A friend of mine asked me today, “So now that you are writing for the Motley Fool and your articles are linked on CNN Money and Yahoo Finance and the like, are you going to keep updating your website? Won’t you just be linking to your articles on Motley Fool?” I must admit, I was appalled that my friend would think that I would stoop to simply linking to my Fool articles over and over on my website! I mean, who wants to come to my website just to read watered-down posts littered with links to my Motley Fool articles? I told him, “Friend, listen up: I pledge to provide readers of tradingcommonsense.com with real exclusive content, not simply links to articles I’ve written for Motley Fool!”

So there you have it.

All kidding aside, now that I’ve written a few articles for Motley Fool, I am as happy as ever that I have tradingcommonsense.com. Motley Fool is great, and it provides lots of interesting and helpful stock analysis. However, Motley Fool also has rules. This site has no rules.

One of Motley Fool’s rules is that everything I write must be submitted to an editor for review and is subject to major revisions. The editors are great, and they have been very helpful, but they are also very busy. So far is seems like it has taken them an average of 1-2 days to read, edit, and either return or publish my submissions. On tradingcommonsense.com, my articles are online as soon as I finish typing the shameless plug for my book that I include at the end of every post. For example, I’ve said before that I am not a psychic, but my crystal ball is telling me that an article very similar to the one I posted exclusively on tradingcommonsense.com yesterday about Wells Fargo and JP Morgan just might show up on Motley Fool sometime today or tomorrow. A lot can happen in the market in a couple of days…

Another rule that Motley Fool has about its articles is that they generally need to be under 800 words. That’s a pretty reasonable length for most topics I would cover, but sometimes, such as the article I wrote about Melco Crown Entertainment, I don’t feel like it’s possible to provide the true depth that is necessary to fully explain the situation in only 800 words. There’s no word count here on tradingcommonsense.com. For better or worse, I will not be contained by word counts!

But I think the absolute biggest shortcoming of the Motley Fool is that they discourage the inclusion of technical analysis in their articles! Whether or not you believe that stock charts hold some mystical powers, the fact of the matter is that enough other people do believe in technical analysis that it has a real effect on share prices. In that sense, it is good to be aware of stock charts, even if they are not the primary piece of information on which you base your trading decisions.

So here’s here’s an example of the type of analysis you will never see in any of my Motley Fool articles:

I sold my position in Apollo Commercial Real Estate last week because that chart looks like absolute shit. For six months, ARI had been trading inside a channel tighter than your sister’s yoga pants. But now that the stock broke below the channel on massive volume, the former support line and the 50-day simple moving average will be points of resistance for the stock moving forward. From a strictly technical perspective, this stock is looking pretty busted, much like your mom looks in her yoga pants. But not your sister.

Thanks to my Motley Fool editors, that type of hard-hitting technical analysis, supported by commentary teeming with profanity and personal attacks will be exclusively provided on tradingcommonsense.com!

Want to learn more about technical analysis?  Or maybe you want to be able to look sophisticated in front of your coworkers when they ask you what you are reading on your Kindle, and you’d prefer to tell them “Oh, I’m just reading a book about stock market analysis,” rather than the usual “Oh, I’m just looking at pics of my ex-girlfriend on Facebook.” For these reasons and more, check out my book, Beating Wall Street with Common Sense. I don’t have a degree in finance; I have a degree in neuroscience. You don’t have to predict what stocks will do if you can predict what traders will do and be one step ahead of them. I made a 400% return in the stock market in five years using only basic principles of psychology and common sense. Beating Wall Street with Common Senseis now available on Amazon, and tradingcommonsense.com is always available on your local internet!