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I was going through my website logs the other day. Anyone with a website can see "referrals" - the addresses of other websites which have a link to their own (assuming somebody has clicked that link).
So I sometimes go to those other websites and see what's written. (Interestingly there are a lot of sites in Spanish and German linking to my theory articles).
Anyway, one guy has some automated trading software for sale. Someone asked him "if it works, why would you sell it?". In the course of answering that guy, he linked to me.
But isn't it funny that that kind of question prevails? I've touched on this a couple of times before, but why are traders the only ones who aren't allowed to want to make more money? Aren't we exactly the type of person who is inclined to make money any way we can?
That kind of question also shows a misunderstanding of how trading works. It's not a fixed income. There are good times. And then there are lean times. Traders are people, believe it or not, and tend have things like families, rent to pay, food to buy. If done well, trading can bring in a fantastic income. But the need for security, the need to be a good *consistent* provider for your family (or just for yourself), doesn't go away.
And then, there is the fact that we live in a capitalistic society. Consider a movie star who spends a couple of months doing some 'acting', and gets a $20 million payment. Why is it, that the actor then goes on to make another movie? Why is it, that the actor then goes on to make a car commercial? Don't they have "enough" money? In capitalism, there is not such a concept.
Even if we don't use the money for ourselves, we can always use the extra for the benefit of others. Ala Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, and a list of other millionaire/billionaire philanthropists. How are they best to serve humanity - by volunteering their time at a soup kitchen for the homeless for 365 days a year? Or instead earning a stack of money, building a number of soup kitchens, and employing people to run all those soup kitchens?
And so, just like any other normal person, traders want to make more money. Selling their trading knowledge, or trading tools they've made along the way, seems a good way to me to pick up some extra cash. It's a completely normal thing to do, but yet people still have it in their head that once you've got a killer trading system, you are then no longer allowed to want to make money through alternate means.
Further, you're probably aware of the saying "it takes money to make money". Let's say you found a trading system which brings in 100% per year. Now let's say you have only $2000 to trade with. $2000 x 100% equals another $2000. You can't live on $2000.
Year 1: $2000 x 100% = $4000.
Year 2: $4000 x 100% = $8000.
Year 3: $8000 x 100% = $16000.
Year 4: $16000 x 100% = $32000.
Year 5: $32000 x 100% = $64000.
Year 6: $64000 x 100% = $128000.
You could probably live on $32000 per year. So if you start with $2000, and you consistently make 100% return per year, it's going to be about 5 years before you can quit your day job.
Two problems come to mind: (1) you need to consistently earn 100% p.a. for this plan to work; and (2) once you've quit your day job, you now have to consistently earn 100% p.a. until you die. Because all of your winnings would be taken up by buying daily essentials. You wouldn't be saving any money - you'd be treading water for the rest of your life.
What I'm trying to say is, you need a decent bank balance before you can consider trading for a living. The more you have, the less return per annum you need to pay for daily essentials.
So, I sell my freaking software! :-)
The other fundamental misunderstanding of how trading works, shown by the question of "if it works, why would you sell it?" is this theory of "the more people know the system, the less well it works". Now in my particular software, you create your own trading system. So you won't be trading the same as me - I'm just providing you a way to automate your own system. However, even if I was selling trading systems, theoretically the more people that know the system - the better the results should be for everybody. No?
Because, the more people buying at a particular time, the more demand there is. And the more demand there is, the higher the price goes. Isn't that how the supply-demand thing works??
So to me, the question should not be "if it works, why would you sell it?". The question should be "if it works, why wouldn't you sell it?".
The User Manual is still in progress. It currently stands at 145 pages. And just like making the software itself, writing the User Manual is a task that just doesn't want to finish. But I think it's very important to do. Give me another week or two on that, and I'll get back to finishing the Medved QuoteTracker integration.
Personally, I had 3 goals for the 6 months just ended. First was to lose some weight. I'm down 6kg. Not fantastic, but not bad. Another 10 to go :-)
Second was to increase my savings. A fantastic trading plan is nothing without capital behind it. That's done too. Incidentally, my 6-month contract has been extended another 6 months. So I'll be on the Gold Coast for a little bit longer at least.
Third was to find a decent girlfriend. I'd been living on my parents' farm for the 12 months previous, and there aren't a lot of girls there. The nearest neighbour was 1km away. That goal... it's hard to say. The thing was that I didn't want to jump into a relationship with just any girl. Relationships are easy to get into, but it's hard to get out.
Been to the movies a couple of times recently. Note that this post does contain spoilers.
Transformers
Transformers is an excellent 90 minute movie. Unfortunately it goes for 2.5 hours. There's a lot of dead time in it.
When they do transform, you can't make out any detail - you can just see a big blur of movement. Similarly with the action scenes - they've got the whole shake-the-camera thing going which I've always found annoying. The second Bourne movie was the same.
There was, however, one scene where I thought "ok, now that's cool". I can't remember what happens in that scene, but it was a 5-second experience. Out of 2.5 hours.
Yes I had the toys when I was a kid :-)
Oceans 13
I really liked Oceans 11. They told you all the problems they had to overcome, and we were left hanging as to how they would overcome them. Then the SWAT team came, and it all looked like it was going badly. Ok, we all knew they would intercept the call to the SWAT team, but there was some suspense there. Then they revealed how they did it, and it was all good.
Oceans 12 sucked. At the end they spring the train sequence on you, and you're left thinking "When did they ever mention anything about a train?". The only scene was them standing on a platform at a train station. And the "oh, Julia Roberts' character looks a lot like Julia Roberts" scheme, was poor. The only good thing was that the cop at the end was Matt Damon's mother.
So off I went to Oceans 13. In this one, (and here's the spoiler in case you don't want to read any further), they tell you what they are going to do... and then they do it. It's better than 12, but not as good as 11. The cool part was that the outside of the casino itself, which you see fairly often, looks very real but is actually all computer wizardry.
There is probably only one thing in existence that's more expensive in Australia than it is in Japan. Why did it have to be one of my favourite foods??
I'm talking about sushi. The trick is to get enough wasabi for the buzz, but not so much wasabi that you get the wasabi-headache. That balancing act is also part of the fun of eating sushi. Actually my sharemate in Osaka didn't have that problem - he always gave himself a big wasabi-headache on purpose.
Anyway, so I'm looking around the Gold Coast for a fairly cheap sushi place. Seems like the plates start at $2.50, and that's just for the egg ones - for the tuna and salmon they are $3.50.
Walking around one day I came across a narrow arcade, with small shops, that actually reminded me of Japan. Except for the surfboard store. And in the middle of that arcade there was a Japanese restaurant. I looked through the prices. It said egg sushi was $2, tuna and salmon were $2.50. "Wow" I thought. I expected that the portion size would be smaller, but surely it was a good deal nonetheless.
So tonight I went there. And the lady came over and I gave my order - "tuna" I said.
As soon as she said "1?" I realised my mistake. Normally a plate of sushi has 2 pieces of sushi on it. When she said "1?" I realised that these were the prices for just 1 piece. And therefore the prices would need to be doubled to compare them with other restaurants. So I wasn't going to be paying $2.50 for the tuna, I was going to be paying $5. And I wasn't going to be paying $2 for the egg, I was going to be paying $4.
As you can see, those prices are well above the normal $2.50 for a plate of egg, and $3.50 for a plate of tuna.
In Japanese I thought to myself "maitta", which has the dictionary meaning of: "I'm beaten".
Still, good quality. But maitta.
I think Friday nights will become "search for a good and cheap Japanese restaurant" night. Until now I had always been going to the same place. Then I found out the pretty waitress there was my boss's girlfriend. It's a small world. Or at least the Gold Coast is a small city.
Just now I called a company, went through the normal phone menu system, and had an "I can't *@#$ing believe it!" moment.
They had ads in the phone menu. Not during the waiting time after you've made all the selections and you're waiting for an operator. I can understand a company having ads instead of repeating a jingle over and over. But no, they put the ads before they even give out the menu options so you have to listen through the ad to get to the options.
It's a good way, I thought, to make an annoying process even more annoying. Nice work.
So fresh from getting my website fixed, my broadband connection went down on Sunday morning. It came back up Monday night - about 36 hours later.
See when I decided upon the company to use for broadband, I went with a small local company. And that company shut down over the Easter break. No 24/7 technical support. And nobody checking the ol' answering machine either, apparently.
So I used my parents' dial-up connection, only to find that it lets me open some websites, but not others. For example, I couldn't open www.microsoft.com. But I could get www.google.com. Potentially I was restricted to content hosted in Australia, but that's speculation - it's actually hard to tell where the content is physically located (I'm guessing Google has mirrored servers all over the shop).
So yeah, pretty sure I've done all the coding for v1.0, but just like everybody else - I can't use TS unless I've got a connection to the Internet. And my website was one of those that I couldn't connect to. So no testing was possible, so it wasn't released this Easter weekend as I'd hoped. Not that I'd told anyone it was going to be out this weekend, but that was the plan. Anyway...
What I did do was spend some time on the documentation. I've got an installation/upgrading/removal guide and a user manual underway. But, if there is something more boring than writing documentation, I'm not sure what that would be. (I don't think there's any problem if a future employer reads that, because I'm fairly sure it's a wide-held belief).
Actually I do know - more boring than writing documentation for your own software, is writing documentation for someone else's. I know, because that's part of my current contract :-)
Please forgive my self-indulgence :-)
To summarise my life of the last few years into one word, I would say "extremes".
I lived in the megopolis of Tokyo for 9 months, with no job other than my own software.
Then I moved to the mere metropolis of Osaka for 9 months, still with no job other than my own software.
My Dad has an accident with a steam-roller (no kidding), and I moved to my parents' farm in outback Australia to help them out. The closest neighbour to my parents is about 1km away. It's a little different to Tokyo and Osaka (less pretty girls :-)
So I stayed there for a year, which was about 9 months too long. Not only does Dad religiously watch the wrestling (WWE) on both Wednesday and Friday, he also religiously watches the repeats of those shows on Saturday and Sunday, respectively.
Anyway, from the boondocks I move to the heart of Surfers Paradise on the Gold Coast, about 100m from the beach. And after 3 years of only working for myself, I return to a "proper" job.
You're right - going back to work for someone else after not doing it for 3 years was a big, big change. But the routine has settled now and it's almost like I never left.
Almost...
There's a gym at work, and the most common thing I hear while I'm in the locker room is how the weekend came around so quickly, or how the weekend went so quickly, or how people are really looking forward to the weekend, or holidays. That kind of thing.
I sense people understand that life is passing them by, but also that they don't realise fully what that means.
If there is a creator, or divine spirit, or God, I don't think He meant for us to spend most of our lives behind a desk. Yes, it's good to be able to live comfortably and not worry about how to pay the bills.
But shouldn't we want more than that - to be able to live comfortably and not worry about how to pay the bills without the need to spend most of our waking hours doing something that we probably wouldn't do if we had a choice?
And yet in the locker room I hear nothing about how people are trying to break free. Either they aren't doing it, or we live in a culture where we aren't allowed to say out loud that we're trying to break free. Probably a bit of both.
Dunno. I think if you spend half of Saturday reading every word of the newspaper, and then half of Sunday doing the same thing, I don't think you can complain that the weekend went so quick.
Anyway, until I'm financially free, I guess I can't judge others.
At the moment I'm half-way through my 6-month contract. During the 6 months I wanted savings to go up, weight to come down, and a girlfriend. And at the moment everything's headed in the right direction.
January 28th would have been my 3-year anniversary of not having a job, but unfortunately I will fall 6 days short. On Monday, January 22nd, I'll start work at my new job on the Gold Coast in Australia.
TS development will slow down, but not stop. There are still some features that I want in there. If you want something new, all you have to do is let me know about it and I'll tell you how likely it is to be done.
While I have a "within 24 hours" policy of replying to emails at the moment, generally I actually reply within an hour or two. This will probably not be the case anymore, and I will have to rely on the "within 24 hours" promise.
I will continue to keep you updated here, on the goal of sipping beers on the beach while TS does the trading and makes the money for me.
Some people in the Oanda forums are very anti-trading signals services. I don't understand why. So when someone, for the 100th time, said something along the lines of "if you need to use a signal service, you shouldn't be trading" and "if they were any good, they wouldn't need to sell their signals", I cracked! Cracked I tell you!
Here's the original thread.
And below are my two posts merged and slightly edited:
I'm not sure why I'm going to stick up for people and businesses that I have no relation with, but here goes...
You all know the concept of capitalism, right? Where we all pursue money, and no matter how much we have it's never enough?
So if some trader has a great trading system which they are making money from, I don't understand why people berate them for letting other people ride the wave as well. At a fee, of course. After all, it's the trader that's done all the hard work - the subscribers just need to follow instructions.
Because, and here's the thing, in a different thread there'll be people asking successful traders to give away their trading systems.
Further, it could be the case that a trader has no capital of their own, but have worked out a really good trading system. Let's say they start with $2000. And they make 100% interest for a year. Now they have $4000. They do it again. Now they have still only $8000 even though they consistently made 100% p.a. Why is it wrong for them to sell their signals for some extra cash?
And if it's not wrong for that kind of person to sell their signals, why is it wrong for someone who has a lot more starting capital to sell their signals?
You see, generally we still want to make more money, even if we have a lot. We don't question why movie stars continue to appear in movies and commercials. We don't question why sports stars continue to play, and then go on to coach. But bizarrely, in this trading arena where the entire point is making money, we question why people want to make money.
That's not to say that there aren't some shonks around in the trading signal arena. So if possible, test them out for a bit. The Collective2 website, as best as I can tell, is probably the easiest place to verify past results.
From memory, traders don't put the details of their alleged closed trades into Collective2 after the fact - they send real-time buy and sell signals just like a broker. And Collective2 have some kind of engine which works out how much the trade would have won/lost. So as for auditing, that seems good enough.
Another way to weed out shonks is to ask in a forum somewhere. Not this one though, obviously :-)
Now, if you know how to trade, maybe you don't need to use a signal service. Good for you.
For others, the game is all about making money. Who cares how they do it? Who cares what knowledge they have? And why do they have to learn to trade? It kind of smacks of superiority to say that people need to read all the books you did, and lose all the money you did, and do all the hard yards you did, before they are allowed to profit from the forex game. (I'm putting words in your mouth there :-)
If all you have to do is follow the signals given by someone else who has done the hard yards for you, I'd say that's a reasonable strategy. Instead of learning how to trade, you can learn how to tell who gives good signals and who doesn't.
If you can find a good signal provider, well, what's wrong with it? People pay for advice in every walk of life. When you went to buy your plasma-screen TV, and you asked the store attendant for his advice, he didn't say "well, if you have to ask, you shouldn't be buying a plasma-screen TV". He didn't say that, right?
Putting ads on your website, selling trading signals, selling software, selling plasma-screen TVs - it's all about providing a service and getting paid in return. Different skills, same goal - TO MAKE MONEY! BECAUSE WE'RE CAPITALISTS!
I mostly enjoy reading posts by Steve Pavlina. His recent article, Setting Your Primary Focus, says to resolve to focus on one thing in the coming year, rather than making any resolutions. Read the article for his explanation.
I have decided that health is my one thing. I tend to think about money by default, so that's taken care of.
The truth is, Sharky has become a chubby bunny.
Steve says:
For example, if you’re 50 pounds overweight, that’s a serious problem that will negatively affect many parts of your life, including your health, your career, and your relationships.
I'm not quite 50 pounds overweight, but by the same token nobody wants to see my belly. Although, now I think about it, nobody really wanted to see it before :-)
So it's to the gym for me, as soon as I move cities, as soon as I get a job, as soon as v1.0 is out. Until then, I'm trying to walk 10,000 steps per day.
And, as Steve Pavlina said in a different post, it's all about turning up. You go to the gym, and you're going to do a workout. The more often you turn up, the fitter you'll become. It's the turning up that's the hard part.
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