Isam Laroui has been trading stocks professionally since 1996, first at a couple of Wall Street proprietary trading firms, then independently starting in 2004. His preferred holding period and trading time frame have increased over the years from a few hours, using the one-minute and five-minute charts, to a few weeks, using the 30-minute and daily charts. He has been trading ETFs extensively over the past couple of years; SPY, SDS, FXI, USO, GLD, GDX, TLT, TBT, BGU are some of his current favorites. He also trades currencies (mainly EURUSD and USDJPY), although with an even longer time frame. A career-long non-dogmatic believer in and user of technical analysis, he has been a Chartered Market Technician (CMT) and a member of the Market Technician Association (MTA) since 2006. In another life, he worked as an insurance actuary after receiving his MS in Statistics from NYU in 1993. You can read his various irreverent (and sometimes irrelevant) musings on his blog at http://musingsofatrader.blogspot.com .