Crazy day 2010Jan29

Another crazy day!

I have made a total of two stupid mistakes, tormenting decision whether to close trades with >-100 pips in deficits and the foolish guts to push thru with sudden help (from “god”???) at the last minute.

A total of 375 pips (or a non-impressive USD199) !!!!!! That is crazy of a day’s trading!

Order                   pips

19618354           –

Remarks : delete trade as it was not the correct leverage that i should be playing.

19618604            +33

19618475             +7

19618357             -3

Remarks: the above three was a set of martingale system to get target of 30 pips.

19618843             +59

19618831             +53

Remarks: for the above 2 trades. started to get greedy and broke my own set of rules which is to reach a certain budget level before playing at that leverage of 0.05x. I wanted to hit the earlier target of $40 so….looks like i am going to be doomed sooner or later.

19619866               -12

Remarks: It was an accident click on sell when i was trying to panicky closing all trades below. The stupid Meta trader 4 software has their sell, buy and close button so close together!

19619100             +23

19619183              +32

19619391              +55

19619678              +59

19619732               +69

The first trade was an honest mistake! i have accidentally click buy when i was trying to close the two trades (19618843 & 19618831). As i foresee the trend to be up, i allowed my foolishness to carry on. It resulted in further four more martingale trades as i stacked up my possible losses of >100 pips. It was simply tormenting to see hope slipping away. I might have ended up quite badly but thankfully a sudden up burst of the prices in GBP/JPY recovered most of my mojo!

Some lessons learnt today:

1) Never use a tablet to do trades. Especially a tiny one like viliv s7 3g premium

2) Dont panic and never click wrongly for trades. It will cost you dearly.

3) Already known this but just for sharing: Martingale system should never be use in trending conditions.

Just too much hardwork!

I have calculated that in order to lose comfortably 2 % or 70 pips at at a budget of 2k (with base of 1k as untouchable). I would need 0.03x leverage for 2k to play.

And for most, getting a comfortable 30 pips per day would be ideal, but 30 pips at 0.03x leverage would equate to only $9!!!!! Getting from $2000 to $2400, would be $400/9 = 45 days. That is like two months of playing forex just to get to next playing leverage of 0.04x.

Foreseeing this, i tried a crazy method of pushing myself to the limit by constantly chasing trades. It is ridiculous, considering one might lose a few days of winnings just because of the psychology stress one has to undertake to perform. I have managed to:

trade 1. sell – profit 32 pips

trade 2. buy – profit 3 pips (nearly caused a disaster, but quick wits got me out upon seeing the situation was weird. Never never assume the breakout to be the same direction that you might have expected.)

trade 3. sell – profit 52 pips

trade 4. sell – profit 38 pips

In total…. a profit of 125 pips for a day! As i was writing, if i have not closed the trades for 3 & 4, i might have gotten extra 127 pips for each of these trades.

Crazy as it is. This is just a training to strengthen my hopeless ambition of staying financially solvent without working.  But this is hardwork…. it is just too damn stressful!

Calculating base amount needed for different leverage.

I was trying to calculate base amount needed for different leverages so as to project a safe while optmising the profit potential. Regardless of how good i think i am about my excel formulas skills, it took me bloody mind-confusing hour to solve this!

Qns: Calculating base amount needed to play different leverage given the following:

– stoploss (Max) per day = 2%

– Max pips lost per day = 70pips

-base amount (bare minimal) = 1000

=(100,000 *0.1) / ((( 100,000 * 0.1 * 0.02 ) / 70 ) / 1 ) +1000

= ( Leverage amount ) / ((( 2 percent amount per day ) / 70 pips ) / cost per pips for that leverage ) + base amount

So effectively ………

0.1x leverage = $4500

1x leverage = $36000

Rigorousness of thought

How many times have you heard friends or colleagues  made some silly comments and they still believe that they are right? And regardless of how much times you tried to correct them, the statements that you made just doesnt stick!

Sometimes silly comments might be correct but this post is not that, not about black swan theory.

The judgement that we made on certain things are often shaped by: beliefs & religion ;background – childhood and formal educations; workplace; friends – birds of a feather flock together; experience – by practises of workplace, love life, charity, accidents, lost of love ones….

Some of these “rational” judgements failed to re-evaluated similar grounds even though there might be some differences. It is basically a lazy man’s way of bringing one’s practices and habits to another.

So are we able to get rid of such practices to avoid bad mistakes? Chances that you are able to but it takes a little to fine tune. How do we know then that what we know and believe to be correct is wrong…. the thing is, you cant. Until you put the thought that is known to be correct to you, to test. And how do we do that?

There are not one side but four sides to a square and six sides to a cube. All reasoning must catered to multi facets of rigorousness of thought before they can be deem as…….. good enough to be correct to one. Creative questioning  by throwing up random questions up in the air and answering one by one would be an appropriate approach towards comprehensive answering. It might take a lot of practices and experiences before one can see the relevancy of the questionings towards a complete solution.It might take a person to be well versed in multi-facet disciplines to see things a little further.

Can one determine an orange is sweet just because you have tasted one?  Or can you throw up some questions about the orange before you even tasted it to confirm your beliefs? for example: is it reddish orange, does it smells sweet or funny, does it look ripe, does the skin looks overly preserved,  can it float well in a pail of water, does it bounce back…? Dont be ashamed to ask silly questions as it might open up to a different areas of  ideas.

One alternative way that was mentioned in “The psychology of trading” by Dr Brett N. Steenbarger is to have your logical self talk to you. Funny as it might sounds, it does help especially when you know you sounds silly and your logical self corrects you.

Some resources that i have found on the net that might be useful for those interested in this topic:

http://www.mindef.gov.sg/imindef/publications/pointer/supplements/onstaffwork.-imindefPars-0013-DownloadFile.tmp/ON%20STAFF%20WORK(L)_280809.pdf

http://www.seenmagazine.us/Sections/ArticleDetail/tabid/79/smid/403/ArticleID/207/reftab/39/t/Rigor-and-Relevance/Default.aspx

Education of a forex trader

Trading remains one of the key focus for me to be self-reliant. It doesnt require much capital to profit from the forex markets but it had humbled so many traders that 95% of the traders who went in never made it. It has humbled PhDs, Smart arses from Ivy leagues, great traders from yesteryears and the barber from the neighbourhood.

It has remain one of the most elusive subjects that one has to learn, primarily due to the fact the market is never predictable. If one is to venture in into this elusive subject, one can be easily swarmed by tons of materials that seems to be offering the holy grail but in fact,  the holy grail never existed.

The education of a trader can varies by a huge margin and for trading, there is no one fix way of learning and profiting from it. As long as the techniques that one is using is good enough for profit taking, it is a good system. However, given the same system to another person….. very high chances that it might failed miserably. So learning all and adapt to those that might appeal to you, and the end result of being profitable is still the most important report card!

With tons of forex courses that are available online and even seminars, offering  their own unique concoction of the holy grail syrup…. one would think if it is so successful then why the need to share? Chances that it might not be so successful after all.

Learning from courses might not be all that bad as “bound to have one that is real”! Provided that they can:
1) Do live trading show the end results on the right side of the chart
2) explicit codification of trading strategies. if implicit which is talk only then forget it!

So ….. in conclusion for the courses…. none make it!

Most importantly,  live journal is very important for trade learning. Not only failures must be recorded and justified, so do successes.

I Quit!

I have quit my job since last Sept due to some personal conflict with my stand on what is right (being stupid lobo – to quit without finding another job and not having sufficient savings to tide over) or to continue being a soulless zombie (being stupid worthless piece of shit) .

.

I chose to be stupid lobo.

.

Thinking back…… the choice that i have made was indirectly influenced by my ex-colleague. He mentioned something about being scolded by his superior for a mistake that he made and i turn this around and kept telling myself that….. at least someone scolded him for a mistake, no one scolded me for being stupid for three years! I had kept a draft resignation letter in my hotmail for six months and the last call was in august……. i had it.

Three years of working at an environment where the boss has very high EQ but no IQ and zero management skills. It is very hard for me to deal logically to a person who does not talk sense or equate hard work to more compensation. The efforts that i have placed in to initiate time/manpower saving are not appreciated and been taken for granted. Just imagine 8hrs of work shrunk down to a mere 5 seconds….. would you compensate that work as a weightage of 8hrs or 5 seconds? It is even harder to imagine that more jobs are being piled on just because i am more efficient, effective and makes less or no mistakes? Given that another colleague has only two jobs just because she makes more mistakes and i should take on eight jobs for the same pay or even more than mine?

.

I never have good EQ skills and have a very stubborn view on how things should go. I am right almost 100% of the time but apparently my personality clashes with those of my boss. It was a total opposite. If only i can be a bit more carefree, accommodating, less demanding, more careless, wayang a lot…… perhaps i can just fit in fine…. but sadly that is just not me.

I dont blame my less-that-competent colleague as i have been thru that stage before…. being incompetent. I can only blame myself for not seeing it earlier that it is futile to work in that environment.

The only resolution for me is to self-reliant…… to be my own boss which is only to account for my own worthless self.

.

Lobo= another term for worthless piece of shit who is not working.

Wayang= a term for puppet show in indonesia. or more appropriately NATO!

Implicit – Friend or Foe

Implicit learning is commonly learned through experience and by skill based processes. A learned implicit response can be so instantaneous that no brain cells were killed during a process….. maybe.

Implicit learning can also help to facilitate faster learning though familiar or similar grounds, for examples:

1) past experience of holding a cup and now holding a vase.

2) looking for the red button in a remote that painfully calls for power off.

3) closing your eye lid when it is too bright

…..

But…… it can be a bane as well. Take for example: you have been so used to typing for decades and suddenly, there is a need to pen down something…. you would find the skills required to write even a simple paragraph a chore. A something that you have so used too when you were young.

Another factor to consider is that it does help us to facilitate faster learning which “conveniently” takes in “useful” data for recompilation for easier digestion. It might appear as energy and time saving technique but in reality, it can cause some serious problems. This is especially so when a person is about to pick up a new skill but due to age which exacerbate the intense of implicit learning makes them failed to pick up the finer points. This makes picking up new skills or learning new subjects much more difficult as you get older, as the saying goes, “you cant teach an old dog new tricks”.

The trick that an old dog can learn is perhaps to attempt all stuffs, learn new things constantly and see things in all perspective. That would perhaps not let the mind fixated at a certain heuristic flow and creates more avenues for learning experiences.

KM- Implicit thinking or experiences

Knowledge Management has always intrigued me when i was working. Mainly due to the fact that i have to sort out huge amount of data and info that was lying around. Or mainly, i hate the fact that i had to spoon-feed some info to my bosses or colleagues just because i am better at some things. What?………. Know more then do more? WTF!

.

As i was reading up, one of the most difficult questions that i have problems with is implicit thinking and experiences…..How on earth, do we code such things into KM?

.

Looking around, i have spotted a simple and very obvious way of codifying implicit. Implicit as in wood craving or any skill based related process, might be best “demonstrated” by visual aids (something like picture workflow) instead of words since words cant really tell all unless you have experienced what the author is implying. Simple har! But the unless mind of mine need to take a waking call for such a simple task. Maybe i was not as exposed to the KM thingy that i should have.

.

Yeah…..  i should read more!