TLC Weekly Update October 11, 2019

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Lack of sleep is definitely a problem this week. So many things have to be taken care of, yet I do not always know exactly what to do with them. Taking on new challenges is fun this way.

Squeezed some time to download the daily statements for Big Game Hunter ES reference account over the past two months this week. Monthly performance summary should be updated already for everyone who like to track the performance of this automated trading strategy. When I get the chance I will follow up in my article series on auto trading what I think about the performance of the strategy so far.

In order to free up space in my office, I have to somehow go through many old stuff and boxes I never open since they were packed several years ago. Threw away a lot of garbage so far but I managed to find quite a number of interesting items, including something nostalgic like the Signal FM box that I used for trading almost 30 years ago.

For those who are too young to know what I am talking about – eSignal used to be Signal and the real-time data were streamed through FM radio frequencies and cable channels.

I wonder if eSignal still support this kind of broadcasting service …

I came across this interesting video and its article version titled The Toolbox Fallacy. It is a great reminder to all those who failed to accomplish what they desire yet keep on giving themselves excuses, that it is very important not to make yourself stuck in a loop of needing yet another tool before you will actually get something done.

BTW, due to scheduling issue, my intro webinar at futures.io will be delayed to November. I will post about the new date once I get it.

TLC Weekly Update October 4, 2019

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Over the past few weeks, due to a very hectic schedule and the need to dine out with business partners who love noodles and all kinds of carbs, I somehow gained weight. And it gets very difficult to lose them even if I go back to my regular diet because every other day or so it will be disrupted again. Seriously I need a way to deal with this.

Talking about diet, I came across this piece on chess grandmasters managing their performance through diet and exercise. What strikes me very interesting is not really the part on diet and exercise as I already know how important they are. The most fascinating thing I learned is how the reigning world champion Magnus Carlsen managing his career by playing less instead of more to keep himself in peak performance. This has been what I advocate for years to traders – make fewer decisions in real time and focus more on broadening your knowledge about the markets you trade will improve your performance many times over.

I am decluttering my workspace lately hoping that by rearranging things a bit, I can manage to create a tidy corner in the room for doing webinars and videos. I did not really think of allowing people to see my office so it is something new to me. On the other hand, it is an exciting thing to try because I will be able to do so much more comparing to written articles. Just imagine I can carry out a lecture style session showing specific trading techniques and interact with the attendees in real-time …

And don’t forget to mark this down on your calendar – Oct 15th 4:30 pm I will do an intro webinar at futures.io. After the short intro going through a few slides, there will be a question and answer period. See you there!

TLC Weekly Update September 27, 2019

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What a productive week! I wrapped up quite a number of projects over the week. Time to have a mini celebration.

First, I finally completed my training course, The Emini S&P Day Trading Course. It is first time ever anyone use this approach to teach people how to day trade. I hope it will set a new standard in the industry and re-define the meaning of trading education.

Second, I get to sit down with my team to figure out what to present in the upcoming introduction webinar this coming Oct 15, 2019 at futures.io, a traders community. I will post more about the webinar when I have more details. For now I just know it is supposed to start at 4:30 pm Eastern Time and I am supposed to do a presentation of what DaytradingBias does.

I came across this youtube video on exercising with just the resistance band. It is what I mean I always travel with that. A picture is worth a thousand words. A video tells the complete story.

Just posted another article yesterday for my series on trading automation. The misunderstanding is so deep, among not just the trading community but also normal folks who get to know about mechanical trading from news of them losing millions (even billions) of dollars, I think I need to voice my stand on this issue.

MY Journey to Fully Automate My Trading: How Do I Know a Trading Strategy Will Work in the Future?

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I was asked the title question, “How Do I Know a Trading Strategy Will Work in the Future?” and various variations of the same question so many times that I think it is a good idea to address that in this series. As oppose to many advocates of mechanical trading who have a Zen like view of the subject, my answer is very different in many levels depending on your understanding of how a market really function. Let’s dive in.

Many mechanical trading gurus dodge this very question with the concept that you should expect your strategy to stop working one day in the future. And that you would never know when that day will arrive, so you must use proper money management to protect yourself. Yet, at the same time these gurus tell people to use various versions of the Kelly formula to increase their trading size so that a trader can make so much money in the shortest amount of time. In other words, they just don’t know if the very trading strategies they show the world today will work tomorrow but they still lure you to bet everything you have including all the profits you have made over time.

You cannot blame them for doing so because they often discovered their winning trading strategies by chance and by throwing everything they can think of to the optimizer to get the results they have presented. Even they do not know why their trading strategies were working in the past. Hence they cannot tell when and why their trading strategies may fail in the future.

I call my approach Mindful Trading Strategy Design. The strategies are not created by random observations. My research is done in such a way that a set of trading strategies are all part of a neatly integrated framework. One such framework obviously is the application of classic chart patterns. However, majority of the people who work on mechanical trading strategy research are very bad chart readers. They have a distaste of the idea. Instead of finding a way to quantify the time-tested methodology, they focus on using engineering methods to, hopefully, bump into something somehow that looks like they are working trading strategies. What they are really doing is curve fitting of both rules and their related parameters. Whether such product from the process would work in the future is not really what they care for.

That’s why these automatic trading strategy generators you see out there that can produce all these fancy black boxes and gray boxes of trading strategies that are highly profitable in backtesting do not sell really well. The reason is simple. The trading strategies produced do not work once they go live. The benefit of hindsight makes these strategies curve-fitted with special rules and conditions to deal with things in the past that you are supposed to lose money!

It is perfectly alright to lose money in trading. A trading strategy should lose money in the past when those situations were caused by unforeseen circumstances. And it is the very reason why we need money management rules. It is a simple concept but majority of people who are handed with a lot of historical data often forget this the moment they dived into the world of data mining.

And that’s why I can tell if my trading strategies will continue to work in the future. They are designed to take advantage of specific market conditions that follow the principles I stated in The Art of Chart Reading (AoCR) and Special Theory of Price Discovery (STOPD). As long as the markets continue to follow the same dynamics as described in STOPD, which has been ever since the concept of markets was born, my strategies will continue to work.

The truth is ugly – no one wants to tell others their trading strategies are just doing okay. People all aim for these super mechanical trading strategies that can make a killing in a market with next to none in drawdown and ultra high winning rate. Yet, it is exactly these trading strategies that will crash and burn.

I have been doing this for two decades. My two cents should mean something.

TLC Weekly Update September 20, 2019

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After blocking out majority of my time from evening onward since last Saturday, I managed to force myself to sit down and completed the Emini S&P trading course I promised for a long time. Majority of the course manual has already gone through the first round of editing by my editor. I will try to wrap up the manual for first release as soon as possible. Since I am offering life time support of the course, everyone who purchase the course will be able to download all future releases from the support area so such issue of the manual going outdated should not be a problem.

I am very delighted that I finally completed this core training material for “the rest of us”. I was never one of those 4% of the population destined for trading. My older brother was and he is still better than I am today in terms of these traders’ traits. But I found a way to compensate my lack of talent with a highly structured approach to trading that helps me forge a successful trading career that I am proud of.

My secret wish is to empower all normal people like me to be able to make money from the financial markets more easily. It is really time to stop preaching the classic way of trading education to the normal people. We are just there to use the market to make money, we do not need to be passionate about the markets or damn curious about the future development of these markets. We just need the right set of tools to strive in the current economic environment where the government no longer care about normal people’s financial well beings.

I read this article on the best books for learning modern statistics and find that these books are much better than the classic university text books. If you are interested in data mining, these books will be very good introduction. The best part is, they are free.

And for those of you who are Malcolm Gladwell fans, here is his talk about his latest book, Talking to Strangers. I have not picked up the book yet but I am sure I will have it on my reading list.

Have a great weekend all!

TLC Weekly Update September 13, 2019

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Another week just fly by so quickly. I don’t even know it is Friday until being reminder to go for an early meeting today. For some mysterious reasons, everything is happening within this month and the next. Maybe it is time to read my horoscope to see what is in store next.

I watched this video about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Gym & Fridge. Interesting how a body builder adapt to old age and stay fit. His way of eating an egg is definitely inspiring.

I have my team working on various versions of the trading strategies featured at DaytradingBias.com. I understand that many people choose their platforms other than TradeStation. As oppose to what many people think, it is much more complicated to convert these mechanical trading strategies into other platforms. The main issue is not the programming factor. Instead, it is the configuration of the underlying charts in each platform are drastically different from each other. Many platforms simply do not have the flexibility to chart the data series in customized ways.

Once we have something ready, I will upload the code and also write in details how to setup the charts correctly in these other platforms.

On the site security front, I am happy that the improved measures have protected the site from being brought down by the hackers so far but the slow down of the site is still causing inconvenience to my members. The security services I am using now are helping us to find the best solution going forward to deal with this remaining issue. I will report on the progress in a month.

This week Toronto is getting warmer suddenly as if it is summer. It was as high as 28 degree Celsius. I wonder if the predicted early arrival of extreme coldness by October will really happen?!

Time to go.

Happy Mid-Autumn Festival!

TLC Weekly Update September 6, 2019

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Another busy week came to an end. Meetings piled on everyday. I don’t even have time to write until now, Saturday morning. It was an exciting week that produced many great results. I am very happy that several deals are finally completed so that I do not need to worry about them any more.

Another interesting development with DaytradingBias.com was brought to my attention by my team. They told me for some mysterious reasons, the site is gaining huge in Alexa ranking. Alexa ranking is one of the major ranking services on the net that determine the level of traffic a website comparing to all the other ones in the world.

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Since I have not instructed anyone doing any SEO (search engine optimization) or any significant promotion, I have no idea why the site is gaining so much attention. It is nice to see that more people are aware of what I do though.

I read this article on Extreme Experience recently and leads me to reflect on my own experiences in life. Indeed, the ones I can still recall vividly are the ones that produced the most extreme emotions. And they do shape my life much more than those experience that is supposed to be more significant yet has no extreme emotions occurred at the time.

I wonder how I can utilize this knowledge to better shape my life in the future?

I was asked many times this week, as I have to talk to many people who do not know me, about myself career-wise. It is a very long story and just talking about how I started trading already open up a lot more interest of the rest of the story. Maybe I should starting writing a memoir … nah, this can wait.

More catch up this weekend has to get started.

Have a wonderful weekend all!

TLC Weekly Update August 30, 2019

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The attacks on my site DaytradingBias.com last week actually messed up quite a few things but nothing serious. Given the circumstances, I have again upgraded the defense measures hoping that the site can better protect itself should there be another wave of attacks. I am getting very curious why there are so many bots out there trying to hack sites like mine that are relatively unimportant.

I made good progress in completing the trading course for Emini. I like to get it done quickly but my schedule is packed so I can only work on it at night and during weekend. Anyhow, I am committed to complete the first edition by the end of September. Site members will see the support page for the course soon.

Here is a teaser picture.

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I was asked many times to write more about the astrology cycles that I explained in details couple of years ago. The other day someone asked me specifically certain technical questions about I Chi and I drew some diagrams explaining the concepts in a visual way. I will tidy up those drawings and write up an article on that. So it is coming, don’t worry.

Many people are wondering if we are going to get a trade deal soon between US and China. The truth is, even if a deal is made, it will not be something everyone likes for sure. So just more headaches for traders and investors these coming months. During this tough time, remember to clear your head before making any trading decisions. Try start your day with Muse, a pretty good meditation assistant.

Got to go. Have a great Labour Day long weekend all!

Not All Display Port to HDMI Adaptors are Created Equal


Over these few weeks, thanks to my Lenovo Yoga died on me (mentioned here), I have to buy a new set of external adaptors. Since the Lenovo Yoga has two USB-C ports but no regular USB port, I have to purchase external adaptor that is built for USB-C. It has its advantage for sure since I just need to use one single port for connection to my 4K HD monitor with ports for networking and other USB devices all in one compact device.

Now that I am using Microsoft Surface Pro 6, all these gadgets no longer work. Trust me. I tried. I even found a USB-C convertor to plug into the Surface USB 3.0 port and no luck. The USB ports on the adaptor kind of work but not the networking port. Definitely no output to the monitor either.

So I have to give them all up and buy myself a new all-in-one adaptor which I found on Amazon.

 

It works … except that the HDMI port does not produce the 4K resolution on my 4K HD monitor. I tried everything including direct changes to the resolution settings. It just cannot get my 4K monitor to display 4K.

So, I tried this on my 4K TV. And it worked. Damn, that’s annoying.

So I ordered a simple display port to HDMI adaptor hoping that it may solve the problem this time.

And nope. It has exactly the same problem. They just cannot sync with my 4K monitor.

Some people asking exactly the same question why the adaptors are not working. The vendors and some other “smart” users blame the problem on the HDMI cable saying that a low quality one will not work. Well, I am using exactly the same cable that used to connect my Lenovo Yoga to the same monitor. I also use this same cable for the connection to TV which works. Don’t tell me it is its low quality causing the problem.

The search goes on. I eventually bought this adaptor.

And it works! I finally found one that works with my 4K monitor giving me 4K resolution.

I don’t blame the other 2 adaptors for not being able to output 4K resolution on my monitor. After all they both can produce 4K output on my TV. My guess is that the 4K specification can be very tricky so a better adaptor may be able to handle more types of monitors.

Lessons learned.

TLC Weekly Update August 23, 2019

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Hitting writer’s block over the past few days is kind of frustrating. I understand myself well enough to know that I need to work on something unrelated to these projects so that I can regain my concentration. Hence writing a short article on cold shower feels right. Here it is in case you missed that.

I also translated an old NeoTicker function Range2Period into Tradestation. It is a very useful tool for those interested in building trading strategies.

I passed my daily statements for the reference trading account to my team last week but when I check for the updated monthly performance on the site it is not there. It took me some tedious time to capture those statements from the brokerage website so I was not happy to not seeing the update a few days after. It turned out, my team uploaded the picture file but the backend of the site decided not to serve the updated picture …

And it is now fixed. For those interested in seeing the live performance for June and July you can see it finally. I will also try to write about it in next instalment of my trading automation series.

Lately I have been asked many times on how to immigrate to Canada by people from Hong Kong and other Asian countries. I do have connections that can help people out in this area. So if you are thinking about moving to Canada, drop me an email and I will refer you to the right people.

I replaced my broken Toshiba flat screen TV with one having built-in Fire TV. I never thought that it is now so much more convenient to browse the net on TV. Although I mainly use this as my big quote screen, it is nice to be able to watch something else like Prime Video or Netflix when having my lunch at home.

Have a great weekend everyone!