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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!

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TLC Weekend Update May 18, 2019

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Anyone notice that my latest articles at DaytradingBias.com and the ones posted here are not written in the same style?

Well, that’s because those articles are now edited professionally before they are published.

To be honest, after seeing how much editing had been done on my books before they were ready for publishing, I know that my English is definitely not there. Since majority of the written materials done on DaytradingBias will be read and re-read by many traders, I’ve decided to have them previewed by my editor first so that we can avoid total rewrite going into the future.

Many of you know that I have a habit of reading books of all kinds. The book I am currently reading is The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck by Mark Manson. I do not know how I missed the original release of the book back in year 2016. Just picked up a paperback copy the other day from Amazon when I was searching for something else to buy there. Odd.

And I am in the process of interviewing people to help me on the coding front. This time it is all about hardcore research and development in trading strategies. It is not progressing as well as I hope for but that’s the way things work. You can’t rush these things …

Just completed the final review of the powerpoint slides for my first webinar this coming Tuesday May 21. I have given lectures and trained traders live on trader floors but using a remote platform is really my first time. If the format is proven useful, I will do it on a regular basis.

The photo is a baby bunny just appeared in front of me when I was walking home earlier.

Have a nice weekend all!

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

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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!

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My Journey to Fully Automate My Trading: Can’t Believe Two Months Have Passed

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Last week marks the end of my second month of automated trading. It was a relatively quiet month with not much activities. Since everything is working smoothly, it is time to raise the number of contracts again. It will be interesting to see what happens when volatility picks up again at this all time high level in the indices.

My reference account is now opened at Striker. Interestingly, due to various delay, the actual trading started from May 1st. It is now trading Big-Game Hunter ES, my first trading strategy offered there. As part of my plan to make things as transparent as possible, the actual statements will be made available for download. It also opened the door for me to openly discuss the trading results without the issue of legitimacy.

I will work with my team to figure out how to offer the viewing of the statements more effectively.

Striker will also have a page in their site reporting the actual results based on the accounts trading Big-Game Hunter ES. I will post the link and other related information by the end of this month.

Next step for this project is to get more trading strategies to go live. So back to development mode and focus on getting these other strategies ready!

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More Trouble from Hackers

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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.

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DaytradingBias was Brute Force Attacked and Luckily Survived

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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!

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My Journey to Fully Automate My Trading: Radical Transparency

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One principle I’ve decided to follow in documenting this journey is Ray Dalio’s radical transparency. To be honest, radical transparency may not be such a good idea for many organizations or businesses. For trading and investing, however, it is a very interest model that can root out, if not all, majority of the human weaknesses, from affecting the performance. But I am not doing this just for performance sake. I am doing it for other reasons too.

What Do I Plan to Make Transparent

I have just arranged with Striker Securities to allow automated trading on one of my trading strategies on restricted number of contracts. And I am signing up with them as the first person to trade it. This will allow me to fully disclose the trading results without affecting my privacy in other areas of my private life. There will also be the third party witness, namely Striker, that can track the overall results of my trading strategies traded through them.

So there is nowhere to hide. I will report the results here regularly. I will be held accountable for what the strategies do in the future.

It will be a really interesting experience as I never need to answer to anyone else in public about my trading results.

What I see is that this process will help me discover better ways to trade even faster because of the accountability I put onto myself.

To Inspire

Many traders choose to trade discretionarily because there is really no other alternatives offered to them.

And they are being put into a path of self-destruction without knowing about it.

By putting myself out there, showing them that there is a way to make trading work for them, I hope I can inspire many aspiring traders to sit down and think about their trading seriously. Maybe there is a better way to learn to trade. Maybe it is time for them to look at trading from a different angle.

My point is simple. It is really not necessary to go through the brutal mental and physical challenges to make trading working for you.

Personal Vendetta

Ever since I “came out” to write about trading many years ago, I was and still am being trashed by trolls and enemies I made in the industry over the years. They could not argue with what I wrote because what I presented to the world has been undeniable evidence on how the markets function. So, they thought they are so clever to go for personal attacks. Little did they know that my experience in trading and every part of the industry is something beyond their wildest imagination.

This time, I am going to take this to their doorstep.

Would they dare to do what I am doing here?