The reason 9 out of 10 retail traders lose money is not what most people think. In 2000, two researchers named Brad Barber and Terrance Odean published a study called "Trading Is Hazardous to Your Wealth." They tracked 66,465 households trading through a discount broker between 1991 and 1996, and they sorted every household by how often they traded, from least active to most active. The finding was brutal. The most active 20% of traders earned an average annual return of 11.4% over the period. The market returned 17.9%. The most active traders underperformed the market by 6.5% per year, every year, for six straight years. The traders who lost the most weren't the ones with the worst stock picks. They were the ones making the most decisions. Barber and Odean traced almost every dollar of underperformance to the same root cause. Overconfidence. The traders who thought they had an

There's a thing the market does every day at 3 PM that I've become a little obsessed with. It's a data feed the NYSE Arca exchange starts publishing live at exactly 3:00 pm every trading day, and for the next 50 minutes it shows where the biggest money in the market is positioning into the close. Most of Wall Street sees this same information at 3:50 pm. Mark and I see it at 3:00. Here's the thing about me. I'm a chaotic wildfire as a trader, which is exactly why I'm obsessed with rules. Give me a signal that fires at the same time every day on the same ticker and I will run it into the ground. Mark Sebastian feels the same way. We've been reading this feed together every trading day for months and built one of the cleanest little trade structures I've ever put on. One ticker,

57% of these patterns end the same way. That's not my opinion. That's Tom Bulkowski's research, the most cited body of work on chart patterns in technical analysis. The pattern is called an ascending channel, and SPY is sitting at the level right now where the trade triggers. The market is at all-time highs. SPY is over $737. And I'm getting ready to short next week. I'm not bearish, I don't think the rally is over, and I'm not calling a top. I'm reading a pattern that has a name, has documented historical performance behind it, and is showing up on the SPY chart right now in textbook form. An ascending channel is one of the most basic and most reliable structures in technical analysis. Two parallel upward-sloping trendlines, with price moving in a steady rhythm between them, where the lower line connects higher lows and acts as support while