BOND AND SWING TRADING SERVICES

There are some important points that have to be made about these services. Please if you are a current subscriber or considering subscribing, read this post carefully.

There was a comment made about the Swing Trading and Bond results made by Trader J that was posted Sunday that made me realize we need to clarify some things so that everyone understands what we are doing here. TJ thanks for that comment because it made we aware that this needs to be addressed.

First, what are the goals of these services?

Second, are they the only trades Michael and I do?

Third, are other services going to be available?

THE GOALS OF THE SERVICES

The goals of both the Swing Trading and Bond System are the exact same each and every year and that is to be profitable. That is it. There are no percentage goals as we have no idea what each coming year will or will not bring. If during the course of a calendar year any service is profitable beyond what it costs to subscribe, that is a successful year. Obviously the goals are to do as well as we can. I did state my personal goals for the year in a post, but that has nothing to do with the goals of the services. I stated I wanted to double my accounts by the end of the year, that does not mean anything as it pertains to any one individual service. In spite of all the BS that is on the web, most people can't do this. If you make 30% on your account every year for 10 straight years you will be one of the best traders in the world. I may not achieve my goals and if the Swing or Bond service were to return something positive, but less than some arbitrary percentage, that does not make them bad.

I subscribed to a service last year from someone with a better track record than I have and lost $30,000 trading it before I pulled the plug. We have been consistently profitable from the day we launched, so I am proud of our record thus far. This is very difficult to do. It is one thing to trade on your own and make mistakes it is entirely another to make blunders in the public view with hundreds of people knowing of the blunders. It has been a learning experience for me determining what trades I can put in and which ones I can't in the Swing Service. The Bond System is easy, it spits out the orders and I just forward those basically.

I consider us well on target for our goals. I am always trying to improve and hopefully this will be reflected in the results. If we annualized the results we have so far since launching the services, I think they would be unrivaled.

DO WE DO OTHER TRADES?

Yes. We are constantly researching all sorts of different ideas and methods. I have 6 different trading accounts at this point and am employing different strategies and mixes of them in each one. We also have accounts in trading contests as well that also have different approaches. If you read the disclaimer it clearly states we have the right to trade anything any time we want to whether or not it is or is not in sync with the trading service signals. Clearly any entry into a trading contest would employ a different strategy than what would be suitable for trading services for clients. That is often a balls out affair with higher risks than what is prudent to try and get an extraordinary return. It would not be prudent to have services that routinely draw down 30 percent or more, very few people can handle that. Further, we often will try some experiments that may blow up in things like this. Many ideas when put to the test of real money flop. Some people enter trading contests with multiple accounts and blow up most of them yet one does well and they win. It can be misleading. I would suggest not being a scoreboard watcher. There are ebbs and flows to life and to trading, you can't get too focused on too short of a time horizon.

I can guarantee we are doing other trades while at the same time we do trades in the services. I can also guarantee that at times I will not always be in all the trades. For example a couple of weeks ago due to my fathers illness I missed a couple of the trades, and missed a couple of winners. Some trades can be experimental trades that completely flop. There could be margin constraints, computer problems, all sorts of other reasons as to why we might not be in any particular trade even though we try to do all of them. That needs to be clearly understood. I may at times through discretion have larger size in some than others, again a judgement call. The only way we can report and account for the trades is just basing them all on having one contract. How people choose to use the signals is up to them as individuals.

OTHER SERVICES

Are we going to offer other things in the future? Yes. Once we get our new web site done we will be diversifying into many other things. The web designers are taking forever to get things done for some darn reason. I would love to have a trading chat room to have more short term interaction but that is something that is in the future.

THE CHALLENGE FOR ME

I have mentioned some of these but they need to be reviewed again since they relate to this topic. I traded some emails with a sub the other day about a specific trade. During the course of that email exchange a reference was made to a trade they were in and what to do, they had ignored the rules for exit. When I looked up the account of this person I found the trade they were talking about was in the Swing Service and they were only subscribing to the Bond Service. Of course this was proof that someone was sharing those other signals with them for free.

I have mentioned that this was taking place and this was proof. I did not confront this person because what is really the point. If for this small amount of money you want do this and defraud me and you can sleep at night more power to you. However, this causes certain problems. First, it hurts the rest of us myself included. We have gotten some very strange price action in some of the smaller markets around our entry points, we created the trades with our group. Based on the number of subs being limited by me I was hoping to avoid this. With people distributing our signals to others like this it makes it impossible for me to limit the number of contracts we trade. As a result I went to stop limit orders in some of those markets to try and address this problem. I then found that many were just ignoring the stop limit and placing stop orders, so the problem was not solved. For those trading the smaller markets you may have noticed the winning percentage is way lower in those, this is why. This kind of stuff creates the fills instead of the market naturally trading to the entry prices.

I just have to ask one last time for people not to do this, it hurts all of us including you. We have had 4 or 5 trades that were ruined by this type of thing and I can't do anything about that other than run the programs exclusively through brokerage firms where we could completely control things. I don't want to do that. I don't mind the pressure of picking the trades but don't make it harder on me than it is by doing this. The Bond System is now ready for the auto trade program through Robbins Trading Company, if you are interested please contact Ryan Spritz at 800-453-4444. The track record it shows is different than what we show this year due to it not being in place at the beginning of the year when the first two big winning trades happened. That is murphy's law, but it will be accurate going forward and over time missing a couple of trades won't matter much even though it has had a huge impact on the YTD numbers in 2013. Keep in mind when viewing that the actual system has made two big winners and it may have also missed a third one I am not sure. In any event it is good now going forward. Give it a couple of months then check in if you wish.

Also we have to do trades that a broad group of people can understand, this eliminates some more complex strategies that we could use. Again in time there may be other ways to make those available in the future. You would be surprised at some of the questions I get. I know everyone is trying to learn and I am trying to help so be patient with me.

HOW TO USE THE SIGNALS

There are a number of ways to use the signals. I think they are best used in conjunction with other things you might be using. I personally trade the same number of contracts on each one for the following reason, I want to get the same return. If I decide to take different numbers of contracts I run the risk of under performing the total results. Obviously a trade in Gold or Silver has a larger effect on the overall results than does a trade in Cattle. This works both ways and has in the months we have been doing this. The whole point of these signals is to try and catch a larger than one or two day move. If you scroll through all the markets with a couple of exceptions, most markets have gone sideways for the last two months. As a result only about half the trades are right. The average winning trade is larger than the average loser so that is how we are moving ahead. This is real world trading.

We will be staying clear going forward of some of the smaller market due to the people who are misbehaving  with the signals. I suppose we will try to outsmart you since we can't seem to catch you. I still don't  understand why you are doing this because it is clear you are hurting yourself along the way?

Here is a chart that shows the latest ES trade from the mechanical system which was a short entry today, exit will be the first profitable open so we will see how it plays out. I am in this trade.

I know everyone is crazy about trading this market but it is a very difficult market to trade. This is the 8th trade this year so far, there has been one loss and the rest wins up to this point. I am continuing to work on adding to this system, it trades about 7 - 8 times a month presently, which is not enough for most people who are more concerned with action than profit unfortunately. 

I learned something shocking about wiring money today that once I get a clarification on will report here in this blog. If what I was told by Chase today is true, nobody should ever wire money ever again. They claim there is no responsibility on there part if a account number and name don't match up because the system is automated and defaults to the account number only. If you happen to transpose a couple of digits by mistake and the money goes to the wrong account your money is gone, POOF. I suspect they are telling me wrong but I have to sue them to find out it appears. It is a shame that there are far more ways your money can be stolen than there are for you to have a windfall. It any attorneys happen to read this and could offer a comment it would be helpful.

That is it for now - Good Trading