Posted on

TLC Weekly Update August 9, 2019

image

All week I was troubled by bad internet connection. Slowed down progress with various projects. Just unbelievable how dependent I am these days on the need to be connected to the net all the time …

My team told me that the Gann Square Excel add-in I have created years ago, is the number one gann tool on the net based on the number of downloads. It is a pleasant surprise for me. Never thought that people like it so much. Just wondering what will happen if I charge a dollar each.

I received quite a number of requests to buy the mechanical trading strategies they see in DaytradingBias instead of subscribing to the premium service which gives full access to all the strategies. I understand what they are thinking of and I can package up the strategies as individual items in the store. The truth of the matter is, the cost of these strategies would add up to way more than the subscription fees. Anyway, I am getting my team to package up some of the items and offer them in the store.

I finally realize that I was sick after I came back to Canada last week. The symptoms were so mild that I thought I was get exhausted from the trip and all. Only until I woke up Thursday in the morning feeling all better that I figure this out.

Someone sent me this Quora answer by James Altucher on Warren Buffett. It is a good read and correct assessment of “The Oracle”. As I told many people asking me about Warren Buffett, he is not a good investor and he is definitely not a good fund manager. Now I can refer everyone to this full length article so that I don’t have to waste time explaining why.

Have a great weekend all!

Posted on

TLC Weekly Update August 2, 2019

image

I was so exhausted after traveling from Hong Kong back to Toronto that I slept on and off for more than a day before I can get back to my normal schedule excluding exercise. And now that it is Friday, it is my first day of resuming my daily exercise routine. My performance was bad.

What two weeks of non-stop meetings, walking in extreme heat, dining out and significant amount of alcohol can do to me?

Well, upper body strength dropped but I know I will gain it back quickly. Other than that, I do not really feel that bad. It is still too early to tell how long it will take to recover fully.

I guess the worst part of the trip was little to no option to stay away from complex carbohydrates. Every meal I was introduced to try out, with much eager by the inviting parties, has carb as the main ingredient. Exotic ramen, very fancy noodle dishes, you name it, I tried it. The end result is six pounds of fat added to my belly.

I am graceful for the chance to try out all these foods. I enjoyed every moment of having them. Doing this occasionally makes life fun. However, getting back in shape will probably be my priority over the coming few weeks.

Talking about priority, I now have time to get back on track to compile my list of books to read on basic chart reading skills. As I explained before, it is getting more difficult to do so because many of the books I like to include into the list are no longer in print. I am working on adding the alternatives in case you cannot find the ones I recommend.

In the meantime, you can read the series here.

I will get back on track to complete the trading manuals on Emini that I promised my members. It is not an easy task because writing is often a “flow” process that you need your brain to have the big picture in your mind in order to produce content that is coherent with the rest of the book. So I need to read and re-read my manuscripts to pick up from where I left off three weeks ago.

So, catch up time for me and wish you all a great weekend!

Posted on

TLC Weekly Update Jun 28, 2019

image

In the blink of an eye, it is already Friday. I have so many things to get done I lost track of time. It is nice to sit down and take a short break here to review what happened this week.

The progress on completing the technical part of the Emini day trading course is taking much more time than I anticipated not because of the materials are not there. Seriously, I have all these day trading strategies written eons ago. Translating them into TradeStation is not difficult at all. But, in order to explain certain things, I have to use the TradeStation optimizer and taking screenshots of the results. And that is a huge pain in the neck as TradeStation is very slow with its optimization process.

I am so used to optimization at 10 times the speed, I thought I can get these things done in an hour and next thing I know the estimated time to completion is extended another few hours. Since I cannot get people to switch to NeoTicker and its Grid Optimizer, I guess I have to live with this until it is done.

For the giant book list on DIY day trading mastery, the second instalment is now ready. Finally, some books directly related to trading are included. The next set of books will probably takes some time to prepare due to an unforeseen circumstances. Namely, as I flip through the books, I find many of the good ones are no longer in print. I am still trying to figure out a way to include them because I am sure you can find some of these books in the libraries or other book places.

I moved up my travel schedule to Asia from August to July. It is primary for family matters. Hopefully the internet will be good enough there for remote access to my work.

And thanks to all of you sending me your suggestions on what to do next with webinars. I am organizing the materials to see which one will get the go ahead first. I will keep you all posted about the progress.

To my fellow Canadians, have a nice long weekend!

Posted on

TLC Weekly Update Jun 21, 2019

image

Happy day.

I get my edited draft of The Emini S&P Day Trading Course back. Read it through twice. Fixed up some minor issues. I have this part of the editing completed. So what’s left is to polish the code of the day trading strategies featured in the course and have them ready for download. Of course I need to take screenshots, write and rewrite parts that I am not satisfied with, but I know I am dashing through the finish line. It always feel good to see the completion of a project.

For the big list of books on trading, I finally give in to reality and split it into multiple parts. First part is just posted.

I told my premium members to look into buying gold producer ETFs at the end of 3rd quarter last year. Looks like the comeback play worked out with more upside likely. As I explained to my readers, in order to win big on the long term moves in gold, you need to leverage on the gold producers. These gold producer ETFs holding the major gold companies are the perfect vehicles with lower risk comparing to holding gold or gold ETFs directly and better reward too.

Now that Facebook is going to release its own crypto currency, the validity of the block chain technology as an alternative to money printed by the governments is now turning into reality. We need to pay close attention to the development of crypto markets from now on … As a minimum, at least take the time to understand some basics about them. Here is a good intro video about blockchain published by Wired.

Have a great weekend everyone!

Posted on

TLC Weekend Update Jun 14, 2019

image

Now that the Raptors got its first ever NBA title, Torontonians will now have to live with a totally jam packed downtown this coming Monday. I wonder how many Raptors fans will take the day off then. Congrats to the team and its loyal fans!

My Emini S&P day trading course first draft is now in the hands of my editor. While he is working on the draft, I just got the graphic design back. Here is a sneak peek.

image

In the meantime, I am working on new ideas for more webinars. In fact, both this new course and the Trading Success Blueprint will include webinars so that they can be much more effective in helping traders to do better more effectively and efficiently.

For the next instalment of Smarter Way to Master Day Trading Emini S&P, I am trying to come up with a list of books that I know will help with trading. It turned out to be a huge list of books that I have to keep adding more. For those of you who want to DIY instead of taking the shortcut with my courses to master day trading, this will be the book list you have been waiting for.

One of the questions I am asked most is “which moving average do you use?” or something along the same line like “What period is your SMA?”

Well, I do not use moving averages in my trading. I do not use oscillators of any kind. I mention the moving averages in my real-time commentaries often because there are many traders using them. That in turn creates patterns in the price movements. Awareness of them and their effects is one of the ways to help yourself in putting the current market condition with the proper context.

Have a great weekend everyone!

Posted on

TLC Weekend Update Jun 7, 2019

image

What a week again with the market going straight back up since Monday. Many people were surprised but not me or my premium members at DaytradingBias. US Non-Farm Payroll week is famous for pulling this trick for decades. Just that no one really paying attention to it. I even gave this out for free years ago yet how many people really take the time to learn it and use it in their own trading?

It has been an extremely busy week for me. Meeting with lawyers, business partners and talking to advertising agencies. Yep, my team at DaytradingBias wants me to consider promoting the site somehow. Although I am savvy with ad placement with classic media, I have no idea if that will be effective in this era with social media dominating the attention of majority of the people. So, I will go with the flow and see if doing promotion about the site will improve traffic.

After months of preparation, the training material I promised many of my premium members is almost ready. Tentatively, I call it “The Emini S&P Day Trading Course: Immersion Learning from Consistently Profitably Day Trading Strategies”. The course will feature a complete set of day trading strategies with ready to use TradeStation code. Unlike pretty much everyone out there offering their trading methods that cannot be quantified, the day trading strategies presented are fully backtested over the full history of the Emini S&P. It is first time ever anyone actually coming out to disclose a complete day trading framework that these strategies are derived from. I know this will help traders tremendously in accelerating their career in trading with this solid foundation.

Lately, I have been thinking and reflecting on what I like to do for the rest of my life. I know trading is just something I love to do so it will always be part of the equation. I also love doing research on financial markets so it is not going away. However, operating the DaytradingBias site has been taking away a lot of my time. I am reading this book, Small Giants: Companies that choose to be great instead of big, by Bo Burlingham and come to a realization that I never really treated DaytradingBias as a business in the first place. If I choose to, I should follow the ideas presented in the book to turn DaytradingBias into a small giant.

There are many benefits of doing so. First, I can free up my time so that I can focus on things I am best at by appointing someone to take care of the operation for me. Second, the time I free up can be turned into time spent on producing more useful tools and education materials for my followers. I know I am good at mentoring other traders so taking the effort into the next level makes sense.

This commitment means a lot of planning on my end and also seeking for the right person to run the show. It will be a challenge. And I am ready for it.

Posted on

TLC Weekend Update May 24, 2019

image

The long process of updating daytradingbias has now entered the final stage. It sure takes a long time getting it mobile friendly, reorganizing the content and (damn it) adding security measures to protect the site from hackers. As I wrap up this project, I am very happy that my time is finally freed up so that I can focus on my other projects. Off my head the list is quite long already – automated trading service, 2 books and several training courses.

This will surely keep me busy for a long time!

My first webinar on day trading the emini worked out alright. The platform I chose is very easy to use and not much post-production effort needed to make the webinar available for replay. Going forward I will do more webinars regularly. Long articles are good for presenting information concisely. However, when the concept takes 3 times or more the length of a long article to explain, it is very hard for people to stay focus reading it through. Webinar can resolve this issue beautifully.

I just completed re-reading the book The 80/20 Principle by Richard Koch. You may have heard of the 80/20 principle or the Pareto Principle but to truly understand and fully utilize the concept it is extremely useful to read the book at least once. By learning from the examples, you can get ideas on how to improve not just your work but also on all other areas in life.

Summer finally arrives here in Toronto. First day above 20C. I wonder how is the cottage country (Muskoka, Huntsville, Parry Sound, etc.) up north doing. There were very serious flooding almost everywhere up there several weeks ago but we are not getting any updates from the news about the situation. It is always nice to go there in the summer to enjoy time in nature.

Have a nice weekend all!

Posted on

My Attempt on a New Format of Communication: Doing Webinars on Day Trading E-Mini S&P

image

The hectic struggle against hacking of DaytradingBias is now over. Thanks to all the parties involved, we managed to contain the problem for the time being. We are still experiencing a moderately high rate of attacks but they no longer affect the normal operation of the site. So life back to normal despite a delay on quite a number of projects.

Catch up time!

I am exploring the possibility of doing webinars on a regular basis. There are times that writing an article on a subject just cannot get the message across. The long form writing that I do, often dig deep into the subject but the distilled information can be hard to understand if the reader does not have the same context in mind. Many topics like certain concepts in trading are very difficult to understand so maybe an interactive format would make it easier.

I asked my team to explore on the technical front of what is necessary to make this happen. We are doing testing right now to see which platform works best. The consideration also includes how to record these sessions so that they can be made available in the future.

First webinar will probably be hosted in June or earlier if the technical issues are taken care of quickly. All of my premium members are invited to join. Tentatively, I will go in-depth explaining how to turn some of the day trading biases I explained before into day trading strategies that fit your particular need. The focus will be on E-Mini S&P as usual since majority of my premium members are Emini day traders.

Don’t worry if you cannot participate in the webinar. The recorded session will be made available to all premium members. The trading strategy codes used in the session will be made available in the download area as well.

It will be an interesting challenge.

See you there!

Posted on

More Trouble from Hackers

image

I spent at least 20 hours this week working with my team to defend DaytradingBias from all kinds of attacks by hacking robots. It is mentally exhausting when we think that we have fended off the hackers already and then another class of attackers swamped the site again. And again.

We ended up using multiple layers of defense to protect the site but even now these bots are still knocking at the door.

Although they failed to hack the site so far (touch wood), they are causing inconvenience to my site members.

These bot attacks overwhelm the server from time to time affecting the normal services provided by the site.

I cannot understand why the bots like my site so much.

Very frustrating but I am still hopeful that we will contain the problem soon.

And for those of you curious like where the hacking bots are coming from …. they come from everywhere. If you guess that the majority of these bots are coming from Russia or China, you are wrong.

Posted on

DaytradingBias was Brute Force Attacked and Luckily Survived

image

Last two weeks DaytradingBias.com experienced multiple incidents of database issues causing the site not reachable at times and also database corruptions. Due to the fact that we were doing major updates to the site, we thought it was probably related to the changes we made. I was forced to restore the site to a backup copy and ended up losing several days of posts and updates. Everything looked normal for a day and then the problem resurfaced again. With help from the hosting company and several experts, we finally realized that DaytradingBias was attacked by a swamp of robots.

It was really our fault – when we’ve decided to update the site about a month ago we found that we need to disable the security plug-in in order to install various new functions into the website. We disabled the security plug-in but then totally forgotten about it because nothing bad happened and we were just very happy with the faster and improved backend. Little did we know the site was being probed on its weaknesses already.

The attack was brutal. Based on the logs, there were like a thousand login attempts per minute at the peak of the attack. Although the site was not hacked, thanks to the basic measures we took originally to protect the site without the security plug-in, but the site was so overwhelmed by the amount of traffic hitting it that it crashed several times. We have no idea back then it was an attack.

I learned something out of this experience. First, the wordpress platform turned out to be one of the most targeted platform by hackers. Second, the hackers are way more sophisticated than last time DaytradingBias was attacked years ago.

It was really luck that DaytradingBias was not compromised this time. Hopefully the security measures we now put on is enough to stop similar attacks from affecting normal operation.

For now, my team can finally take a break. Right on Easter Friday too.

Happy Easter!