Another great reason for taking out a home equity loan is to make improvements on your home. Have you been thinking about adding a swimming pool to your backyard? A greenhouse to your yard? A new bedroom or bathroom addition? A home equity loan is a great way to finance those types of projects.

Your first step should be to talk to your current mortgage company about your options, but don’t stop there. You will quickly find that there are plenty of companies who are willing to lend you money against your house, and so you should shop around for best deal.

And that brings us to our final point. A home equity loan is secured by your home. What that means is that if you don’t make payments on time, lender will have right to take your home and sell it in order to collect on debt. Make sure that you are in a position to pay back any amount you borrow against your home!

When SP futures make a quick surge to a strong resistance zone, and then loses momentum at or near zone, while concurrently TICK registers an extreme high reading (usually over +1000), this sets you up for a high-probability short entry, with a hard stop just above resistance zone.

These counter-trend trades "fade" (meaning to enter a trade against trend) intraday emotional extremes, and may come at beginning of a new trend - giving you a chance to hit a "home run." More often, however, they become scalp trades that don't last long, sometimes less than a minute. Either way, they are high probability trades if you time your entry well.

It takes a lot of practice to time your entries just right on these trades, and you have to be ready to get out immediately (before your hard stop is hit) if you sense that your edge has disappeared. It is difficult to sense when edge (probability of success) of a trade is gone *before* trade changes from a small gain to a small loss. Practice will help *if* you know what you're looking for.

Most traders believe you have to wait for your hard stops to be hit before you can know that a trade's edge is gone. This may be true for most traders, but it doesn't have to be true for you.