MERRY CHRISTMAS

Here is a pic of my posse which is our Christmas card. I want to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from all of us. Thank you for reading the blog this year and also for having the confidence in me to subscribe to some of my services. We have done well together this year and I am looking forward to next year being a gangbusters year for us.

From a personal perspective due to the PFG disaster this year has been probably the most challenging year of my life. In some aspects I have handled it very well and others not so well. It is difficult to understand how tough something like that can be on you until it actually happens to you. I remember in the Madoff case and MF case I felt terrible for the people but moved on from it quickly. When you are a victim you cannot move on quickly, especially if you are a person who lives on your trading income. It is one matter entirely if you lose some disposable money that does not effect your life at all. It is entirely another when your whole life is changed by something like that. You can see what I have to support with trading at the top, so not being able to trade for as long as that freeze up has really hurt me. I have to generate significant money to pay for all of this each month as you can see. I was not able to generate any for several months and even when some money came back it was not nearly enough as a base to generate the returns I needed to cover this. 

I have been very very angry at times over this, but for the most part I have accepted it. Harboring anger does you absolutely no good at all. I do have to admit I do have thoughts at moments of using all of my training to give Wasendorf what he deserves as well as a few others I suspect had roles in this. It is a thought that leaves me quickly because I will never have that chance anyway. It is better to focus on what you are going to do positively as a result of something like this. I have a plan to do something about all of this that will benefit everyone, but it is going to have to wait until I get back on top financially. Once I do I think the regulators are going to wish there was no me. It will all be legal and above board, until that time it is parked in a file and life goes on.

I have also tried to spend a lot of time in here discussing this because in spite of doing so I still don't sense any real sense of concern in traders about their money being safe at FCM's. When our next cycle of difficulty shows up trust me some FCM's that "seem" fine are going to POOF and your money will be gone. It is clear with the MF situation that the authorities have no interest at all in doing a thing to people that break the laws in regard to segregated money. That should tell you there are going to be more cases like this. When we get another bear market you are going to see some of these firms steal the money to try and survive. Even if the NFA catches it through electronic monitoring of the bank accounts, the money will still be gone. Depending on where it went you still may not be able to get it back through a clawback process. Even if you can it will take years and you won't get all of it. I understand if you have an odd $25k or so that you don't care much about and are learning to trade with, but if you are someone who trades like I do with much larger amounts, you had better be on top of this issue.

LEARNING CURVE

The daily signals are just that, daily signals. All we can do is give the trading signals, how they are managed is up to the individual. We cannot and will not give advice on this. Data providers have differing symbols for the same markets so it is up to you to determine the symbols that correspond to the markets.

We are also going to roll out some things once the new site is done that will be very helpful. We are contemplating a few things and I would like to get feedback on what level of interest there is for these following items:

CHAT ROOM

DAILY VIDEOS

DAY TRADING

WEBINARS

MEMBERS ONLY SECTION WITH HIGHER LEVEL CONTENT

ES TRADING SYSTEMS

I think I can guess on some of these but please let me know. The goal is to take this to the next level although it may be one step at a time. We are not sure what people want so please give us comments. Others in our business seem to be doing some of these things.

cj@wearefuturestraders.com

jmp@wearefuturestraders.com

We had some very unusual action in the ES tonight in reaction due to the move in Congress. What was peculiar was how isolated it was to basically just the ES. Even the Russell and Naz had nowhere near the reaction that occurred in the ES. What was also strange was the lag in the movement. It started down slowly well after the news, then all of the sudden after a pretty good time lag, crashed then immediately bounced right back to where it was. This appears to have been what I call an electronic death spike which rarely happens in this market anymore. However what was strange was the lag, it was almost as if someone big was trying to decide whether to sell or not..... HMMMMM. I will let you take that where you want to. An argument can be made for the PPT being on either side of this action.

Maybe I am nuts but I am not sure this is going to crash right here. This whole market just has a strange feel to it I can't quite get a handle on. For my taste now the ES has too big of a range for me to trade it Friday now so I will sit on the sidelines.

Here is a trade I just did in Soybeans and the signal was also in the Swing Service.

Again the intention is to try and catch large moves in this and even though this was only 2 days, it was a large move so I took the profits after the 3 big down days in a row. Could it go further, of course. However, when I get a move this big this fast I often take the money. This was a 3 to 1 on the risk reward scale so that is a good enough payoff for me. They don't all work out like this unfortunately, life would be grand if they did.

Merry Christmas a bit early from my posse