I Love Those Neutral Days

Yesterday in the ES was a neutral day. For those who don't follow Market Profile, a Neutral Day occurs when there is range extension in both directions after the Initial Balance.

OK, what is the big deal about a neutral day? Well most of the time,  after the market's second range extension, it retraces back to the middle of the Profile. I say "most" but in the ES RTH, I can't remember it not happening unless it was too late in the day.

It doesn't take a lot of smarts to figure out that this is a high probability trade that should be traded by me in every instance I see it. This is an automatic response on my part. No thinking required, I just do it. Sometimes the move is not completed entirely within the RTH session but goes into the Asian time zone. See the pic.

A salute to the Military etc...

For my U.S. followers remember the Americans that voluntarily offer to pay the ultimate price in defense of this nation. Reguardless of how you view the current conflicts, you can not help but be humbled by the voluntary sacrifce these men and women give in our name.

Give them something, I contribute every year to http://www.lbeh.org/

Now available with Google Apps: Google News

[Cross-posted from the Google Enterprise Blog]

Editor’s note: We recently launched an improvement that makes over 60 additional Google services available to Google Apps users. This series showcases what’s new and how your organization can benefit.



Welcome to Google News
Staying up to date on all the day’s news is a challenge – even when that news might be absolutely critical to your business. Missing a story could mean missing an opportunity. That’s why we’re pleased to make Google News available with your Google Apps account.

Google News is a computer-generated news site that aggregates headlines from news sources worldwide, groups similar stories together, and displays them according to your personalized interests. You can customize Google News with topics you are interested in, and even indicate which publications you’d like to prioritize in your personalized news stream.


Google News will surface stories relevant to the interests you indicate and will aggregate articles from multiple news sources covering that story. For example, if a story about changes in the funding environment for small businesses shows up in your news stream, you’ll be able to click through to coverage from a variety of news outlets in order to get a spectrum of views on the issue.

Now that Google News is integrated with Google Apps, sharing the articles that you discover with coworkers is easier than ever. You can email a link directly from the News interface with address autocomplete linked to your existing Contacts list.


And Google News even makes it easy to stay current on the latest developments in the news when you’re away from your desk. When you connect to Google News on your smartphone with your Google Apps account, you will find an experience optimized for viewing on your mobile device and get the same personalized stream of news you see in the full browser version.


Now you can make the most of those spare minutes between meetings or the transit time on your morning commute by reading the latest news, complied and organized just for you.

Learn more and get started
Google News can be enabled by your domain administrator from the Google Apps Control Panel at https://www.google.com/a/[your_domain.com] (replace [your_domain.com] with your actual domain name). If your organization isn’t using Google Apps yet, you can learn more and sign up today at http://www.google.com/apps/more.

For answers to specific questions you can visit our Help Center or you can follow the latest updates on our product blog.


Posted by Chase Hensel, Product Manager, Google News

Note: Google News may not be available in all areas.

We Asked. You Told Us Your Wishes for 2011

Two weeks ago, the Small Business Marketing team asked about your aspirations for the coming year. You told us the biggest wish for your business, and the wish for expanding your business’ online presence. Today, we’d like to share what we heard.

We combined your responses from our blog, Facebook and Twitter and organized them into three main themes and then sub-themes. Of course, not all wishes fell neatly into these themes, so we did create a Miscellaneous category.

Before the drum roll, thanks to everyone that took time to share and participate. Some wishes were big and audacious and others more practical, but all with an underlying tone of passion for what you do and a focus on delighting your customers. On with the results…

Theme 1: Move my business online

Not surprisingly, you’re passionate about the business products you’re using and made very specific feature requests. Rest assured if they were Google product related, we’ve shared your wishes with our product teams. Additionally, you said you want more online resources to help your business grow. Your comments acknowledged that referrals are now happening online through social media channels and, as such, you want to understand how to use these online tools. You also want more out of your websites. Ultimately, you said you want to do more online to run your business more efficiently and spend more time concentrating on your customers.

Click for larger image.

Theme 2: Grow my business

We heard that you want to continue to grow your business with increased profits, more customers, or more people. Lots of wishes for more marketing tools to increase your business’ visibility – the range included the entire marketing mix. You want simple tools made specifically for you. There were wishes for funds to buy equipment, spend more on advertising, build e-commerce into your offering, and lease real estate – to name a few.

Click for larger image.

Theme 3: Love my business

Many resounding wishes to continue fueling your passion because you love what you do. You’d love to learn more – from social media, AdWords and Places to creating marketing plans. You prefer support face-to-face with people and training at a relatively low cost. Many of you want more opportunities to network and support your fellow business owners. Whether it’s help getting the most out of applications and tools, or navigating a healthcare plan, you’d like some expertise to assist.

Click for larger image.

We thank you again for telling us your wishes for the coming year. Stay tuned as we will use these wishes to build upon our plans to help small businesses succeed in 2011.

Posted by Leslie Hernandez, Product Marketing Manager, Google Small Business Team

Repetition Is Key

Over half of what a good trader does is repetition, much like professional athletes. As Reggie Jackson says, "A baseball swing is a finely tuned instrument. It is repetition, and more repetition, and a little more after that". He could easily have been talking about trading instead.

Developing trading skills, as I have often repeated, is all about repetition. A trader needs to hone his skills with repetition in SIM. A trader needs to test and develop his trading plan through repetition in SIM. A trader needs to perfect his entry and exit skills with repetition in SIM.

I had a comment to yesterday's post that said: "Your blog has become a broken record."

Mate, you're missing the point.

This is my 351st blog post since October 2009. I blog almost every trading day. Yes, there is repetition. It's repetition because I say it and show it in different ways. Some people don't get a concept the first time or they don't get it the way I first showed it. Learning can be tedious unless you really love to trade. I learn every day. When I'm not trading I'm either researching or teaching.

On top of it all, there is not a lot of "new" in learning to trade. Trading is simple, but not easy. To achieve that "aha" moment can take months, but usually years. Mentoring and seeing ideas such as those in this blog helps shorten the learning curve. I know, because readers and students have told me so.

Additionally, a lot of time and effort has gone into writing blog posts that I think readers would enjoy or benefit from. And that is my criteria- Would I want to read that post?

On that note, I will be blogging on some additional topics in 2011, including exploring ways to make money using longer term trading techniques. I'm also bringing back the video trading recaps.

Today's trades show the benefits of identifying the beginning of a trend. This was the topic with one of the guys I am mentoring today during our 1 to one.

We begin anew

My new journalism website, Chartiers Valley Patch, launched at 6 a.m. Monday. I welcome all of my followers here to visit the site and pass along the hyperlink to anyone who lives in and around Bridgeville, Collier Township, Heidelberg and Scott Township. Your support, opinions and suggestions on this blog over the past 17 months have been very-much appreciated. Thank you.

http://chartiersvalley.patch.com

Now available with Google Apps: DoubleClick for Publishers

[Cross-posted from the Google Enterprise Blog]

Editor’s note: We recently launched an improvement that makes over 60 additional Google services available to Google Apps users. This series showcases what’s new and how your organization can benefit.



Welcome to DoubleClick for Publishers
For millions of online publishers—from the smallest blogger to the largest entertainment, news, e-commerce and information sites—online advertising revenue is vital. When publishers can maximize their returns, everyone benefits from more vibrant online content and websites. A publisher's ability to manage this process can have a significant impact on how much money they make from their online content, which is why we’re happy to bring our Google Apps customers our next generation ad serving platform to solve these problems: DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) from Google.

Imagine you're a major online publisher with a popular global surfing website and an ad sales team. Every second of every day, you have difficult decisions about what ads to show and how to measure their relative performance. For example:

• In the same ad space, a surfboard wax advertiser wants to run a static image ad for your Australian readers, while an airline offering flights to Hawaii wants to run an expandable interactive ad for your American readers.


• A fast-food restaurant wants to run its burger ads before noon and its pizza ads in the afternoon.


• You've sold 10 different surfboard makers a million ad slots at slightly different prices; now you have to allocate them across your various webpages to fulfill all these orders over the next two weeks.


• One of your surfing tournament reviews is linked to by a popular news site and you have a surge in traffic. Your sales team couldn't predict this, so you’re left without any ads for thousands of readers. You want to fill this ad space by selling it via an ad network that has ads available.

These examples illustrate how complicated it can be to optimize ad serving on your website, and they only scratch the surface.

DFP comes in two flavors, tailored for different publishers' needs: DoubleClick for Publishers, for the largest online publishers, and DFP Small Business, a simple, free version designed for growing online publishers. As a Google Apps user, you now have access to both versions of DFP with your existing Apps account.


With advanced features such as streamlined ad trafficking, inventory management and forecasting, revenue optimization, granular reporting, and an open API, DFP offers a complete toolkit to easily sell ads on your site directly to advertisers while also working dynamically to help you get the most money from inventory you sell through partners like AdSense and ad networks.

Just like Google Apps, DFP runs in Google’s cloud so you get the same reliability, flexibility, and easy access without any software to install or hardware for IT to maintain. Also, DFP is fully supported by Google so you don't have to worry about manual system updates or downtime.

Learn more and get started
DoubleClick for Publishers can be enabled by your domain administrator from the Google Apps Control Panel at https://www.google.com/a/[your_domain.com] (replace [your_domain.com] with your actual domain name). If your organization isn’t using Google Apps yet, you can learn more and sign up today at http://www.google.com/apps/more.

To learn more about how DFP can help you manage and grow all of your online ad inventory, please visit our website or follow along with the latest news and release updates at the DoubleClick for Publishers blog.

Share your story
Have you already started using Google Custom Search at your organization, or plan to now that it’s available? Please share your story and your organization could be featured in the next Gone Google ad campaign!


Posted by Stephen Kliff, DoubleClick Team

Note: DoubleClick for Publishers may not be available in all areas.