CAN THEY BACK THEIR WAY INTO 7?

Can they devise a new scheme of yet another different way of calculating the number to manipulate the head line number under 8%? As a betting man , I think I would bet my life on it. If they have to exclude 50 Million people out of work on some technicality, they will back their way into something in the 7's by the election. To think that these folks are concocting this grand scheme to change our way of life to socialism, makes me ashamed to be an American. I just can't believe what politics have come to in this country. They are creating false moves in the stock market, lying about every single thing that matters at all, just to win an election. Now they are pitting social classes against each other trying to create class warfare. The President talks more like Jalen Rose a famous former hoopster who was known for his smack talking, than he does like a leader. The problem with smack talk is that it does piss off the opponents. Maybe a revolt is coming in this country? It just seems hard to believe that all the great hard working honest people that live in this great country will allow this to go on much longer. I will just state one more thing and then move on. If this jack off gets 4 more and institutes the class warfare structure he wants to, I will move out of the US assuming I can afford to. I heard a liberal pundit the other day on a talk show say that once you make more than 1 Million, the government should be able to take every penny beyond that, and give it to the people who work harder and deserve it more like waitresses and bartenders etc.. In his scheme if you make 10 million you get to keep 1 million and they take the other 9? I can tell you this, if he came to my property with that attitude he had better have his affairs in order before arriving. It is time to stop being nice to people like this, they want to ruin our lives PERIOD.

The markets continue to be very challenging. This has been the longest period of time in the last few years by far, that I have had few trading setups to enter trades recently. All I can tell readers is what I am doing and what I am not doing. First in reverse order, what I am not doing. I am not forcing trades. I am not running out and jumping from one method to another as my famous friend I talk about in here all the time is doing. The latest with him is using Advanced Get and some oscillator to trade Wave formations. Some "guy" in India is doing this he met that is doing well, and he is going to try that. As always, I hope it works for him. He is one of the best people I have ever met and has had great success in the business world. However, I told him that I would be more than happy to give him my views on this, but have no interest in using any of it. I just don't believe that if you are constantly changing methods you can ever hope to have any consistent success. I choose to try and find better ways of using what I already have. I want to be a master of one thing, not an apprentice of many. I remember a high school teacher in one of the rare times I was paying attention say, you can choose to know a little about a lot or a lot about a little. To me even at a young age the choice was obvious, a lot about a little.

As a result, I seek refining what I already use. I alluded to my college roomate who is the GM of the Indiana Pacers in a recent post. When I visited him on the way back from Chicago, I sat down with him at 1 am in the morning after their first playoff game and showed him my basic trade setups. He knows nothing about trading at all, he has a money manager handle his money. However, he is very bright and knows how to run a business. I thought it would be interesting to get another pair of eyes on my tools, to see if he could give me any insight into how I might be able to make some tweaks to what I am doing. What he said was very interesting. After showing him the three main things I look at, I showed him a dilemma I was having with one of them, the most important one. It always looks good after the fact, but at game time it is tough to read, very subjective. It is more subjective than I prefer, yet is the best tool I have ever had. The challenge is how to get more consistent with the reading of it, since it is the main cog of my method. 

He likened my method which has 3 components, to how he evaluates players and their ability to succeed in the NBA, which also happens to have 3 components. What was the most interesting is that he has one of the 3 as the one he gives the least weight, and uses it as a tie breaker. After listening to me explain my 3 tools, it was very clear to him that the one that I was having the most trouble reading consistently, should be the one given the least weight. Ironically, that is the one I give the most weight. This is the beauty of having some one with no biases look at what you are doing. It was very clear to him with no bias, that the most inconsistent tool should be given the most weight. I have been so biased towards it because of how well I have done with it, I just never thought of it that way. He did see why when I showed him lots of examples, why I like that particular tool, but he was troubled by how tough it was to read at the time the trades took place. In his world he has to be right most of the time on players, so he has to have a method to make decisions with, that will be consistent over time. Sound familiar?

On some levels I do think trading is just like any other business. People get hung up in how different it is, but I don't really agree. Yes it is incredibly challenging, but so is opening a restaurant. How about playing the PGA tour for a living? In any endeavor small percentages of people succeed and others do not. Trading is no different. Now that I have gone through rearranging my tools under a scheme of logic I put together with his hiearchy, I have removed the subjectivity from my setups. Now I can go back through prior periods and look at trades that were generated mechanically to see how they did. In one market I have done, it has not had a loss in 3 years, and in Gold it only had 2 losses in the last 3 years, with 18 wins. It will not generate as many trades as I am used to taking because it filters many things out. When you trade really subjectively, there is always a trade because you are winging it. It is very tough to be consistent doing that. I am kind of in between some discretion but mostly mechanical. This still keeps me in the middle but pushes me more toward mechanical. I cannot make this completely mechanical, because I can't code what the one pattern I see in one of the tools is. It is clear when it is there or not to me, but to a computer it misses them no matter how I try and describe it.

Moral of the story, don't chase your tail. Look to someone from the outside at times you might be surprised what they tell you.

Good Trading