Let me tell you, I have been stressed lately! It seems like all areas of my life have suddenly kicked into high-gear.
- Orders for custom programming work (indicators and strategy development, mostly) have been coming in faster than I can get to them. I had to work during most of the recent holiday break to catch back up. Already, another wave is coming in.
- Publishers are sending me books for review faster than I can read them.
- I am trying to get a port of eotpro ready for eSignal this month.
- We have ports of eotpro technology planned for at least one other platform, if not two or three more, ASAP.
- The majority of my morning and early afternoon are used for daytrading.
- My girlfriend wants more and more of my afternoons and evenings. And, more and more, I want to give them to her.
My Typical Day
On a typical day, I wake up and commute briskly to my office, picking up breakfast on the way (this means, I walk from my bedroom to my other bedroom, grabbing anything that happens to be both edible and on my kitchen counter on the way). Then I trade until 10:30, when I come into the eotpro live room to chat and answer questions for an hour or so. Then I trade until the markets close, followed by the fastest blog updates I can manage to make. Then, I do my best to get through as much business as I can from 4:30 to 6:30. Next, shower and get dressed… off for dinner and evening with my girlfriend. Then, once she falls asleep, I do as much work as I can until I can’t stay awake anymore.
Normally, I don’t much mind being busy, but there are limits to what I can accept. In the last few weeks, I’ve noticed a number of depressing repercussions:
- When people post questions to the forums, it can be days before I get a chance to notice and respond.
- I generally respond very quickly to short emails, but sometimes people write long emails (practically their whole life story) and I don’t get a chance to write back. I used to be able to answer all of my mail. I feel bad about that.
- Twice in the last week, I was too tired for sex.
- Dinosaur Trader asked me what my best blog post of 2008 was, and I couldn’t find anything I was all that proud of. Yeah, there are some good tidbits here and there, for sure. But, I have learned a lot over the last year, and I’ve been too busy to share that information with all of you like I’d like to.
- I have some interesting indicator enhancements written, but I’ve been reluctant to tell anyone about them, because I know I won’t be able to deal with the demand to release them on all the platforms we support now.
- People contact me wanting to advertise on the blog, but I just have to ignore them for lack of time and energy. That’s money I’m throwing away!
- You may have noticed that we’re 12 days into the year, and this is my first blog post. Geez!
- See above re:too tired for sex.
So, A New Path
One of the reasons I wanted out of my day job (almost 3 years ago, now) was because of the dishonesty and corrupt environment around me. I’ve taken care of that… the eotpro folks are not only great traders, but also great people to work with. The other reason I wanted to strike out on my own, though, was to be in control of my time. I wanted to establish a healthy work/play balance. I wanted time to devote to meditation and staying centered.
Well, I seem to have lost that time balance again! Maybe it’s a necessary evil of a successful business, but I’m not ready to throw in the towel yet. I was looking at my options over the weekend.
This time last year, one option would be to drop all the non-trading activities. In 2009, though, it would hurt a lot of people for me to do that. I have long-term relationships with clients that depend on me to update and maintain their custom trading indicators (the biggest of which is of course eotpro). I also rather enjoy the programming. I could drop the blog, but I’d hate to do that, because I think it could be one of the best trading blogs out there if I could spend more time on it. It doesn’t make any sense for me to drop trading, because it’s the basis for most of my other business.
It’s a hard problem, when you want it all! :-)
I did strongly consider putting my trading on hiatus while I try to get a little “caught up” on my other businesses. In the end, though, this would be a band-aid, because the next surge of orders and books and who-knows-what-else would put me back in the same spot.
What I need is to be able to work on my blogs and programming work, while at the same time focus on trading. Astute readers can probably see my solution coming…
Automated Trading
I’m going to spend 2009 researching and developing mechanical trading systems. In this way, I’ll be able to offload the buying and selling onto my machines, while I focus on providing more value to all of you. This direction appeals to me because:
- It’s a challenge. I’ve run automated trading systems before, on and off, with minor success. I’ve always gone the very conservative route with auto-trading, because most obvious auto-trading ideas have big variance (read: drawdowns) in their historical performance. I’ve never been comfortable with that.
- Despite the above point, I’ve had clients send me some very successful strategies that they needed coded, so I’ve seen strategies that do quite well. I can’t reveal any of those, or legally use them for myself, due to NDAs I’ve signed. But, I’ve seen that it can be done.
- The research I do will lead to new indicators for eotpro, and also new articles for the website. This should help people considering this path find their way faster.
- I like to change things up from time to time.
What’s It Mean To Me?
For me, it means trading will be light as I go into research mode. So, initially, I’ll lose out on opportunities to make trading gains for a while. Don’t worry, I’m more than prepared to weather this. Last year was very good to me. On the plus side, the blog should get better updates, more often. This will bring in more blog revenue to help compensate me during the transition.
What’s It Mean To You?
Quite a bit, actually, if you are a long-time reader or client.
- I plan to write a detailed, informative article most weeks covering some trading-related topic. I’m making a list of ideas, and I’ve also started a forum topic for suggestions.
- Speaking of the forums, I’ll update the forums and actually visit and moderate them.
- I’ll be able to handle more clients for custom programming work, faster
- I’ve done some work to try to reorganize my three years of articles, and make them easier to find. I plan to finish this, and keep this the most well-organized market blog there is.
- Maybe more, stay tuned…
Good luck with automation, Richard. I’ve been trading an automated portfolio with MiniAnalyst for a year and the draw-downs aren’t small but the profits more than compensate.
I’m sure you can find something that will work for you.
I am so happy to see that you are choosing to create balance. The whole reason we all trade is to create a lifestyle that we have control over and enjoy!
Hi Richard, I’m glad your back as I was going through cold turkey last week waiting for your next update.
Thanks, all. I know, Denny, it has been too long! Michael, I figure that—as with most challenging things—either I will succeed or I will learn a lot. So I am happy either way.
Go Richard! I’ve been doing this system development thing for a month now, but I know that with your trading and programming knowledge, you will be able to flip the switch to ON before I am. Which platform are you going to build on?
I’ll do most of my research on Mathematica and multicharts, probably. I’ll be buying a quad-core machine to do backtesting on, at some point. At least that’s the plan right now. First, I need to get through the backlog of work for others that’s built up.
(and finish doing my taxes)!
You are the hardest working trader I know. Good for you for setting priorities. At least you aren’t too broke for sex. Not that you are paying for it…..well….you know what I mean.
Hire someone….your blog and attitude is great, get someone to help organize/assist you. Like taxes, pay someone…..look harshly at your time and money and maximize its use to you.
Great blog, great ‘(dare I say) integrity.
Hi Richard,
I am one of those silent readers which have always been looking forward for your posts.
What I would say is really without any offense but if you are willing to stop trading in exchange for the other stuff you would like to do, it shows (in an implicit subsconscious way) that you are not happy with trading at all, that it really drains your life in some way or another and you rather prefer try do other “classic” stuff instead of trading.
You are implicitly saying that trading is very hard and time consuming and the other stuff is easier on you.
Its interesting because when you think about the way “trading” is sold by marketers (which is partially true) is that you can have the lifestyle you want and that you are able to leverage your time as your account grows, which is true… but if that were sooo true then why arent you at best leveraging your trades so you make more money out of it and drop “other” stuff.?
As I say Im not trying to offend you but making a point here and that is that trading is hard and even when the reward might be bigger than other endeavours one is still deciding to do other stuff instead of trading.
Honestly, been there done that,, I had to step out of daytrading and move to the daily trading chart in order to regain some emotional strength but still I hate to see that in a year time I get to make 100 trades which might not always yield the greatest result (because of lack of data points per year).
So keep on moving and thanks for sharing your thoughts.
Gustav
Gustav, First off I want to make sure you didn’t miss the fact that I’ll still be daytrading… I’ll just be teaching my computers to do the grunt work.
Secondly, it’s no secret that I’ve never been one of those people that lived to trade. I’m more about wine, women, and music. The most important thing to me is quality of life.
I got into trading at a time when I was thinking “wouldn’t it be awesome not to have to go to this job?”
Now I’m thinking “wouldn’t it be awesome if I didn’t have to do anything at all if I didn’t want to?” I want to see if I can move to mechanical trading. I want to make as much of my income as passive as possible. Once we’ve finished expanding eotpro to all of our targeted platforms, that income will be fairly passive, other than enhancements that we’ll make along the way.
But most importantly, none of that work will have to be done at any particular time of day (or any particular day, for that matter). More freedom == happier Richard.
Also, it will be a nice change after 3 years of staring at charts every day. Ask my girlfriend… I like variety! :-)