Everything in life, including trading, can be stress-free
Those of you trying to reach me through email have to wait until my team finish repairing the email server.
Looks like hardware problem so until the faulty hardware is replaced I am stuck on web access to my email which can be a pain in the neck to actually find the real emails to response to.
My guess is that it can take another day or two.
When I was in Europe last month, it was inevitable that I had to go out and socialize with my business associates. One such night we ended up going to a club with blackjack tables. One of my friends there knows very well I am an avid card counter and would like to see if I can beat the house. So there I was, sitting at one of the blackjack tables with couple hundreds of euro in chips to play the game.
I asked the dealer like how many decks are there and started playing.
I did my usual counting and noticed that the cards dealt out were collected and put back into the card dealing machine. I knew something was not right but I could not recall exactly what it was at the time, partly due to all night wine and dine activities.
Needless to say, I got cleaned out.
Whenever I tried to increase my bet size, thinking that it was the right time to do so, I encountered significant losses.
The chance for me to count wrong was very low. So low that I knew something did not add up. After I lost my last chips, I recalled exactly what I should have remembered before I started playing.
My associates asked me to keep on going so that I can win the money back. I told them I don’t want to do that because I was low on cash. In reality I had more than enough cash to keep going but I knew better not to. My friends even tried to pool together more cash for me to do it again because they probably feel bad that I lost money.
I ended up telling them the truth. I pointed out the machine on the table is something I cannot beat. Since I do not like playing blackjack to lose money, I told them we should do something else instead. They were quite upset and were afraid that I was unhappy. I had to assure and reassure them that I am perfectly alright.
I was secretly relieved that I did not need to grind at the table. I was happy because I knew this is the right decision.
The issue I pointed out being the card dealing machine was not an excuse. This type of card dealing machines is designed to save time for the dealer, prevent cheating through manual card shuffling and, most important of all, to beat card counting. Cards are consistently redistributed back into the shoe hence the chance of these cards showing up again, say, five hands later, would be the same as all the other cards within the machine. There is no more distribution imbalance that a card counter can rely on. Thus, all card counting strategies based on the cards not being reused until next complete reshuffle would fail.
I should have walked away the moment I sit down at the table and noticed that the machine is in place for dealing cards. But I did not.
I suspect that my inability to recall the important fact about the card dealing machine is my commitment bias. I changed my Euros for chips. I sat down at the table. And most important of all, I have a crowd around me watching. My mind swing from being a careful pro into a casual player.
Emotions ran high when the crowd saw the dealer’s hand busted at the fourth and fifth card. Emotions ran even higher when someone on the table getting 21 on the fifth card.
Of course, emotions swing low when the dealer managed to clean the table with 20 or 21 even though many players had pretty strong hands.
Everyone has been participating in the game, with emotions invested into every card being dealt out.
I could see on the face of everyone that they were emotionally exhausted about an hour into the game.
Isn’t it interesting that we all know this is a game of chance yet we would cheer on wishing the dealer to go bust, or that some players were so anxious that it took them forever to decide whether to hit or to stand?
Maybe this is the very reason some people love gaming.
They enjoy the emotional rides and excitement that these games bring to them.
Going a bit technical here, I will explain what the difference is between a normal Las Vegas style blackjack and the one I played with the card dealing machine.
In short, the Las Vegas style dealing will give the house a very slight edge over the players if the player is not counting cards, while exercising all normal cautions like not to hit when you cards already total at 20. With a good card counting strategy, a player can, at times, having a significant edge over the house when many high cards are left in the shoe leading to very uneven distribution.
For the card dealing machine I played, it actually offers the players a very minute edge, as long as the player is exercising the normal cautions. This means, if you have a big enough bank roll, you can win a small percentage of your capital as long as you are betting with the same size. Obviously, the goal of using these machines is not to beat the players. These machines are installed for the purpose of facilitating a service, to keep the guests entertained.
However, if a card counter is not aware of the design, the uneven betting based on the wrong projection of the existence of a bias distribution, will lead to unnecessary losses.
It is a good reminder to us, the professional traders, that we manage to make money in trading because we have good strategies and game plan in place. However, we have to be aware of the changes to the game itself that may completely alter the odds of our trading strategies. Keeping up with the environment change is very much part of our responsibility as a pro trader.
I thought I unloaded last portion of my stash of bitcoin last year. Not really. It turned out I have this old bitcoin wallet that I have forgotten on my computer. When I opened it, there was some bitcoin left there. I guess this is how it feels like when someone found out they have won the lottery.
The euphoria ended shortly afterwards.
When I try to transfer the bitcoin out to an online service to cash it out, my passphrase was not accepted.
I actually panicked.
Until I resolve this problem I cannot use the bitcoin I have in this wallet at all. After so many attempts to guess what is the correct passphrase, I finally gave up.
Suddenly, I recall reading about a service that they will help you recover your bitcoin. There is no upfront fee, just a percentage of your wallet if they manage to recover the bitcoin for you.
So I looked it up and found Dave Bitcoin and his bitcoin recovery service walletrecoveryservices.com
I contacted Dave through email and explained my situation to him.
After just a few email exchanges, I have decided to give Dave a try.
I struggled a bit with the decision originally because:
1. the fees may sound steep at 20% but in reality it takes a lot of computing power to brute force your way into finding the correct password
2. even if Dave managed to crack the wallet, I have no assurance that he would return the bitcoin to me if he plans to runaway with the bitcoin
However, the fact that the bitcoin in the wallet is as good as nothing if it cannot be accessed anyway. That understand helps me make up my mind.
The rest of the process was easy. I send an email to Dave with the bitcoin wallet, my knowledge about the password and stated my agreement to his terms and conditions.
Dave is fast. Within a day, he helped me recover my bitcoin already.
Literally, I get my lottery ticket back.
Everything is done as promised professionally.
Bitcoin community is lucky to have Dave offering such a valuable service.
If you encounter a problem like mine, I highly recommend that you contact Dave Bitcoin.
Right after I arrived home, I knew I caught something on the plane. It was filled with people coughing all the way. Usually, I can withstand this kind of environment and stay healthy. Not this time – started with mild cough and runny nose, and then all of a sudden total outbreak of red eye several days later, I was infected in the eyes. Yeah, pink eye.
I never had pink eye at very serious level until now.
Note: You can skip the next paragraph if you dislike gross details.
My eyes basically ooze out ugly pus (eye discharge) all night without me knowing. The next morning my eyes are glued together by this yucky stuff. I have no choice but to contact my family physician to ensure the problem is not something life or sight threatening. I went to see the optometrist. She gave me the bad news that I have viral infection in my eyes. The pus, however, is actually good news because my immune system is reacting to the virus and the pus is, exactly like the phlegm one gets in the throat from flu, the resulting product of expelled virus and my body fluid. If my body could not fend off the virus, there would be little or no discharge and the discomfort (including sharp pain) would be worse.
In short, I caught pink eye and it is in a form that I just need to take care of my eyes until the virus is cleansed out.
So how did I get the infection? Nope, not the dirty hands or whatever you read from the internet. It is simply the virus gets into my eyes through the breach of the part of sinus connecting to the eyes.
How do I know? It happened right after I blow my nose and blood is found due to the dry condition in Canada.
It took just two hours after that to turn my eyes from clear white into bloody eye.
Here is the good part on how to handle pink eye safely and comfortably. I have done this with my kids before so I know it reduces the discomfort a lot.
To help the eyes recovering faster, we have to flush out those discharge so that they do not scar the eyes and do not damage the sensitive skins around the eyes. To do that, warm water is better than cold water, unlike what majority of things you read out there. Warm water made from boiled water is safest. Add coconut oil to the mixture too as it helps to soften the discharge coming off the eyes.
Remember not to rub the eyes harshly because the mucus actually stick to the skin. Trying to remove them by force can bruise your skin. You have to start with just soaking the eyes with the warm water mixture first. Only until the mucus are dissolving that you move onto using very soft material to clean out the pus.
Once the cleaning is done, use regular eye drops that simulate tears to flush out the hidden mucus. Then clean out the pus again.
Once you are done, you can apply coconut oil all around the eyes to help the skin to recover.
At this point, if the eyes are swollen and in pain, using a cold compress on the eyes will sooth them.
If there is no mucus to deal with, you can keep the eye drops in the refrigerator so that they can sooth your eyes on contact.
An important thing to remember though is that if you have only one eye being infected, you should be extremely careful not to contaminate your other eye by your hands or the environment. One good way is to wash your hands (or using hand sanitizer) often.
Well, drinking lots of water and having enough rest are the two most important things to do to get rid of pink eye.
Since the discharge from the eyes are highly contagious, it is also advisable not to travel around so that you will not infect the others.
Seriously, when your eyes are constantly discharging yucky stuff, it can be quite scary for anyone meeting you face to face.
My eyes are getting better. Most of the redness is now gone. Overall I do not have much discomfort from my eyes, just inconvenience.
However, my work schedule is totally disrupted. I managed to response to some email every day but nothing much can be done beyond that when your eyes are not cooperating. I can tell that another catch up race is in the making.
This bout of sickness reminds me to be grateful for having pretty good health overall. I should take good care of my body from now on even when I am traveling. If I were not that confident of my fitness, this round of illness could be totally avoided.
Another good lesson of “pride goes before a fall”.
My hard disk trouble started in the early part of February yet I was not able to get it replaced for various reasons. Anyhow, I finally have it replaced by a new hard drive and everything looks fine so far. Throughout this ordeal, I learned quite a few things that’s worth sharing.
Portable Hard Drive is a must-have for quick backup and restore. Without one, trying to buy a decent one with large capacity from a remote city may be very difficult. I have a 3TB one with me all the time while I am traveling. Even if my laptop is reporting a potential failure, I can immediately backup everything so that I know all the latest work I have done with my projects and researches are safe.
USB Boot Drive is another must-have since you cannot really backup your computer efficiently without it. The one I use is the one I recommended for years called Active Boot Disk. I use it to backup my computers regularly and in this situation, I managed to take a snapshot of my laptop the night when I first see the warning message.
With the first two items above, the issue of protecting your valuable data is taken care of. Even if your laptop is toasted while you were seeking for a replacement hard disk, you can still get things working on a new laptop.
To replace the hard disk inside your laptop is a more complicated question depending heavily if you are going to let a computer shop does the replacement for you, or, your laptop can be easily taken apart. Well, I have way too many bad experience with computer stores repair services that I almost always do my own upgrades and replacements now. Even if you are not good with handling computer parts, you should be able to find disassembly videos on YouTube on almost all types of laptops.
You need the following items to complete the hard disk replacement process:
A screwdriver set that can handle all the screw types on your laptop. In my case, my trusted 30+ years old Swiss Army Knife does not work with my Lenovo laptop. I was forced to buy a screwdriver set at the computer store eventually. The story about the computer store in next section.
A replacement hard disk that is at least equal in capacity as your original hard disk.
It took me two weeks in three cities to find a computer store that actually sell decent size internal hard disk. The first two cities are not major ones so my hope was kept really low. But then the third one, being a large city, it still took me multiple attempts before finding a computer store that really sells slightly better hard disk models.
Maybe it is because I am in Europe, but it seems that all these stores are selling both external and internal hard drives at half the capacity we find in America. They are also priced more expensively. The funny thing is that in a big retail electronics store I visited with all kinds of computer related products, their sales people do not even know where the portable external hard drives are located within the store. They have to search the store for like ten minutes before finding the items.
I seriously do not know what to say about that.
It took about 6 hours to backup my laptop with 400G of data. The time it takes is much longer than a typical laptop with same amount of data because I have a lot of highly compressed tick data stored on my laptop. It is very time consuming to backup such data because they cannot be compressed any further by the backup application.
Knowing the amount of time it takes to backup can help you plan ahead of time to schedule a down time for your laptop so that it will not disrupt your normal work schedule. What I did was starting the backup late in the night so that early next morning I can continue with the installation of the new hard disk with restoration right after. Just in case that does not work out as planned, I would quickly swap the old drive back into the laptop to continue my day.
Restoring the hard disk image onto the laptop with the new hard disk is actually a breeze. All it took was just an hour and 20 minutes. Once it was done I just shutdown the laptop completely. When I turned it back on, it was able to boot normally and everything feels the same. Well, in my case, the replacement hard disk is a faster model than the one that came with my laptop so everything actually run much faster.
1. Have a traveller set of computer screwdrivers while I am on the road.
You never know when you are going to need to take your computer apart. You do not need to carry the whole set. Just bring the bits for your devices and the handle will do.
2. Do not use SSD on your laptop.
SSD has great feedback from all computer users due to their faster speed. They are also perceived to be safer than the regular hard drives because they do not have moving parts. In reality, however, SSD drives are more likely to fail and have bad blocks developed quickly within first 2 years of usage. Yep, you may suddenly lose some part of your important files on an SSD without knowing it has already happened.
In comparison, the classic hard drives have come a long way as manufacturers of these drives have keep advancing the technology. In my situation, I am very glad that I chose my laptop with a hard drive instead of SSD. My decision at the time was based on the capacity that I need which was not available with SSD. I do not even know that the smart warning ability of the regular hard drives until I get one in this incident.
This smart warning ability gave me the precious time window to replace the drive with ease.
When SSDs eventually fail, they just die on you and you will not get the chance to backup your data first. Hence you will lose your latest work on your laptop one day no matter how frequent you backup your data.
3. Do not use SSD external drives as your backup drive.
For the same reason above, if your data is important to you, you should keep a regular hard drive as your backup drive.
I am sure that going into the future, the SSD technology will improve a lot just like the regular hard drives with better safe guard for our data. Until then, I will avoid SSD on my laptops.
4. Know your USB 3.0 Port on the laptop
The latest external backup drives use the USB 3.0 port for much faster performance. On many laptops, however, not every USB port are USB 3.0 port. Plugging in your external drive to the wrong port, will result in much slower data transfer speed. For example, my backup time of 6 hours will likely turn into 12 hours or more if I plug my backup drive to the wrong USB port on my laptop.
I made this mistake before with my regular backup routine. You can imagine what happen the next morning when I woke up seeing my laptop is not even half way through the backup process …
It is not my first time seeing my laptops getting into trouble while I am on the road. To name a few, I have experienced RAM failure, overheating that killed the screen on the spot and bad electricity outlet that fried the power adaptor and the laptop (yes, fire too for those looking for excitement). There are many blizzard situations that we road warriors just cannot be prepared for. My advice is that have the essentials packed with you but don’t panic when things go wrong. There is no point to get upset since computer failure is part of life.
Deal with it and you have another story to tell your friends.
Western Digital 3TB Portable External Hard Drive
List of Western Digital Portable External Hard Drive on Amazon
Well, just days into my trip the unimaginable happened. My trusted laptop suddenly popped out a warning message telling me that the hard disk has encountered hardware failure and it is going to die soon. I am told to backup the computer as soon as possible.
I have not seen this message for at least 10 years. Not on my computers for sure.
Before that, I have seen it once or twice happening on someone else laptops.
I have dealt with hardware failures many times. Hence the recommendation I always make to others that they should backup their computers regularly. And I backup my computers religiously all the time.
But having this trouble in the middle of a trip where I needed the computer most is a first time.
I have already backup the computer completely over the past 10 hours. It took that long to backup everything I have on the laptop. I am taking no chances.
But now what?
I could not find a computer store nearby that is open. I am not sure if I can buy a replacement hard disk in coming few days.
The wait and see is getting me slowly.
After years of sickness free life, the flu in this season finally got me. The soreness and aches are real, as the battle between my immune system and the flu virus is going on fiercely. Since there is really no cure for flu, I have to tough it out. However, there are ways to reduce the ailments and shorten the recovery time.
To manage the symptoms, the obvious choice is using painkiller like acetaminophen to control the fever and reduce the pain from muscles and bones. For cough related symptoms, however, I find using oregano oil is much better than using the cough syrup from the drug stores.
First, make sure you get at least food grade oregano oil. If you happen to have access to oregano essential oil, it is even better.
Put a few drops (5 to 10) of oregano oil in small amount of water. If it is essential oil, put in 1 to 3 drops to start with because they are way more potent than the regular one. Then mix it hard with a spoon or whatever because you do not want to consume too much of the oil all at once. Some people choose to mix oregano oil with coconut oil instead and that works well too in my experience.
Sip a little of the mixture and keep the liquid under your tongue. This is the fastest way for us to absorb the substance within the oregano oil. The burning sensation will kick in pretty quickly. The experience here is the reason most people will give up the remedy. Hence start with a more diluted liquid and increase the concentration of oregano oil up to a level you can still tolerate.
After 30 seconds or so start letting the liquid to dip down your throat. Oregano oil has anti-inflammation property and the ability to cut through the phlegm. It also helps your throat to recover a bit faster. Aside from its awful taste to some, I think oregano oil is a much better cough control substance comparing to the cough syrup out there because it does not make you drowsy so that you can actually carry out your day like normal if you choose to.
Repeat this process 3 to 4 times a day will keep the coughing under control.
There are other benefits with consuming oregano oil like keeping our appetite up which contributes greatly towards a speedy recovery.
Just a reminder though, to recover from flu, the tried-and-true method of resting a lot and drinking enough water is still the best way to go.
I am working on trading models for trading the Hang Seng Index. It is a cooperation project among multiple parties. I am quite excited by the idea that I am taking my financial technologies and trading experience to challenge the best minds in the Asian arena.
To my surprise, in the initial phase of this project, for which I expected a lot of difficulties in terms of data collection and information gathering, it is so much easier than working with the S&P indices.
For S&P 500 and the other related indices, one of the challenges is to figure out all the historical components of the indices and the exact time for which these components are part of the index calculations. S&P makes it so hard to figure this out even though it is something that should be made available to the public. It took investigative work to track down all the changes that I explained in one of the chapters of Market Breadth Primer.
However, working on Hang Seng Index, it is so easy to gather such information because Hang Seng Index has its own official website with everything you need to know about the indices are made available. I have to praise those working there that they are doing such a great job that S&P should be ashamed.
So why venture into trading the Hang Seng?
Well, I can see that the financial system is not going to be stable going into the future. Counter-party risk will be again in the spotlight soon. That means trading European markets is definitely not a good idea. Trading only instruments in North America is also not a good idea if bad things happen to the brokerages and clearing houses here. So, having presence in Asia now and eventually building this up to include more countries there will be a very good way to take my trading to the next level.
Meditation, the mystical practice that has gained so much recognition lately from the Internet, has been around for literally thousands of years in various forms and styles. It gained its flame because of the supposedly superpower you can unlock within yourself like becoming wiser, calmer and perform better in almost everything. However, for normal people who tried to learn this, more than half of them are likely not able to benefit from practicing meditation. In fact, it is creating more frustration and confusion than helping out these people to live a better life. After all, it was called a mystical skill for a good reason. Well, thanks to latest scientific research and technology, this ancient technique of training our mind is now much more learnable than ever.
I touched on this subject of meditation over the years but I tried to minimize the coverage because of several factors. First, it was much less acceptable to even talking about meditation just ten years ago. It was even namely as “evil” when you whisper the name to someone whose religious background somehow tainted by bad information. Second, self learning meditation is always difficult because there is no easy way to track one’s progress in such training. Unlike learning a subject with scientific facts that you can be quizzed later on to see how much you remember or understand, a normal person do not have a simple way to self assess the improvements they have made from practicing meditation.
Modern meditation techniques introduced by many famous gurus actually helped a lot more people because they simplified the whole concept down to something much more tangible. For example, the famous one-moment meditation has been helping so many people in dealing with their everyday stress and hectic lives. There are many scientific researches made public that help people to understand that being more mindful (through meditation) can benefit them so much that their brains are rewired in a good way.
So we now know meditation helps people in a very meaningful way. Its health benefits are tremendous. But these researchers have not been able to solve the biggest obstacle of making meditation something accessible to everyone, until now.
I reviewed a product called Inner Balance at my other site, Essence of Trading, focuses on its benefit on trading performance. This product is basically a portable heart rate monitor that connect to your cell phone through Bluetooth. What makes it special is that it can track your heart rate variability (HRV) in real-time giving the user instant feedback of their current state of calmness. Yep, you read this right. For the first time, there is a way for anyone who does not have access to a good trainer to learn the foundation of meditation, which is slowed down breathing, to finally learn the skill properly, quickly with much less frustration.
Heart Rate Variability (HRV) is a pretty good indicator of one’s calmness which was very difficult to measure before the discovery and deeper understanding of how our heart lung functions are affected by our mood swings. Maybe, in the future there will be even better measurement tools discovered along the way. But why wait if we already have something on hand that can help us now.
Anyone interested in getting Inner Balance can go to their site and check out the products offered there.
(Affiliate disclosure: I have signed up to become an affiliate after I gave out a whole bunch of this device as gifts and see the amazing results on my friends and family)
I will try not to repeat what I wrote in the review here. Anyone interested in that can read it later.
What I like to say here is that many traditional practices from our ancestors could be labelled as mystical but not all of them are bad. Once we start to understand more how they work, the mysticism dissolves, resulting in a more accurate view of what they really are. Meditation, now with enough scientific researches done on the subject, is shining through with real life practical use in medical treatments like reducing anxiety, lowering high blood pressure and improving performance from sports to trading. It is a real gift from our ancient past.
I wrapped up my trip to Asia on schedule earlier this week. I did not anticipated that though because there is always something coming up from this type of business trips that you have to extend it until everything is taken care of. Very nice that I get to take a break now going into New Year for much needed rest and relax before the hectic work schedule I planned for next year.
During my stay in Asia I squeezed time to check out various bookstores in every major city I went to. I was trying to find some trading books that are of decent quality to be recommended to my Asian readers. And if possible, I could just buy a whole stack and give them out as holiday gifts. Sadly, I could not find one book that really meet my expectations. It is quite disappointing given last year I learned about the financial scams still rampaging in these countries.
In many of these bookstores, there is really just one or two columns of books on investments. And trading, being a sub-category of investment, has probably one to two rows of books. These books on trading are mainly translated from books originally written in English. My not so in-depth attempt to browse through some of these books leaves me with a pretty bad impression as I have read the originals and I am quite sure the translated versions of these books are not delivering the correct message to the readers.
Another very interesting phenomenon is that Warren Buffett is over represented in every bookstore I visited. First, if you are a normal person, you should not invest like Warren Buffett. I am willing to go all the way to say that if you are not Warren Buffett, you should never invest like him. It is a very sensitive topic which deserves a complete article written on just this issue alone. I guess I have to do that in the future so that I do not need to answer this same question again and again.
There are rows and rows of books, both translated and originally written ones, on Warren Buffett’s “investment secrets” and “financial wisdoms”. This is classic cult following mentality where these books are there to attract casual readers to buy them on impulse. They do not provide any real value to the readers yet I know they must be selling very well because there are multiple copies of these books on the shelf while other books you see only one copy there most of the time.
I can see the huge potential of trading / investing education market in Asia. Only by lifting the overall standard in investors sophistication in the region will eliminate the continuous scamming activities there. Better education for traders will also reduce the number of tragedies related to gambling in the financial markets that I see dominating the retail trading scene in Asia.
