Category: Trading

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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!

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TLC Weekly Update August 16, 2019

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I have been busy catching up with projects while attending multiple long business meetings over the week. The week is not quite as productive as I hope for. Things should improve though by next week.

Talking about productivity drop, my four year old flat screen TV just died the other day leaving me without my real-time quotes when I am not inside my office. It is expected but four years is kind of short though. In case you do not know about this, modern electronic devices are not built to last …

I am very glad that my special recommendation worked out (so far) for my DaytradingBias premium members. It feels great to help my members making some money in this tough trading environment. The trade is still in progress. We will see how things go in coming few weeks.

I added a new reading list for aspiring traders who want to pursuit trading as a career. This time the list is not compiled by me. Instead, it is a collection of recommended books on trading by the famous traders of our time.

I am working on another webinar right now. If all goes well, I will schedule that either in late August or early September.

Time to go. Have a wonderful weekend everyone!

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TLC Weekly Update August 9, 2019

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All week I was troubled by bad internet connection. Slowed down progress with various projects. Just unbelievable how dependent I am these days on the need to be connected to the net all the time …

My team told me that the Gann Square Excel add-in I have created years ago, is the number one gann tool on the net based on the number of downloads. It is a pleasant surprise for me. Never thought that people like it so much. Just wondering what will happen if I charge a dollar each.

I received quite a number of requests to buy the mechanical trading strategies they see in DaytradingBias instead of subscribing to the premium service which gives full access to all the strategies. I understand what they are thinking of and I can package up the strategies as individual items in the store. The truth of the matter is, the cost of these strategies would add up to way more than the subscription fees. Anyway, I am getting my team to package up some of the items and offer them in the store.

I finally realize that I was sick after I came back to Canada last week. The symptoms were so mild that I thought I was get exhausted from the trip and all. Only until I woke up Thursday in the morning feeling all better that I figure this out.

Someone sent me this Quora answer by James Altucher on Warren Buffett. It is a good read and correct assessment of “The Oracle”. As I told many people asking me about Warren Buffett, he is not a good investor and he is definitely not a good fund manager. Now I can refer everyone to this full length article so that I don’t have to waste time explaining why.

Have a great weekend all!

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TLC Weekly Update July 26, 2019

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I was doing a presentation in Hong Kong on alternative investment vehicles earlier this week. Some questions are quite interesting. But specifically there is this one question many readers will be interested to know the answers,

What are my opinions on the current market environment?

Here is a quick summary:

  • Brexit is good for UK. British Pound will bottom out soon after Brexit.
  • Do not short Euro now. Too crowded. Too late.
  • When every major economy are using ZIRP to stimulate the economy, there will be unintended consequences.
  • Gold is in the beginning stage of a two to multiple years rally.
  • Equities will not be the place to be for good return in coming two to three years but not necessarily a “crash” that many people wanted to see (i.e. Chicken Little syndrome).
  • Real estate will not generate good return because it always normalize to the long term bond yield which may turn negative if the central banks choose to do so.
  • US dollar will be the place to be until it gets too expensive for the 3rd world countries to service their debts.
  • The belief that you need physical gold implies you believe that the system is heading for total collapse. If that is the case, you should not pile up gold bars. You should buy guns instead. (Stolen from Tim Morge)

There is this very odd thing I like to complain about the restaurants in Tsim Sha Tsui, Hong Kong. Many restaurants offering breakfast on their menu but they do not open until much later in the day. And many of them do not indicate what time they open. So I was walking up and down the street not able to find a place for breakfast even though all these places having their signs telling me the nice breakfast they serve … by lunch time.

The week was so packed with all sorts of meetings I could not work on the book list on technical trading skills. I will catch up with that when I return to Toronto in couple of days.

And this year is first time in my life that I have so many people surprised me with birthday cakes and well wishes. I don’t usually celebrate my birthday at all for years. So it is a drastic change indeed. Thank you all of you for remembering my birthday!

For those of you who are curious about my exact date of birth for whatever reason, here is the clue – first moon landing.

Have a nice weekend all!

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TLC Weekly Update July 19, 2019

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It has been an extremely busy week since I arrived at Hong Kong this past Sunday. Being busy and having a hectic schedule are not really something that pose serious challenge to me. But the hot weather is. I was effectively sweating all day going everywhere. It was only made tolerable because of the breaks I got from going inside air-conditioned buildings …

It is a more personal trip for which I am meeting with my family, across multiple generations, quite a number of times. We do not get the chance to see each other that often. It is good to see people family members are doing fine. Time is short though since I will head back to Toronto this coming weekend.

One thing I notice is that the price of everything has rise significantly in Hong Kong in just half a year since I last visited the place not long ago. I ask around to see if my observation is correct. It turns out many fast food chains and retail stores are increasing their prices due to the upward pressure of labour costs.

I was rereading the book The Magic of Thinking Big by David Schwartz on the plane. Before all these movements of self-help and all these talks about better performance through the building of proper perspective, we have this book explaining it all way back when. It is still the one that I recommend most to young adults because of the way the message is delivered.

Looking ahead, this coming week will be as hectic as the first one since I have been providing strategic portfolio allocation advices to my clients. I am also in talk with potential investors who are interested in some of my business ventures. Even though I do not usually get myself directly involve in running the start-ups I invest in, it is a great idea to spread the words when the opportunities show up.

Weather forecast is saying that it is going to rain all week long. To me, that means lower temperature. Yay!

Have a nice weekend all!

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TLC Weekly Update Jun 28, 2019

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In the blink of an eye, it is already Friday. I have so many things to get done I lost track of time. It is nice to sit down and take a short break here to review what happened this week.

The progress on completing the technical part of the Emini day trading course is taking much more time than I anticipated not because of the materials are not there. Seriously, I have all these day trading strategies written eons ago. Translating them into TradeStation is not difficult at all. But, in order to explain certain things, I have to use the TradeStation optimizer and taking screenshots of the results. And that is a huge pain in the neck as TradeStation is very slow with its optimization process.

I am so used to optimization at 10 times the speed, I thought I can get these things done in an hour and next thing I know the estimated time to completion is extended another few hours. Since I cannot get people to switch to NeoTicker and its Grid Optimizer, I guess I have to live with this until it is done.

For the giant book list on DIY day trading mastery, the second instalment is now ready. Finally, some books directly related to trading are included. The next set of books will probably takes some time to prepare due to an unforeseen circumstances. Namely, as I flip through the books, I find many of the good ones are no longer in print. I am still trying to figure out a way to include them because I am sure you can find some of these books in the libraries or other book places.

I moved up my travel schedule to Asia from August to July. It is primary for family matters. Hopefully the internet will be good enough there for remote access to my work.

And thanks to all of you sending me your suggestions on what to do next with webinars. I am organizing the materials to see which one will get the go ahead first. I will keep you all posted about the progress.

To my fellow Canadians, have a nice long weekend!

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TLC Weekly Update Jun 21, 2019

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Happy day.

I get my edited draft of The Emini S&P Day Trading Course back. Read it through twice. Fixed up some minor issues. I have this part of the editing completed. So what’s left is to polish the code of the day trading strategies featured in the course and have them ready for download. Of course I need to take screenshots, write and rewrite parts that I am not satisfied with, but I know I am dashing through the finish line. It always feel good to see the completion of a project.

For the big list of books on trading, I finally give in to reality and split it into multiple parts. First part is just posted.

I told my premium members to look into buying gold producer ETFs at the end of 3rd quarter last year. Looks like the comeback play worked out with more upside likely. As I explained to my readers, in order to win big on the long term moves in gold, you need to leverage on the gold producers. These gold producer ETFs holding the major gold companies are the perfect vehicles with lower risk comparing to holding gold or gold ETFs directly and better reward too.

Now that Facebook is going to release its own crypto currency, the validity of the block chain technology as an alternative to money printed by the governments is now turning into reality. We need to pay close attention to the development of crypto markets from now on … As a minimum, at least take the time to understand some basics about them. Here is a good intro video about blockchain published by Wired.

Have a great weekend everyone!

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My Journey to Fully Automate My Trading: Reference Account First Month Results

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The result is in with the first month of trading the reference account using Big-Game Hunter ES at Striker. There are quite a number of things I learned over the month about the service. It is a good thing that I am trading real money with Striker myself so that I can further refine the trading strategies I planned to offer through them. Let’s go through the results and discoveries one by one.

First, the month has a net loss of $2820.80 all fees included. So it is down 18.8% for the month. It is not an outlier comparing to historical performance. So on the surface it is a typical month for Big-Game Hunter ES. This being said, I will add a monthly return table in the Big-Game Hunter ES page so that it is easier for traders without prior experience in this type of trading to see how the equity fluctuates.

Here is a chart capturing all the trades for the month.

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What is more interesting, however, is that if you know what happened during the month, you would notice that quite a few of the trades taken were stopped out because of news shock caused by Trump making tweets suddenly in the afternoon. Although I cannot tell for sure that these trades would have worked out fine without those news shocks, I know it is not likely that they all experience the worst case scenario either. So, it is something worth monitoring to see if such events continue to interfere with the performance. If so, better protection scheme has to be deployed using higher resolution data.

Another observation is that on days that the disruption of price movement caused by POTUS all resumed the original path the next trading day. It is as if whatever he did, only affected the day trading crowd.

Since I am trading the strategy on Tradestation myself and also through Striker, I get to compare the fills of the trades to see if there is any issue with Striker’s automation. Here is a table of the trades taken and a comparison of the actual fills.

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From the one month experience, it looks like there is a consistent slippage against the strategy with fills at Striker. However, the actual net effect of the trades were magically at zero thanks to one of the outlier better fill of 2+ points. I really don’t know what to say about this until I get more data to analyze. Let’s say I am just glad that the result so far is comparable.

I could not write up this post last weekend because I do not have a good way to capture the daily statements with the reference account. I ended up doing this manually. Without automation this will be very hard to do going forward as I planned to release more trading strategies with Striker. For now I guess I have no choice.

On my own account, given the chaos that is expected during the coming few weeks, I decided to delay the increase of contracts until next month. Hopefully POTUS will be done with his trigger happy tweets by then. I am not worry about Big-Game Hunter ES not going to perform though. I am going to deploy another set of trading strategies with my account soon, it is better I keep things as is so that I can compare the results more easily.

Have a good one!

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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!