Blog – Page 33 – The Lawrence Chan Blog

August 5, 2018

When Everybody is Wrong

My Big Picture Summary for DaytradingBias.com Market Bias Observer newsletter, Aug 2018 issue. With charts!

The large hedge funds have been underperforming the markets for several years already. They look so bad that many gurus out there came out slamming the industry as a whole. Well, even David Eihorn’s Greenlight has reported his fund is down about 19% for the year. Is the era of big hedge funds really over?

Don’t forget that these funds have all the resources to hire the best to work for them. They have access to information that retail investors and even institutional investors do not have. Yet, the results clearly pointing to something going wrong. So what goes so wrong?

My understanding is that these famous hedge fund managers are actually very good in what they are doing. The main problem is that they all depends on the framework of top-down analysis based on their specific macro view to allocate their resources. If their macro views do not lead to the correct forecast of the market environment, everything they do, will be at best crapshoot. That’s the very essence of trading and speculations. You do not win on every single trade.

Since the year 2013 when the S&P 500 is set up to breakout above that long time boundary at 1600 and that Nasdaq 100 making new all time high, we have entered a new era where the prior 20 years of trading environment is transformed into something new. That shift of expectations created a unique situation for which the shorter timeframes have now dominated the price movements of almost every financial market.

We have seen such environment before, and the pros who are not close enough to the price actions suffer. For example back in year 1999, majority of the pros working for big firms were laughed at because they cannot make money in the so-called easiest trading environment because the stock market went up pretty much every day. Pros are beaten up so bad back then many even give up their career in the industry.

But we all know what happened afterwards. When the new era eventually run its course, like in year 2000, the normal environment would return. The shift will cause chaos and the pros will be the ones who survive.

I dare to say this, when even the best hedge fund managers are not doing well in shorter timeframes, it is a sign that the bull market is going to end pretty soon.

July 14, 2018

So Many Things Finally Done, So Many More Things to Get Done

Last few months has been the most productive ones over the past two years. So many projects that have been stuck were finally completed. What a relief!

For one, my book The Art of Chart Reading is now finally published at Amazon. Thanks to everyone who support the book this week, I am proud to announce that, as of this Friday, it is the Top #1 book at Amazon in Investing and Investing Basic categories and also being one of Top 20 Nonfiction books. It is a great start for the book.

The paperback version of the book is still being worked on. If all goes well, the paperback edition will be available by end of this month.

And the site The Art of Chart Reading Online is also in development. It will take a lot more to make it good for the purpose I envisioned.

On DaytradingBias.com side, the move to the new direction has finally started. It was planned at least a year ago but almost everything that could go wrong, did. Although the process has started, it is not even half way through.

It is great that the Trading Success Blueprint is finally completed. It is the grand summary of my knowledge and experience in mentoring traders over the past 20 years. From now on, I have a reference that I can point aspiring traders to if they want to build a trading career the right way.

Yet, the trading signals and trading tools that I have planned to release have been delayed for so long. I could not just roll them out without proper testing. Due to the frequencies of these trading strategies, they do not happen everyday. I need to make sure they are working correctly. It is not only necessary. It is a responsibility as well since people will put money on the line based on these tools. Thus, I have to be patient and get them ready one by one.

On money management side, the process of fully automating the trading has started too. However, it was the most eventful two months we have seen in a long time. Be that North Korea related matters, or all these explosive news about Trump, they swing the markets hard. All these happening while I am manually testing these strategies. It is a huge challenge for someone like me because I created these trading models.

The golden rule of mechanical trading is to follow the rules exactly. But being the creator of the models made me want to override them. After the fact, my interventions worked 9 out of 10 times. But the 10th time is a disaster. In short, if I had followed the rules completely, the performance will be about the same as what I have now. Being 20% better with all the crazy maneuvers is not worth it.

Again, a lot more to do to complete the transition.

oh well, challenges make life interesting.

July 6, 2018

Story of My Book The Art of Chart Reading

Finally, after three long years of wait, my book The Art of Chart Reading will be available at Amazon in couple of days. I am very excited about the release of the book. But at the same time it feels like putting an end to a very difficult period in my past. Very difficult to explain how I feel at this moment.

I have created a website for the book called The Art of Chart Reading Online. The purpose of the site is to showcase charts that I study and how they work out afterwards. Since I do my homework studying the charts all the time anyway. This should not put too much workload on my tight schedule.

This book would not be possible without Priscilla’s suggestion some 15 years ago. She knows very well how I feel about the financial industry and how much I hate seeing decent people being rip off in the stock market. She popped the idea that if I can do something about it what would it be. I told her it has to be a complete instruction manual on how to read the charts because it is the only tool that the retail traders have access to that is objective without spins or lies.

Priscilla became the first reader and my collaborator on the foundation sections. Only until I was able to make her understand exactly how the charts work, that those explanations are kept in the book. That’s how I know other people will understand the framework too.

April 16, 2018April 16, 2018

Surprisingly Smooth Transition into Windows 10

I spent the past two weeks setting up a new laptop due to the unfortunate event that my original laptop being crushed in the plane while I was traveling back to Canada. Since I do not need my laptop during this period of time, I can use my desktop computer while setting up the new laptop slowly. The experience with the transition from a Windows 8 laptop into Windows 10 is, surprisingly, good.

The Incident

I use a backpack when I travel and my laptop is stored in the part for which thick protection foam is there all around it. I thought it is safe from physical harm. I could not be more wrong this time though. First my backpack was moved away from the overhead compartment where I put it due to someone else having a huge luggage forced the flight attendants to move luggage around to accommodate that. My backpack was moved somewhere else before i can even try to grab it back.

By the time the flight was over, I tried to locate my backpack. It was squeezed down under two hard surface carry on trolleys. I thought it should be alright because nothing bad really happened to my laptop ever through all these flights over the years. I could not be more wrong.

When I arrived home, I found a corner of my laptop was totally crushed. Amazingly, the laptop is still functional and boot up fine. The catch is that two of the ports I needed most are no longer usable.

A hard lesson learned – never store your laptop in a soft shell container.

Finding a Replacement

I am never comfortable with new versions of Windows. I wrote about that many times over the years. Microsoft is infamous in destroying compatible with everything from hardware to software with new versions of Windows. My experience was so bad I never buy a new computer with new versions of Windows. This time, however, I have no choice.

Microsoft has determined that they cannot continue to support their older versions of Windows. Windows XP and the major disgrace Vista are now discontinued from normal support. Windows 7 is still supported but probably not for long. Hence, it is very diffficult to buy any new laptop with older versions of Windows.

First, I would not want to buy a laptop with Windows 8 ever again. That leaves me with only Windows 10 to choose from. I thought, what the heck, Windows 10 is around for sometime already. Everything should be working fine now. Is it?

The Transition

It is not that easy for a road warrior to switch to a new laptop. This is especially true for professional traders. We have so many applications to install onto a computer, it takes a lot of time to get it done. This time around, it took me like a week to have all the necessary configuration done on Windows and the essential applications installed. The more auxiliary applications can wait.

Core applications like Microsoft Office has to be installed. I am very glad that my Office Enterprise 2010 still works on Windows 10. There was a point in time that Microsoft tried to force everyone to use the stupid Office 365. As a paid customer, I seriously cannot accept their proposition that I have to pay up again, as a subscription, that has no added value to my need. As far as I recall, I have been a paying customer of the Microsoft Office software since I was studying in university. Microsoft has to give me a very good reason to pay for another upgrade.

Many other applications are not working well on Windows 10 due to the Smart Scaling issue. That includes quite a number of trading applications. Smart scaling is the changing of pixel density dynamically so that the display device can show you things that you can really read. Given the laptop I get has 4K resolution, if the application is displaying its content using the pixel based method, it will be so small that I cannot see what is displayed at all.

Luckily, Windows 10, after several updates, has find a way to resolve this issue by offering multiple compatibility display options. I got two trading platforms working but one is still in trouble. I will not name names here. I think it is better I report the issues to the developers and see if they manage to come up with anything like a workaround or a quick new release to address the issue.

My Impression

I like Windows 10 a lot on this new laptop. Well, part of the reason is that the new laptop is very impressive on hardware basis alone. On the other hand, Windows 10 gives me a much more comfortable feel in terms of control and flexibility. Windows 10 is delivering what Windows 8 intended to do but failed to do so – a new paradigm without sacrificing the core power of Windows over platforms like Macs. Windows has always been a workhorse type of platform and it is the favorite platform for businesses and large enterprises. Windows 8 deviated from that (so did Vista) and it has been part of Microsoft’s painful memory since.

The truth is that I have to make a lot of adjustments to my usage routines from the last laptop but I am happy to make the transition this time. Unlike last time when I was forced to switch to Windows 8 and took the plunge to change all its settings to mimic Windows 7, I am happily learning to work within the new Windows 10 workflow. Part of this obviously thanks to all the software companies making the transition easier by having Windows 10 compatibility taken into account. The other part is that Microsoft learned from its users what has to be done to make Windows 10 functional.

April 10, 2018

Email Server Down

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.

March 25, 2018

When Card Counting Fails: Learn to Walk Away While You Can

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.

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 Machine

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.

The Crowd

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.

The Odds

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.

The Lesson

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.

March 15, 2018

Dave Bitcoin Saved My Day (and My Bitcoin Piggy Bank)

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.

From Heaven to Hell in Hours

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.

There is Hope

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.

My Wallet is Saved

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.

March 11, 2018

Pink Eye

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.

The Symptoms

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.

How It Started

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.

How to Handle Pink Eye Safely and Comfortably

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.

To Speed Up the Recovery

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.

End Notes

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”.

February 26, 2018

Things I Learned from My Hard Disk Trouble While Traveling

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.

Must Have Items While Traveling

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.

Finding a Replacement Hard Disk is an Adventure

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.

Plan Your Backup

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.

Lessons Learned

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 …

End Notes

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.

Products Mentioned in this Article

Western Digital 3TB Portable External Hard Drive

List of Western Digital Portable External Hard Drive on Amazon

Active Boot Disk

Portable Screwdriver Set for Electronic Devices

February 10, 2018

A Failure Might Be Imminent: Surviving a Dying Hard Disk

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.