Author: Lawrence Chan

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TLC Weekly Update July 19, 2019

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It has been an extremely busy week since I arrived at Hong Kong this past Sunday. Being busy and having a hectic schedule are not really something that pose serious challenge to me. But the hot weather is. I was effectively sweating all day going everywhere. It was only made tolerable because of the breaks I got from going inside air-conditioned buildings …

It is a more personal trip for which I am meeting with my family, across multiple generations, quite a number of times. We do not get the chance to see each other that often. It is good to see people family members are doing fine. Time is short though since I will head back to Toronto this coming weekend.

One thing I notice is that the price of everything has rise significantly in Hong Kong in just half a year since I last visited the place not long ago. I ask around to see if my observation is correct. It turns out many fast food chains and retail stores are increasing their prices due to the upward pressure of labour costs.

I was rereading the book The Magic of Thinking Big by David Schwartz on the plane. Before all these movements of self-help and all these talks about better performance through the building of proper perspective, we have this book explaining it all way back when. It is still the one that I recommend most to young adults because of the way the message is delivered.

Looking ahead, this coming week will be as hectic as the first one since I have been providing strategic portfolio allocation advices to my clients. I am also in talk with potential investors who are interested in some of my business ventures. Even though I do not usually get myself directly involve in running the start-ups I invest in, it is a great idea to spread the words when the opportunities show up.

Weather forecast is saying that it is going to rain all week long. To me, that means lower temperature. Yay!

Have a nice weekend all!

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TLC Weekly Update July 12, 2019

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I was a happy camper 1.5 years ago with my Lenovo Yoga 920. Now that it is dead for no good reason, I have switched to Microsoft Surface Pro 6. It took me several days to copy my backup onto this new tablet / laptop plus the tedious task of installing all kinds of applications to the machine. I am glad to say, I have a new best friend!

What I learned is that the Lenovo’s approach of using the USB-C port as a charging port is in fact a very bad design decision. Many users of the Yoga laptops suffer from total loss just because the port can fry the motherboard, the SSD, the battery and the charger. In short, it is now proven that it is a stupid idea. So if laptop makers see this, please do not make new laptops that use the USB-C port for charging.

In case you are wondering why it is a bad idea for laptop but not cell phones – it is because laptops need much higher voltage output from the port for charging purpose. With clean power sources of course you will be fine. But even in major cities, power surges can still happen randomly and the risk of passing those energy spikes to the laptop greatly increases.

My work on my Emini day trading course is now disrupted until I have the necessary files restored. Originally I thought I lost all my latest set of code examples. However, during one lucky restart of my Yoga 920, I managed to launch TradeStation and did a complete backup onto my USD flash drive. The laptop then died on me again with BSOD just minutes later. This backup turned out to be good enough with 50% of the latest changes I made. So, instead of losing two weeks of work, I lost half of that.

Not bad!

Many people asked about Bitcoin lately. And many people are wondering if the Facebook crypto will change the crypto currency landscape. I am no expert in crypto but I find this short video from London Real where Andreas Antonopoulos talks about that. His point of view should be taken seriously.

Time to get packing.

Have a nice weekend all!

(This update is posted 1 day early due to my travel schedule)

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TLC Weekly Update July 5, 2019

Well, sh*t happens. My Yoga 920 laptop died on me since Tuesday. Tried everything I can think of to “fix” the damn thing but hours wasted with no clarity whatsoever what went wrong. The symptoms include random crashes that force itself to restart, battery refuses to be charged and data files corrupted. I thought I bought a great laptop that will last at least five years.  Not even at two years mark the machine already died.

So my progress in completing the Emini day trading course is disrupted. Luckily, I have backup of my TradeStation stuff so it is a matter of installing it on my other laptop (Surface Pro 6) and restore the backup there and I will be back in business. The more frustrating thing is that some of the spreadsheets I have created for the course have to be re-created from scratch …

While I was waiting for the computers doing their things like backup and restore, I get to read more chapters of the book The Laws of Human Nature by Robert Greene. The book is huge and really takes time to read. It is also a great exercise to reflect upon the concepts to see how myself and people I know are bounded by these laws.

For those of you who email me over the past few days, you have to wait a bit longer until I have my laptop ready for that. I can only do limited online stuff at the moment. I have added a new item in my list of things to optimize in life after this incident. I will find a way to reduce my dependency of my everyday computer, or at least have a way to make the replacement process much more speedy.

For my premium members, I will travel to Asia starting next Friday. Due to time zone difference I will not be able to participate in the real-time commentary. I will see what I can do once I regain internet connection.

Have a nice weekend all!

 

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TLC Weekly Update Jun 28, 2019

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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!

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TLC Weekly Update Jun 21, 2019

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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!

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TLC Weekend Update Jun 14, 2019

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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.

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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!

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My Journey to Fully Automate My Trading: Reference Account First Month Results

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The result is in with the first month of trading the reference account using Big-Game Hunter ES at Striker. There are quite a number of things I learned over the month about the service. It is a good thing that I am trading real money with Striker myself so that I can further refine the trading strategies I planned to offer through them. Let’s go through the results and discoveries one by one.

First, the month has a net loss of $2820.80 all fees included. So it is down 18.8% for the month. It is not an outlier comparing to historical performance. So on the surface it is a typical month for Big-Game Hunter ES. This being said, I will add a monthly return table in the Big-Game Hunter ES page so that it is easier for traders without prior experience in this type of trading to see how the equity fluctuates.

Here is a chart capturing all the trades for the month.

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What is more interesting, however, is that if you know what happened during the month, you would notice that quite a few of the trades taken were stopped out because of news shock caused by Trump making tweets suddenly in the afternoon. Although I cannot tell for sure that these trades would have worked out fine without those news shocks, I know it is not likely that they all experience the worst case scenario either. So, it is something worth monitoring to see if such events continue to interfere with the performance. If so, better protection scheme has to be deployed using higher resolution data.

Another observation is that on days that the disruption of price movement caused by POTUS all resumed the original path the next trading day. It is as if whatever he did, only affected the day trading crowd.

Since I am trading the strategy on Tradestation myself and also through Striker, I get to compare the fills of the trades to see if there is any issue with Striker’s automation. Here is a table of the trades taken and a comparison of the actual fills.

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From the one month experience, it looks like there is a consistent slippage against the strategy with fills at Striker. However, the actual net effect of the trades were magically at zero thanks to one of the outlier better fill of 2+ points. I really don’t know what to say about this until I get more data to analyze. Let’s say I am just glad that the result so far is comparable.

I could not write up this post last weekend because I do not have a good way to capture the daily statements with the reference account. I ended up doing this manually. Without automation this will be very hard to do going forward as I planned to release more trading strategies with Striker. For now I guess I have no choice.

On my own account, given the chaos that is expected during the coming few weeks, I decided to delay the increase of contracts until next month. Hopefully POTUS will be done with his trigger happy tweets by then. I am not worry about Big-Game Hunter ES not going to perform though. I am going to deploy another set of trading strategies with my account soon, it is better I keep things as is so that I can compare the results more easily.

Have a good one!

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TLC Weekend Update Jun 7, 2019

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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.

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TLC Weekend Update May 31, 2019

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We have a very crazy week of market swings this week thanks to escalation of the US-China Trade War. Yet when everyone thinks Trump cannot pull out another magic bunny, he tops himself again by declaring more fights with more countries last night. This surely making many traders speculate things from his intentions to his mental state. I choose not to participate in such discussions. Seriously there is no point to do so because it is a waste of time and it is not going to help with our trading decisions.

I am planning to do another webinar soon given last one was very well received. I have not decided what topic to do though. So those of you having questions about trading in general or specific things related to DaytradingBias can email me or leave a comment below. I will figure out the rest after I look at all the requests and questions.

I remember recommending a book, Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions, to traders who hate computer programming. The funny thing is that this book is also absolutely hated by the computer geeks because it is not done properly, or not technically correct enough. I was organizing my bookshelves the other day and flipped through the pages. It may not be the easiest book to read, but, for non-programmers who have the necessity to understand more about algorithms, like traders, this book is a good introduction to a number of concepts that are useful in many ways.

And talking about the cottage country here in Canada on my last update, it somehow triggered a boat company calling me to see if I am interested in buying a new boat. Initially I was all puzzled like how the hell someone knows that indeed I am looking for one. It turned out the company sales manager actually read my blog here. By piecing together several things together from my other posts, including my new avatar that is based on a real photo, he figured out I was the person he dealt with many years ago. Good job!

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TLC Weekend Update May 24, 2019

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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!