I’ll be traveling later in the week, and am quite busy trying to tie up loose ends here before my trip. So, posting may be light until next monday. Today, there was just one small trade before I quit for the day. The markets seem extremely sluggish, and dinosaur trader confirms that things don’t look any rosier in the stocks arena. What’s going on, here?

This is more of a standard blog design. Actually this is the least I’ve changed a template, ever. In fact, I changed so little that I even left the original template author’s link in the footer. That’s going to make upgrading my wordpress installation when new versions come out MUCH easier. There are a few things I’m going to muck with, but this is basically it.

Since my last design accommodated large inline images much better than this one, the layout is a little off on some ancient pages. I’ve gone through and fixed up all the posts from 2008, at least, and will fix others as I run across them.

I have re-enabled comments, but for now at least I’ve got full moderation on. So, don’t expect your comments to appear instantaneously, if you choose to comment. I’ve set wordpress to autoreject the problematic commentors, so I hopefully won’t have to spend any time on them going forward. We’ll see if that works for me, or if I would rather just turn comments off again. I’m just way too busy to spend time on “you suck” or “your hobbies make you stupid” comments.

[edit: I've updated the MtM pictorial history, though I'm probably the only one that likes to stroll down site-design memory lane.]

This post was contributed by a guest author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of Richard or MovetheMarkets.com

It’s been great to contribute to Move the Markets over the last year or so. I appreciate Richard allowing me to contribute. Without that, nobody ever would have read anything I had to say. Richard’s built-in readership base was just what I needed. I hope that I have brought something good to his site during the time I have been here.

I also appreciate everyone who has ever read my stuff, commented or emailed me. I’ve made lots of friends and gotten gems of advice and wisdom that have helped me immensely.

As Richard said, I am interested in finding a new blog home. I haven’t decided what I will do, whether join someone else’s blog or make my own. I do know that there are so many people out there with exceptional content and actual trading skills–I don’t think I’d be able to generate any readership base on my own. So, contact me at prospectus@movethemarkets.com if you need a washed-up hack like me to contribute to your blog, though I may end up deciding to do nothing and just fade away.

In any case, trade well, manage your risk and enjoy your life!

–Prospectus

This post was contributed by a guest author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of Richard or MovetheMarkets.com

A number of things about the blog have been bugging me lately. When I do something for free, it’s not allowed to bug me. So, changes. Get ready!

The biggest annoyances are:

• About 1/2 of the non-spam comments are “you suck” comments. Not even “here’s why you suck,” but just your simple “u r a faggot” comments or “u can’t trade worth shit” comments. At least tell me why I’m such a bad trader, in your opinion. Damn. Then when I delete those comments I get 5 more complaining about the deletion. But when I let them through, it just leads to more name-calling.
• Content posted by the other authors does not reflect the opinions of Richard. But none of the complainers seem to understand this, or at least they expect me to censor what gets posted. And about 1/3rd of the complainers don’t realize there are other authors besides me on the blog.
• We let an author join, who started making posts insulting traders who read the blog. I finally felt I had to delete the posts (and I HATE deleting posts) and drop the author.
• I have a personal blog on the side, but I rarely remember to post to it or even look at it.
• Boredom

So… I took some time off from blogging. And, clearly not everyone thinks I suck, because I got a lot of emails asking for me to come back. I decided it would be best to come back with some changes to make things easier for me. Here they are:

• No more comments. This will cut the time I spend moderating comments by 100%. That feels about right.
• More non-trading posts. I have a lot of other interests, and it will help me with my boredom to mix it up a little. I’ll be merging the posts from my personal blog into this one, and deleting it. I don’t think many people linked to that blog, anyway.
• Goodbye, other authors. This was the toughest decision, but it addresses some annoyances and fits with the previous two items. MWF has already spun off (NSFW) the trading fraternity (NSFW). Prospectus is looking for a new home. If you are interested, mail him at prospectus@movethemarkets.com.

Every time I make lots of changes, there is plenty of praise and plenty of complaints. Feel free to mail me your thoughts, if your ego demands it. Keep in mind, though, that I do this for free (actually at a cost, since I pay for webhosting). That means I do it on my own terms, whether you like it or not. If you are willing to back up your suggestions with cold hard cash, by all means drop me a line.

This post was contributed by a guest author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of Richard or MovetheMarkets.com

I have decided to quit trading.

I have given this my best shot, but as Richard said earlier, “Trading is simple. YOU are complicated”. And I am indeed complicated.

I have gone from being up 25% in my prop account after two months to now down -80% after 6 months. There have been a variety of circumstances and mistakes, but I am responsible for my trading results. Period. I blame no one but myself. This is a hole I cannot trade my way out of. I have instructed my prop firm to trade the remains of my account for me. Better that they make 50% on my tiny amount of money than letting me lose it all. There’s something to be said for trying again and again when you fail, but there’s also something to be said for knowing when to pack it in.

Many have tried to help me over the years, and I am grateful. There has been more than enough good advice and help given to me to allow any less complicated person to be successful. Unfortunately, I was unwilling or unable to really follow it.

I realize that I have been pursuing my daytrading “dream” with all manner of emotional baggage, and for the wrong reasons. This has led me to disaster. I wanted an escape from my day job, and I wanted trading success to bail me out of these and other problems in my life. These feelings have pushed me to forced desperation trading so that I could escape from them. Instead of a bottle or a needle, I turned to charts and a mouse. An expensive “cure” to say the least.

So is daytrading impossible? Far from it! There are very many who are doing it right and making a good living from it. I am just not one of them. Maybe the answer for me would be automated system trading where emotion and discretion is left completely out of the equation. That’s one thing I have to consider. I was applying for a new job in the finance realm, which would force me to quit watching the markets and trading during the day, but it’s looking like that is not going to pan out as they have offered it to someone else. I may get a shot as a second choice should they turn it down, but I don’t think it’s likely. Either way, I’ve hit my personal stop loss point as a trader and I’m pulling the plug.

I don’t exactly know where I go from here. My every waking moment has been trading, markets and everything in between for the last few years. Podcasts, websites, books, talk-radio… Suddenly, my world seems to have gone silent. I’m a very driven person, and I don’t take much down time. Every spare second was spent doing something related to my goals. Now my driving purpose has faded away, and my life seems empty. That purpose and clear direction is destroyed. I plan on focusing now on those close to me who need that energy and attention that I’ve been spending elsewhere. Maybe this is the answer that I’ve been seeking all along, trying to find it in a few R’s when it was right in the walls of my own home.

I feel like I don’t have anything to contribute here anymore, so I don’t see myself posting much. This is a site for professional and developing traders, not washed-out ones. Should that change, I’ll be back. But if not, I wanted to thank everyone out there again for help and support over the last couple of years. I wish you success in trading and in your life.

This post was contributed by a guest author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of Richard or MovetheMarkets.com

I’ve made a wordpress plugin so that all posts with youtube videos will have a link directly to youtube at the bottom of the post. The reason is, my iPhone won’t display the embedded videos, but it does have a youtube application that will activate if you click on a youtube link. So, now iPhone users can watch the videos on the site from their phones, and everyone else has an extra link to ignore. If you are too lazy to look at a previous post to see what I mean, here is some footage of a kick-ass version of Red House from the Isle of Wight. Strange that he’s wearing the exact same outfit I like to trade in.

Watch this post's video on Youtube

This post sure has a lot of verbiage for a so-called ‘pictorial’ history! Oh well… too late to change it now. I thought it’d be fun to capture pictures of the site’s past themes, while I can still find examples. This might well only be interesting to me (like people with photos of their children, I guess). Deal with it!

June 2006

Here we have the first blog theme I did. Like all my themes, I started out with a theme I found on the net, and modified it.

I remember completely changing the way the theme was put together, in terms of the CSS, because so many people had trouble rendering the three columns properly. Finally, I gave up on CSS, and actually went to a table-based layout. *shiver* Going to tables meant that the left sidebar comes first in the html file, which supposedly makes it harder for search engines to tell what your page is about (because they give more importance to the “top” of the file).

November 2006

By November, the situation here at Move the Markets had changed quite a bit. I was getting regular submissions from Zoomie, and someone named ExEngineer was coming on board (wonder what happened to him?). I was also getting a lot of comments making it obvious that people were unaware that more than one person wrote on the site. So, I wanted a layout that:

• Made it more obvious that there were multiple authors.
• Better displayed more posts per day.
• Looked different… I was tired of the old look.

Again, starting from an existing multi-author theme, I created this:

I think it’s funny to this day that the graphic at the top (which I created out of flames and shattered glass and a few effects in Corel Painter) has nothing whatsoever to do with finance or stocks. No one ever commented on that, though.

So, the 2-column format allowed me to go back to CSS and still have the page content “first” in the html. After the first couple posts (displayed in wordpress’ horrid summary form), I presented only post titles. This way, many more posts could be easily browsed from the home page. In some ways, this should have been the perfect site layout… but I just never really enjoyed it.

So…

January 2007

By January, I was tired of all the bright orange colors and fancy web-2.0-ish icons beside everything. I set out to design a much more austere theme. Some of you may recall that my first attempt was in muted lavender/purple tones. It was unusual, but I kind-of like unusual. However, so many people complained that I changed it to stronger reds+grays the next day.

I think I got what I wanted, at the time. It was plain, simple, and to the point. This was also when I introduced tagging to posts, and the resultant tag cloud and “related posts” features.

August 2007

While the previous design was very successful, it was time for a change.

• It always bothered me that it rendered slightly differently on IE vs Firefox.
• Sometimes I wrote long articles that looked ridiculous in that little fixed-width column.
• I had been looking at that design for 7 months.
• I got a request to accomodate Firefox-style text scaling, and I would rather undergo serious dental work than try to adjust the CSS for a multi-column blog.

So, this time I thought… What can I do that I don’t see any other bloggers doing?… widgets and web-2.0 tie-ins are all the rage… sometimes I go to a blog and there’s so much stuff there that my eyes have trouble locking on to the actual content. That’s not an exaggeration.

I drew a line in the sand… 1 column! All content, no spectacle! Then, the question became: how to somehow still retain what is useful in all that sidebar stuff? The answer is not yet clear… it will be interesting to see what evolves out of this, and how far that will go until the next re-design. :-)

Update: April 2008

Having gotten tired of the 1-column layout, and having jettisoned the guest authors on the blog, I thought it might be fun to go to a more standard setup. There is a lot to be said about having a “normal” blog theme. How long will it last? Time will tell…

This is the theme I’ve modified the least prior to going live. I changed so little that I even left the link to the original theme’s author in the footer.

I’m going to be changing the site layout today. I’ll start in a few minutes, actually. I’ve already changed over I Am Richard. The new layout is very minimal. I’m taking all these multi-sidebar multi-widget blogs as a contrary indicator. :-)

I’m sure some of you will like it and some of you won’t. That’s just the way it goes. Take comfort in the fact that I’ll probably get bored in another 6 months and change the layout again.

As with every time I change the layout, some things will be broken for a few hours while I check things out. If you have any suggestions, please feel free to comment (once commenting works, anyway). Don’t feel bad if I don’t make every change you request, though…

First off, I want to brag that we came in #3 in a list called: Top 100 Day Trading Blogs. MtM snipers have been dispatched to take out the owners of the top two blogs.

Secondly, everyone should congratulate Eyal, because Eyal is going pro (although he’s been trading like a pro for a long time now).

Third, I’ve updated the Blogs I Read Page, to eliminate some blogs that have gone on hiatus, and add some new favorites. Most recently: I’ve added OONR7’s blog, because I really like the trading style, and am looking at incorporating some of those setups into my trading. And, while I normally avoid new blogs, I’ve made an exception for Narrow Edge Trader, Stewie’s blog.

We posted some charts from Stewie on MtM a while back when he didn’t have a website. I guess he liked the experience, because shortly after that he started his own blog. Now, I am easily threatened… it’s stressful maintaining that #3 spot! So, I dispatched MtM agents to break his thumbs and make it look like an accident. Problem solved, right? Unfortunately, the agents thought I said “thumb” rather than “thumbs” (I really should enunciate better when ordering a crippling… lesson learned). So he can still blog with one hand, and he’s doing a great job at it, too. Why, on the post I just linked to, he already has anonymous comments implying that he’s fabricating his performance by only posting trades after the fact. Awesome.

When managing a large computer network, there’s a simple procedure for finding out what an unknown cable does: unplug it and see who complains. It’s not high-tech, but it works.

Well, I have stopped using my 30-Day High/Low scans. I’ve replaced them with a real-time trade ideas scan which pretty much finds me the same stocks if they break out on volume. So, rather than hoping a few stocks break out, I just let TI tell me about every suitable stock that breaks out. I set up TI to tell me about 3-day highs and lows, and that’s usually plenty of time to get ready to play a 30-day breakout, if one is going to happen.

Instead of asking people if they still wanted me to post my daily list, I just stopped doing it a while back. No one has complained, so I am going to take that page down at my next convenience.

Don’t worry about the weekly list… I can’t imagine going without it. I use it every day, filtered for above average volume.

I probably won’t be trading Thursday or Friday. Thursday, I have been selected for jury duty. Assuming I don’t end up on an actual jury, I suppose it’s possible I could trade Friday. But, it’s OPEX, and I have moved my normal Thursday long lunch to Friday, so…

I haven’t posted in a while, I know. I have at least one article in the works, which I hope to finish soon.

Lack of blogging doesn’t mean lack of trades, though. I have been trading more than ever, lately (except for a few days last week when I was out of town). I made 6 trades today alone (all winners). But, that presents a couple problems:

• I can’t write detailed descriptions of so many trades… it would take too long.
• Even if I did write them, it would be boring to read, as these have all been very quick, in-and-out trades. The charts aren’t very meaningful aside from context.
• Because of the incredible risk:reward for these scalps, the statistics look ridiculous… the R curve just goes straight up. I’m not sure they are meaningful anymore. I have gotten behind, putting my trades into stocktickr, but I will probably catch up with that this weekend.

Admittedly, these are mostly good problems to have, but I’m going to have to think about how to address them. I could move to a “trade-of-the-day” format, and just outline the trade I had the most to say about, maybe. If you have suggestions, speak up.

Things have been going very smoothly lately. Of course, that could all change tomorrow. But, right now I am mentally counting down to the point where I’ll have covered my projected expenses for the rest of the year. Then, I’m considering taking the remainder of the year off. Sounds good to me! Unlike many people out there, I don’t have any kind of drive to be in the markets all the time… I think that’s what keeps me from overtrading.

One nice thing about having multiple bloggers in one place, is that when you don’t have time to write anything, the blog still stays active. Thanks, everyone!

I’ve not much felt like blogging this week, since my social calendar has been pretty full. I’ve got yet another party to go to this weekend, in fact. It’s been fun, but kind of exhausting. And, there really hasn’t been much to blog about anyway. The markets have been ugly, so I haven’t made many trades.

I did make two trades today, which were both winners. That may be a good sign that things are returning to normal. We’ll see about that, Monday, I guess!

Even when I don’t blog, you can still catch me talking most days on wallstreak and jaiku for semi-realtime info on what I’m up to. When possible, I call the trades I’m considering beforehand, so others have a chance to chime in, or join in the profit. (of course, if you don’t trade exactly like me, then obviously your results may vary). Today I called my trade in FDO, and a play on AKAM that I didn’t take because I was already done for the day, for instance.

I’ve adjusted the nightly scan for stocks that may make new 30-Day highs or 30-Day lows (which you can see on my scans page). The list was just too damn big every night. So, last night I thought for a minute about which entries I tend to disqualify right off. I thought of two criteria, which I adjusted:

• Upped the avg volume to 450k from 250k. I was usually automatically passing on stocks doing 200k on the day they show up in the scan, anyway.
• Demanded that the stock’s total range over the last 20 days to be at least 6%. I may raise this further in the future. The idea of the scan is to find stocks taking a rest during a good move. Too many scan candidates had been on the right side of their moving averages, but still essentially moving sideways.

Last night, that cut the scan down to about 2/3rds its normal size. A nice improvement. Tonight the list looks better as well, and I’ve posted the new version. It will be the version I use going forward, as well.

Jaiku Updates

I’m not promising to do this in any timely fashion, but most days I plan to make an entry on my jaiku stream pointing out which of my scan candidates I plan to focus on that day. I’ve been making the entry usually before the markets. Other traders on jaiku are also posting their candidates. It’s really great… check it out if you haven’t!

Web2.0 users are a fickle, unfaithful bunch… Initially, I was a little annoyed at the sudden interest in jaiku. After all, I love twitter and am patiently waiting for stability and features to come along. But, having played with jaiku for a couple days, I’m considering switching.

The two services are extremely similar, but jaiku has a few more features. The “killer” feature is commenting. Unlike twitter, you can comment on jaiku entries. Twitter-ers already do their best to emulate this via “@user: blah” formatted updates. But, that is far from perfect.

Other things I initially didn’t like about jaiku:

• it encourages you to put all your feeds in your update stream. I thought this would get old awfully fast. After all, I use a news aggregator to read my rss feeds… why would I want to use jaiku as a second-rate newsreader? But, it turns out that when I add someone as a friend, I can select which of their feeds I want to follow, if any. Brilliant!
• no mobile or IM interface like twitter has. I bet these are coming, as there is an API. But, if not, I can simply use twitter for my mobile updates, and these updates will be sent to my jaiku page via RSS. And people can still comment on it. Cool!
• no way to manage comments, that I could see. This seems to have been addressed now, as I have the option to delete comments on my updates. problem solved (except no way to ban an obnoxious user, but I bet that will eventually show up, too).
• no auto-update like twitter does. Or should I say did… Twitter went from 2 minute updates to 10, to not even mentioning it anymore… So, in both cases I’m hitting refresh a lot.

So, I am considering making the switch, even though there are good chances that twitter feels the pressure and rolls out these same features in short order. What to do?? Well, starting tomorrow I’ll be making all my web-based updates on jaiku, to see how it works out. Feel free to join me! Hey, a lot of you ended up liking twitter, no? Give jaiku a try… I am at http://richardtodd.jaiku.com/.