Trading volume will continue to be light with New Year’s Day on Thursday. With light volume, we have no stocks to watch this week, but the professional traders of TraderInsight.com reflect on 2008 and think about the year ahead.

Adrian Manz, Stock Day Trader

With zero volatility in the Christmas-shortened week, my intraday trading plans for New Year’s week are to stay pretty light and reflect on the year gone by. Our continued focus on the strategies presented in my book, Around The Horn: A Trader’s Guide To Consistently Scoring In The Markets, has served us very well for the fifth year, generating a consistent rate of return and predictable intraday price movement. Each time I speak publicly, a few new faces appear in the crowd, and each time many of them talk to me about how they have put the strategies to work in their own trading. Nothing is more rewarding than meeting and speaking with these people and learning that my success in this business has inspired their own.

I am certain that 2009 will present more of the excellent trading opportunities we were able to capitalize on in 2008. My guess is the Fast Ball, Switch Hitter and Infield Fly setups will dominate early in the year, and that by the time we reflect on 2009, the Sinker setup may once again be a bread-and-butter strategy.

The patterns in Around The Horn are inherently designed to capitalize on the cyclical nature of the markets. A move through the cycle, or around the horn if you will, used to be a full year in the making. Now the cycle length has been truncated to a few weeks, and trading timeframes have shortened from months to weeks, weeks to days, and hours to minutes. Everything has changed, yet everything inevitably stays the same. We make our living by spotting the footprints of the big money as it moves through the market. We anticipate crowd psychology and earn our keep by taking profits and cutting losses at support and resistance targets that serve to pinpoint the areas at which fear and greed will cause others to panic. Trading is an art form that as much requires a genuine understanding of self as it does price action. Success is predicated more on introspection and growth as an individual than on an understanding of bar chart dynamics and price action. Your own demons will sink you much faster than any market maker or specialist. I hope that all of my readers will find those mischievous sprites held well under control in 2009, and that this year will provide you many opportunities for profit.

Tom Incorvia, Stock Swing Trader

Last week didn’t provide much color for traders. As expected, there wasn’t much volume or direction in the broader averages. Unfortunately, this week will probably provide the same. There will a few economic releases, but nothing that should be earth shattering.

For me, this is the season of reflecting and planning for the New Year. 2008 showed me that the impossible could happen. I’m not going to go into the travesty that hit the markets. We all heard and felt it and I would like to keep my writing upbeat. We may all look back at 2008 as one of the great buying opportunities in the last 75-80 years. I’m fairly certain that the companies that do survive will be much stronger and fundamentally sound. It brings me back to 8th grade science class and the laws of natural selection.

I’m looking forward to the New Year and the opportunities that will unfold. I hope to see the second half of 2009 bring an improvement in the economy, or at least bring the bulls out of hiding.

Art Collins, Index Futures Trader

The stock market continues to be range-bound, so few cues will come out of support-resistance numbers. I'm thinking two things. One, we're past the point where bad news or minor selling automatically leads to massive sell-offs. And two, the last week of the year tends to be very bullish. There will probably be more activity than most people generally expect for this time-frame and it will probably be up-side biased. I don't expect the next huge correction to happen until after the inauguration, which co-incidentally dovetails with a traditional decline in the last week or two of January.

Dave Mecklenburg is the Editor-in-Chief of TigerSharkTrading.com.