Alas, I guess longer term is all in the mind of the holder. For me it used to be 2 top 5 years now I'm very lucky to make it the full year for the lower taxes. I hardly ever do. A function of that has been the market. A function of that has been me. As long as you are patient and willing to watch and track something for a week or two you can become familiar with any stock's trading pattern weather that is tape reading of charting is just semantics... the problem with both approaches for me is first day the damn thing breaks out with volume I am instantly looking for a low volume retrace and I'm in there... often too early. In fact tape reading leads top soooo many false break outs--this is mostly due to the skewed after and pre market quotes I feel. So I'd like to throw into this argument the idea that classic tape reading died officially when the extra hours of trading was introduced. Most versions of tape reading now are just scalps... is anyone really buying new lows off tape reads???? I think I study the tape scrawls more than most, but when you get in a 4 Horsemen Mentality with just a few tech stocks going to the moon... what does it mean that BIDU is up $15? However order flow is order flow and if you were on your game you would of noticed Citygroups spike in buy orders in the last five minutes of Friday and gotten in. I just missed and backed away in the post trade as the stk settled back to only up 36 cents... big mistake? Probably I don't see how this whole sector doesn't do a three day soar next week. Will I be chasing? No. Will I be Tape Reading? I guess so even if I don't want to the info will be there. In general just staying upon sector rotations and big institutional buying will serve you fine & if you happen to locate and sexy stock that the market makers bring up and down a couple bucks all the time-- by all means go in and out of it to your hearts content-- It does get so confusing at tax time though... stoney