Everything in life, including trading, can be stress-free
We are getting ready to tidy up daytradingbias.com by removing the rest of the parts not fitting with the future design. There will be many changes coming and can from time to time affecting the look at feel of the site. Do not be alarmed as that will not affect the access to the content.
Remaining obstacles include user forum not mobile friendly and that many supportive tools used on the site are now out-dated and obsolete. I am sure these will be taken care of too.
Enjoy the weekend!
We all breathe but it is rare that people are breathing correctly. The difference is clear and the impact on health and mental clarity is very significant. Yet, no one spend time to talk about it at all. Well, for one, talking about basic of the basics generate no buzz. So, here it is on how to breathe right.
Most people breath by simply relaxing their chest hence air flow in. Naturally, you will let the air out as your brain detected signals from your lungs that the oxygen intake is used up. Yep, your brains and bodies are doing that with every single breathe you take. But there is a problem with that, you are using just 25-30% of your lung capacity on each breathe. You are providing bare minimal supply of oxygen to your brain and your body.
By practicing the following simple breathing exercise for 2 weeks, you will reprogram your body and your mind to increase the average air intake to at least 45%-60% of your lung capacity. Do not underestimate this change – we are talking about 100% increase or even more in terms of air intake volume, or oxygen supply going into your body. This does wonders to your health. If your daily activities include a lot of mental work (e.g. having a desk job), you will see marked improvements in your ability to concentrate as well.
1. Preferred to lie down somewhere. If you are doing this first thing you open your eyes, you are already on the bed. Try not to do this when you are going to sleep because it can make you more awake thus delaying your bed time.
2. Breathe in by pushing your stomach/ tummy out first until it reaches 70% to 80% from the maximum you can do when pushing hard.
3. Then expand your chest to continue the breathe in process until your chest is at least 60% to 80% from the maximum you can do with expanding your chest from breathing in.
4. Relax and let the air out slowly. If you can control it to take as long as the breathe in time, it is a bonus.
5. Repeat the breathing for at least 30 times.
Remember your lungs and the muscles surrounding it are just like the rest of your body. They can be trained to become stronger and more flexible. The breathing exercise above will strengthen your respiratory system and teach your brain to breathe like this method when you are not practicing it deliberately. The more you do it, the faster it will become a natural part of you.
Note: I was talking to my son the other day that I suddenly remember this is actually one of the fundamental breathing work that one has to learn before doing all the more complex ones. I guess we all tend to forget about things that is already a part of yourself.
I have decided to move the review section of trading books and trading related stuff to the Essence site. However, we have encountered a problem that the review ratings done on DaytradingBias cannot be moved due to the plugin that produces the ratings no longer exist. I am still trying to find a solution to that.
Another consideration is that I will retire the site news section as we look at the traffic stats we find out the posts there are not read at all. So there is really no point to clutter the site with too many posts.
My team has completed the protection work on art of chart reading articles so that only premium members can read them from now on. This will satisfy the requirements from several ebook publishing outlets as we are getting close to publish the book.
Our prototypes of the new trading signals are working fine. The only worry is that the internet stability is not as robust as I like. I guess eventually I have to use a data center in the States to run the signal servers. I have asked my team to evaluate which data centre to try out. And no need to worry if you are thinking of the disaster we experienced quite some time ago that the move totally failed. The new servers will just produce the new trading signals. The existing ones will still be running off our servers here in Canada until we know it is safe to move anything over.
More work to get done.
Have a nice weekend all!
The news is in – there are 15,000 to 28,000 homes in Toronto that are sitting empty. The real estate industry downplayed this as just 2 to 4 percent of all housing units, as if that cannot affect the housing prices and supply at all. They are wrong.
First, we have to understand that many of these houses are investment with no plan whatsoever to rent the units out. There are special investors unlike the classic ones who want to put their capital to work. These special investors are parking money on these properties just because they need a safer investment vehicle than keeping cash in the bank. By the way, keeping a lot of money in the bank is not safe.
So the suggestion of putting a vacant-home tax on these empty houses will not improve the supply of rental units that much. At least not as effective as what many people believe. The reason is exactly what I wrote earlier that there is a new class of housing investors who do not behave the same way like the ones that we are familiar with. This class of investors will simply choose to ditch their investments in housing and switch to something else. Hence, we may see a drop in average purchase price but not improvement in rental unit supply.
Case in point – the so-called foreigner tax on properties has already been neutralized by accounting tricks in Vancouver. I guess the same fate on foreigner tax will happen in Toronto quickly.
Lesson learned from foreigner tax? Negative incentive (i.e. punishment driven taxes) seldom works.
Further complicating the situation, many smart investors are now converting their investments into AirBnB instead of the traditional long term rental because of the significant increase in potential income. In additional, the rental units operated as AirBnB can be sold quickly with no troublesome issues of long term contracted tenants. Hence, local people seeking for long term rental units are facing a near static pool of supply even though there are new condos built everywhere.
The government has to think of more novel ways to resolve the housing supply problem.
To start, they need to factor in the two new dynamics I mentioned above that changed the housing market behaviour so that the correct solutions can be found. Otherwise, people can no longer choose to rent or buy their homes because there will be next to none new supply of rental units. When everyone is being forced to buy their living places, the housing prices will never stabilize. The long term economic impact will also be very bad when labour mobility is greatly reduced.
Personally, I can think of several ways to tackle this problem but it will not be welcome by majority of the people living in Greater Toronto Area as the balance of renters and home buyers is now completely messed up.
For example, introducing positive incentive policies to get people to consider offering their housing units for long term rental can be very effective. It can be as simple as first time landlords offering long term rental units can keep their gain tax free the first 5 years. This encourages more people to consider doing long term rental instead of the more entrepreneur AirBnb option. We cannot force investors to do something they do no want to do but incentives can get people to think twice before going for the AirBnb route.
Policy of this type, however, is almost always objected by the NDP party because “it helps the rich”. So whatever I suggested here is, yet again, babble for my own amusement.
Don’t know what to say when I was called this morning from the bank that one of my credit cards is compromised. I was told that the card is disabled and a new card will be sent to me in a few days. I thought that was no big deal because it has happened to me several years ago. Credit card information being stolen is just part of life when everything are paid with credit cards these days.
I was kept on the phone to verify every transactions happened lately whether each of them were legitimate purchases I made. It took couple of hours over the phone to get things cleared up. I thought the trouble was over until I checked online to see which credit card of mine can be used in place of the one that was compromised.
Crazy as it may seems, I found another credit card of mine has quite a number of Uber charges that I do not recognize. Within moments I realized that this other credit card was hacked as well. After another round of marathon phone calls to handle the situation, most of my day was used up already.
This is so frustrating. I have no idea how my credit card information were stolen. I do not visit questionable websites. My computer is clean from malwares. I shop at normal places. It is something I like to dig deeper to see if I can prevent this from happening in the future.
For now, I am keeping my fingers crossed that the credit card thieves / hackers will spare me for a long long time.
Due to server failure earlier this week, we have been running everything off a backup server. This weekend we will move things onto a new server we’ve received today. The weekly update could be delayed by several hours.
I do not expect any major problems from this hardware replacement routine.
I have moved the trading related videos to Essence of Trading from DaytradingBias.
This completed another part of the streamlining of the content within the daytradingbias website.
Although the videos are moved to Essence of Trading, the function to browse by the specific topics related to trading is not ready yet.
We will take care of that as soon as possible.
Have a nice weekend all!
Due to unforeseen issues, I have to handle several things out town until end of next week.
I will try to post if the internet connection is functional at where I am heading.
I am quite sure I cannot trade during this trip but I will still post my pre-open thoughts in real-time commentary as long as I have internet access.
Must get packing now.
Have a good one!
We replaced my email server with a new computer over the weekend.
Data transfer was easy. Looks like there is no data loss so far.
Setting up the email server, however, took many hours as many tedious settings have to be done manually.
Anyhow, it is all done. Everything back up and running.
And a nice little surprise for me – I was told the old email server has been working 7/24 for 12+ years.
When things are working, we tend not to think too much about their importance.
As reported several days ago, my mail server broke down. I am working with a backup of the server setup on an older computer temporarily. We will setup the mail server properly over the weekend. If you intended to send email to us over the weekend, please note that it may be bounced. Just resend the message to us should get it to us.
Art of Chart Reading online will be taken off the site soon as I prepare to release the book bearing the same name. In short, many changes to the site daytradingbias.com in coming weeks as content will be rearranged. If you find the site suddenly looks different, no need to be alarmed.
Have a nice weekend all!
