very broad time periods or very large price ranges

Charting & TradingView

  • Always start on the weekly timeframe. Dow himself never traded below the daily. The lower the timeframe, the more noise and the harder it gets. Stick to weekly while learning
  • If it's not clear, it's not there. If you can't see clean market structure on a chart, move on to a cleaner one. Especially avoid small caps with dodgy wicks everywhere while learning
  • Don't overthink finding stocks to practice on. Pick any random chart, practice pivots and market structure. If that chart's messy, pick another. The key is in the process, not the ticker
  • marketindex.com.au — good for browsing ASX sectors and finding tickers
  • listcorp.com — lists all ASX indices and sectors

Trading Strategy Insights

  • Craig only trades the public participation phase. Gets in on the change of market structure (breakout from accumulation), gets out when he sees bearish divergence near the top. Doesn't try to catch accumulation or ride excess — moves money into the next thing entering public participation. Replicable, consistent
  • Phases are somewhat subjective. Where exactly accumulation ends and public participation begins can be debated. What matters is identifying when market structure actually changes (breakout above previous highs with confirmed HH/HL)
  • Market cycles repeat roughly every 30 years. Within a ~30-year secular bull market you get multiple smaller cyclical bull/bear markets. The major resets (lost decades) happen roughly every 30 years — Great Depression, 1970s, 2000-2009
  • Cyclical bull markets last ~3 years on average (sometimes 2, sometimes extends to 4). We get 3-4 of these between major resets
  • Phases → Elliott Wave: Understanding accumulation/public/excess translates directly to Wave 1/Wave 3/Wave 5 in a five-wave impulse. This foundation pays off in Term 3
  • Volume confirmation is covered in depth in Week 4 (Tenet 6)
  • Reversal patterns — there are only 3 ways a trend can reverse, covered in Week 3 (Tenet 4)
  • Support/Resistance flip — when resistance breaks and becomes support (and vice versa), covered in Week 2
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