[keithbin]

I am a semi-retired chartered accountant, I have been active on the stock market for approx. 15 years now, initially as a hobby but more seriously for the past 5 years. As my accountancy/tax practice continues to scale down, my investing/trading must become my primary source of income.

I was first introduced to Stan's stage analysis system while doing a technical analysis course early in 2011. Although the course devoted only 2 pages to stage analysis (as part of a total of 185 pages), Stan's approach immediately resonated with me, it seemed to "jump out" from the clutter of all the other stuff & jargon that the course contained - somehow that day my gut told me that *this* was the system for me to use. I bought the book and have been using the stage analysis system ever since, with decent success thusfar. I approach it on the long side mostly as an 'investor' not a 'trader'. Recently I have been experimenting with shorts - with mixed results, thusfar I'm more or less at break-even with shorts. Going forward I would like also to try some 'trading' using the stage analysis system.

As far as longs go, whilst my results have been pretty decent I do believe I can do better - my entries and exits tend to be a bit sloppy - often rushed, often ill-timed (when looking retrospectively), too often influenced by what some or other 'guru' has said. My stop-placement also needs some work, it has not been ideal. I was delighted to find this forum and believe that I can learn a lot from all of you here.

I am in South Africa and so trade on the Johannesburg SE but including some international ETF-type products which are quoted here locally. The detail here in this forum on the US & UK markets will not be directly applicable to me, but I hope to learn from you all in terms of tweaking/refining/improving my use and implementation of stage analysis.

cheers,
Keith