The Chicago School of Trading

Former UCLA Basketball Coach John Wooden passed away last Friday. There are many of you who are not old enough to remember a time when the NCAA Tournament was the UCLA Invitational. Between 1964 and 1975, UCLA won ten of twelve NCAA Tournaments. If freshmen could have played in 1966...

On May 6th, 2010 the stock market took its wildest twelve minute ride in history. SPY(SPDR S&P 500 ETF, Public, NYSE:SPY) opened at 116.26 rising as high as 117.00 before finishing the day at 112.94. Oh, I almost forgot to mention that SPY traded as low as 105.00 before rallying...

Happy President’s Day. We used to only honor Lincoln and Washington, but now we honor all of them with mattress sales. Like Chester Alan Arthur for example. Arthur had never held elective office until being elected Vice-President in 1880. He had been collector for the Port of New York, which...

Here come the Bernie Madoff books: One of Madoff’s victims, Sheryl Weinstein who invested millions of dollars for the charity she ran as well all of her and her husband’s life savings with Madoff, now claims she also had an affair with Madoff in her book “Madoff’s Other Secret:Love, Money,...

About a year ago, the HBO show Real Sports, profiled former major leaguer Lenny ‘Nails’ Dykstra. The less-than-eloquent, foul-mouthed, tobacco-chewing Dykstra was portrayed as a business genius in a piece that featured CNBC’s Jim Cramer extolling Dykstra’s market acumen and showed Dykstra trying to explain his options trading strategy to...

Oil prices are on the rise, so once again the fingers are pointing on those evil speculators. Websters defines speculation as “assuming a business risk in hopes of gain”, in other words: Trading. When the oil market goes up, speculators who have purchased oil futures are blamed. When the stock...

Three things that helped shape our modern world happened on July 16th: 1945 – The first atomic bomb was exploded in Alamogordo, New Mexico. 1969 – Apollo 11, the first manned mission to land on the moon is launched at Cape Canaveral in Florida. 1971 – Corey Feldman was born...

That’s French for “Happy July 14th” or Bastille Day – The French national holiday that commemorates the storming of the Bastille Prison by a mob of French peasants 220 years ago today. It’s like the 4th of July only there’s an ugly mob of smelly, bloodthirsty, French peasants with torches...

Bernie Madoff was sentenced to 150 years on Monday, which means with good behavior he might get out in 75 to 80 years. Several of Madoff’s victims testified in his sentencing hearing. They told tales of bankrup and ruin. To avoid having to testify in a similar hearing someday, here...

As we celebrate the 233rd birthday of the United States this weekend, we pause to remember the words of John Adams, one of the authors of the Declaration of Independence. After the Declaration was passed by the Continental Congress, Adams wrote to his wife Abagail that succeeding generations of Americans...