LA Traders Expo

My wife and I just got back from Los Angeles on Sunday. I attended the Traders Expo and my wife jogged around the city. She lasted about 30 minutes in a seminar before she decided that her time would be better spent running through the hills of Hollywood. There were a few seminars that made me wish that I was running with her (and I hate running), but for the most part, I felt like I learned some new stuff.


I had an enjoyable time. I was impressed by many of the speakers. A few fell short of my expectations. Some were there to sell stock systems for large amounts of cash. I resisted.

I got to meet in person several of my favorite authors and bloggers. I'll highlight them here:


Brett Steenbarger who runs Trader Feed and and has written a few great books on trader psychology. He talked about his new book The Daily Trading Coach and discussed how traders sabotage themselves while offering techniques to avoid common problems that traders face. I really enjoyed his talk. Dr. Steenbarger spoke for free and offered an hour-long question and answer session after his talk.

I was a bit shocked when he opened his talk with a story that involved an "F-bomb" and the word "whore". After reading his blog for years, I was expecting a quiet nerdy fellow. I found out that Dr. Steenbarger was a talented speaker who has an interesting background and a diverse set of hobbies and interests.

Scott Andrews who runs Master the Gap presented a couple of very interesting number crunching seminars on the opening gap on the indexes. I had no idea that a gap could be analyzed in so many different ways. The information was great and I was very impressed with Scott's presentation.

Corey Rosenbloom from Afraid to Trade presented an interesting seminar called Idealized Trade Set-ups for the Intraday Trader. Corey was a nervous that he would have a weak showing to his seminar because he was speaking at the same time as Tom McClellan--the designer of the McClellan Oscillator and John Bollinger--son of the designer of Bollinger Bands.

Corey had a gread turnout despite his fears and presented a terrific seminar that kept my interest despite my having weekly mentoring lessons with him.

I also enjoyed seminars by John Carter of Trade the Markets, Merlin Rothfeld from Online Trading Academy , and Leslie Jouflas from Trading Live Online.

Overall, I'm glad I went. It gave me a boost of confidence and helped confirm that I am on the right track.