The Legend of The Gambler - page 33
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Pain in the F'ing arse, 5th decimal place. Now I have to tweak all of my scripts when I get back. This could potentially have drastic effects on existing scripts that have multiple open trades. I plan to wind down some of my scripts so the disruption will be minimal.
My observation of the locals are that they do not really use their cell phones as much as the Americans. I'm walking down the streets of Hamburg, and I hardly see anyone on the phone, and in restaurants, no one is talking on the phone either. This is very strange to me because in the US, Americans (especially kids nowadays) are practically tethered to a phone or a crackberry.
Anyone here using an 3G iphone? I plan to buy the next Apple Iphone, in June. I was thinking of trading from my phone, but MT Mobile does not support the Iphone OS. So I'll have to figure out something. I can't stand my junkie wireless phone now. Either I go with Iphone or the Android for connectivity to the internet.
I'm sort of in media withdrawal right now here, the television is pretty bad in the hotel, I'm getting like CNN and Bloomberg as entertainment...and they just keep repeating the same stories every hour. The bars and beers/sausages are great here though.
Bloomberg runs repeats on weekends, but resume on the asian open on sunday night.
If you're going for an Iphone I suggest you be very weary of Iphone roaming charges.
If anything- if you do not need the "Iphone" multimedia experience, a palm/nikon or crackberry should do just as well.
Personally, I am not a fan of the iphone.
If I'm going to pay that kind of money for a new mobile phone and data package, I figure I might as well get the best. And after my own thorough analysis, I think Apple Iphone just have the most features, and I will be getting the next generation hardware. I want to use it for everything...multimedia, GPS, internet surfing, mobile trading, remote connect, and MP3 player.
Yeah, ATT even added an international package, so I'm not too worried about the roaming charges.
Before jumping on that, not worry boat, I suggest just a quick google search on "Iphone Roaming Charges"
If I'm going to pay that kind of money for a new mobile phone and data package, I figure I might as well get the best. And after my own thorough analysis, I think Apple Iphone just have the most features, and I will be getting the next generation hardware. I want to use it for everything...multimedia, GPS, internet surfing, mobile trading, remote connect, and MP3 player. Yeah, ATT even added an international package, so I'm not too worried about the roaming charges.
I'm still in deep deep drawdown to the tune of -$20K right now.
But here is an interestingly revealing link to professional currency program returns, not some internet gurus making gazillion dollars of returns on demos.
BarclayHedge | Barclay Currency Traders Index
Forex is really a tough business, and I hope I survive. It doesn't take much to go from profit to loss, and hopefully, the other way around too.
However, it does show the power of compounding, and being consistently profitable...even on small returns can become very powerful.
I blew out my account.
I learned another lesson, never ever trust a black box strategy. The worst thing that has happened to me was subscribing to someone else's strategy, and then having it blow out your account without knowing exactly why. I can take blowing out my own account with my own strategies, then it's just my own fault. But this experience has taught me to trust in myself, and stop trying to diversify into things that I do not understand.
Another huge lesson that I learned is that I need to shut the hell up and trade in private. Focus on what I'm doing, and stop trying to look at what others are doing. I can still trade manually, and rebuild my account slowly again. In the mean time, I'm taking a break.
Anyways, my Hare account is gone. It's probably evident looking at the performance of the signals that I was subscribing to.
Hey Kenny,
Sorry to hear that, I have been a avid stalker of your journal as both your personality and trading style amuses me.
May I ask, what signals did you subscribe to? I know you had talked about some hear, I am wondering if there are others you did not mention.
I blew out my account.
I learned another lesson, never ever trust a black box strategy. The worst thing that has happened to me was subscribing to someone else's strategy, and then having it blow out your account without knowing exactly why. I can take blowing out my own account with my own strategies, then it's just my own fault. But this experience has taught me to trust in myself, and stop trying to diversify into things that I do not understand.
Another huge lesson that I learned is that I need to shut the hell up and trade in private. Focus on what I'm doing, and stop trying to look at what others are doing. I can still trade manually, and rebuild my account slowly again. In the mean time, I'm taking a break.
Anyways, my Hare account is gone. It's probably evident looking at the performance of the signals that I was subscribing to.Only signal I subscribed to was the COINTHL at rentasignal, as it was stated earlier in my journal. It is a bitter pill to swallow.
If I had been just trading on my own, my accounts would have been at all time highs, and I would be well on my way to what I wanted to achieve.
I was attracted to the idea of cointegration from the description of that signal, and it gave consistent results for a few weeks. However, when I was caught in a prolonged drawdown, I knew I was in deep trouble. I saw the flaw in his strategy. Basically, he had 2 sets of trade. One is a short term trade with 1/10 of the trade size. The other is a long term trade with full trade size. When the short term trades were in trouble, the long term trades would always come in, and save it because of its size. However, the fatal flaw was when the long term trades were in trouble, he didn't have a backup plan. This is why the strategy failed miserably when the long term trades got caught the wrong way.
Also, his short term trades took on a different personality, he started using straddles on the same pair, and would get caught on at least 1 side of the trade with drawdown which needed further hedging to stop the bleeding. This hedge costed margin to put on, and basically locked us into a loss.
Overall, the strategy was doomed to fail because any sustainable strategy requires to cut losers short, even if it means taking a 20% hit to the account every once in awhile. Instead, he added more to the losers in an attempt to bring the strategy back, and that was the nail in the coffin. I was furious and saw the writing on the wall, when the signal provider added another long term trade on top of the existing long term trades...which just killed the margins even further...because at that stage...we should looking at ways to preserve margin...not use it more. At that point, I knew it was the last bet to see if we can either double down to make a comeback or go completely bust. It was the latter.
Well, after a month of soul searching, I'm ready to pick up the pieces.
With the trading debacle recently, I've been really demotivated with trading. I still believe that I can build my account back up, but I've decided to heed my own advice and take a long term approach. At the beginning of this year, I said I was going to higher timeframe to do my trading...then I got sucked into the whole "follow the signals" game...and didn't follow my own gameplan. Instead I got onto someone else's gameplan, and that is a big mistake. Something I intend to correct going forward.
I will continue to run my own strategy on my main account. Trading on longer timeframe allows me a great deal of time to do nothing, which is not really productive. So with my science and engineering background, I've decided to take a position with a steady paycheck. I will usually check the charts 1-2 times a day, and just ride the higher timeframe trends.
Each day, I will look on the daily movement at 2-5 PM EST of each day, and place a order at that time if there is a trend. If there isn't a trend, I just don't trade. This gives me plenty of time unless I'm traveling for business, which this position requires quite frequently.
Until then, I'll remain in my own corner trying to not sabotage my own trading with more other people's distractions.