Welcome! Have a profitable trading day ahead of you!

Wednesday, January 31, 2007

A Beautiful World

Pleasantly surprised to receive a set of beautiful photos from mich. Will be posting it here once in a while, to appreciate each photo in its own rights. It has been the starting of the fifth year with which i first started buying stocks and barely a year where i began to realise the deeper inter-connections and philosophy of the stocks market. People enter the stock market for many reasons, most of which is of coz to try to make a fast buck from it. Sadly the case, not many emerge unscathed from the experience of it all. We feel the exhilaration as well as the anguish and pain. If theres one thing or place where all of our emotions can be found, it would be the stock market. Everyone's experience in it can be wildly different, and it can be exact to the spot, depending on the way u conduct yourself whilst u are in it.

As much as many so-called market experts or analysts have tried to enlighten the masses within, the only way one can truly experience it all is to walk the path. To fall and pick ourselves right back up and carry on the journey. It may be that one could never understand or felt he/she understand the market, and that every additional day is the same as if its your first day in the market. Yes that is just the reason why the market is so attractive to you and me. Perhaps the best thing we can do is approach what we learn from our own experience with an open mind, throw out the rotten stuff, pick ourselves up and proceed on our own journey.

See you on the path!

Monday, January 29, 2007

From Chaos To Cash


Hyflux ~ Olivia power, supp 2.74/2.67 , volume declines on retracement. (vested)





Hongguo ~ Time for another round? supp 1.07/.965






MAE Engg ~ superbull, supp .19 , res .25






CapitaLand ~ Reversal! Firm supp 6.50 , res 7.25






Wildbey ~ Retracement completes, supp 2.28 , res 3.00 (As requested)





Sin-Oh ~ Rising Up! firm supp 2.68 , res 3.08 (as requested)





My purposes in this chapter are: to introduce you to the basic concepts of Chaos in a relatively non scientific manner, and to point out its applicability to profitable trading and investing. When I first started trading, over 40 years ago, the primary approach to understanding the markets was fundamental analysis. Poring over the company s financial statements, examining the crop reports, and gathering as much "expert" opinion as could be found were the standard procedures. They did not produce predictable or profitable results, but they were the only options if one did not have insider information. Through these past four decades, I have seen the personalities of both the stock market and the commodity markets change many times. Actually, they are in a constant state of flux They form an example of "applied chaos." In the 1970s, very few traders would admit that they used technical analysis. In those days, technical analysts were considered "weirdos." There has now been a complete turnaround.Today, most traders are proud to call themselves technical analysts not because they have been successful, but because they are following the crowd.

The newest science on this planet is the Science of Chaos. In this chapter, we will explore the generalized principles derived from this science and apply them to life and particularly to trading on the stock and commodity markets. As pointed out earlier, the Science of Chaos deals primarily with natural phenomena. One of Mandelbrot's pregnant findings was that the fractal dimensions of rivers are similar to those of commodity and stock markets, which is an indication that the markets are more a function of nature than a process designed by the left hemisphere of the human brain. Our view is that economics fundamentals and technical/mechanical analysis do not draw an accurate map of the market's behavior. The Science of Chaos provides three primary principles for the study of markets. Collectively, these principles govern the behavior of energy. As discussed fully in Robert Fritz's book, The Path of Least Resistance, these principles are:

1. Everything in the universe follows the path of least resistance. The markets are like a river.As they move through each trading minute, they take the path of least resistance. That's whatwe all do; you, me, the markets, everything in nature. It is part of the inherent design of nature. While a river is running downstream, the path of least resistance determines its behavior. Gravity is energizing it as it flows around rocks and along curves in the riverbed. You are reading this sentence at this time because this was the path of least resistance when all your time management factors were examined. You are sitting wherever you are because that location was on your path of least resistance. In the market, you will exit from a losing trade when the pain of losing one more dollar becomes stronger than the pain of saying that you were wrong to be in the trade. The path of least resistance will win again.

2. The path of least resistance is determined by an always underlying and usually unseen structure. The behavior of a river, whether it is calmly flowing downhill or creating rapids, depends on the underlying structure of the riverbed. If the riverbed is deep and wide, the river will flow calmly downhill. If the riverbed is shallow and narrow, the riverbed will create rapids. The behavior of the river can be accurately predicted by examining the underlying riverbed. If you could see the bottom, you could accurately predict the behavior of the river at that point. Many traders who keep repeating their trading behavior produce losses. They often feel powerless and frustrated. They attend seminars, read books and underline appropriate passages, study NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming), have private sessions with market psychologists, and then find themselves back in the same old losing rut. If that has happened to you, you simply haven't changed your underlying structure. Permanent changes happen only when you alter the riverbed, the underlying structure. As a trader, you always know when you are trying to go against the path of least resistance. Tension immediately builds up in your body and mind. If you are tense about trading, you are not "floating down the river." Once you learn to determine the underlying structure of a market, you can make peace with the behavior of the market and simply "float like abutterfly, sting like a bee."

3. The always underlying and usually unseen structure can be discovered, and it can be altered. You can change the flow of your life and your trading. To do this easily and permanently, you must work with the underlying structure rather than the behavior produced by that underlying structure. The basic concept derived from these three principles is this: you can learn to first recognize the underlying structure that is driving your trading, and then change it so that you can create what you really want from the markets. Structure determines behavior. Structure determines the way anything behaves; bullet, a hurricane, a cab driver, a spouse, a market. The way the pits are structured determines the behavior of the traders in the pits. The structures that have the most influence on your trading results are composed of desires, beliefs, assumptions, and, most of all, your understanding of the underlying structure of the market and yourself. As Robert Fritz notes, "You can't fool Mother Structure ."

(Excerpts from New Trading Dimension: How To Profit from Chaos)

Friday, January 26, 2007

Gorillas and The Market


Allgreen ~ reversal, supp 1.56 , res 1.75






Federal ~ rangebound, supp .645 , res .72 (as requested)







JEL ~ retracement complete, supp .325







SinoTech ~ breakout confirmed, supp 1.30






Straitsasia ~ support confirmed, .70






A problem that has perplexed zookeepers for many years is why gorillas don't mate incaptivity. It is not because they don't learn about sexual activity; it is because they don't have the proper environment. All animals must have risk to make life worthwhile. If there is no risk, we try to create some because risk and feeling alive are different sides of the same coin. Risk is what makes us alive. Life is not worth living in an environment where there is no risk. In the past, depressions, wars, and conflict gave us a national purpose. We could risk everything for the common good. World War II brought Americans together and created a level of cooperation among us that has not been matched. Our risk was in seeing our enemies, looking them in the eye, and doing something about them. Then the atomic bomb made hand-to-hand combat obsolete. We no longer looked our enemies in the eye, and war became more scientific and less personal.

Even before World War II, most people had the risk of surviving during the Great Depression. Just getting by brought out the best in us. Because we spent most of our time surviving, we were relatively happy while dealing with this risk. Then modernization machinery and the postwar industrial revolution allowed us more leisure time than we were accustomed to having. Today we have to spend that leisure time, and we have lost the opportunity to struggle. Most people fill the gap with TV, but you and I have the opportunity to fill this deep need by being in the market. First, we must understand our need and how the market interfaces with that need. Chaos provides us with unique tools. Chaos is the background from which we mine the material needed to make us feel good about ourselves, to learn about ourselves, and to progress toward realizing our own personal potential. We are forced to make choices, to abide by the results, and to learn from daily opportunities. Risk is a turn-on in life. We are not interested in haphazard risk. We are talking about the risk that produces research, allowing us to understand the markets better and to extract profits from our knowledge and understanding.

Your beliefs about the market create your reality of the market. Beliefs are assumptions about the nature of reality, and because you create what you believe in, you will have many "proofs"that the market operates the way you think it does. For instance, a trader who believes that the market is abundant and generous will act in such a way that he or she experiences abundance; a person who believes that no one can make money from the markets will not receive money from the market. Each trader will have many experiences to prove that his or her personal belief about the market is really a fact about the market. You can change what you believe and thus change your experiences in trading. In this book, we are going to explore in detail how to trade each of the five dimensions. We will then put them all together for a profitable approach to decision making in the markets.

The biggest risk you can ever take is not betting on yourself.

We have explored in this chapter the reason most traders lose, and we have introduced the idea that the new Science of Chaos can improve our market performance, allowing us to be consistent winners in the markets and in life. We also took a quick look at what I refer to as the real Holy Grail. In the next chapter, we will examine the Science of Chaos from a practical everyday trading orientation. We will eliminate most of the complicated math and concentrate on profitable application of the theory. A number of books contain the mathematical underpinning of the Science of Chaos and Complexity, but few have successfully applied the theory to the investing and trading markets. I am proud to have you join me in this pioneering effort. The best is yet to come. Let me again welcome you to the wonderful world of trading and investing, where anything is possible if you understand what is happening in both the market and yourself Permit me to share with you other reasons I love trading the markets. It is the last bastion of free enterprise where you are rewarded generously for doing the easy, appropriate thing.

You win or lose purely on your own decisions.
If at the end of today, I have lost, THERE IS NO ONE TO BLAME. If, on the other hand, I win today, I DON'T HAVE TO SAY THANK YOU TO ANYONE. I am not obligated to anyone or anything. I do not have to be politically correct. The reward is there for the taking; the only question is: Are you conscious enough to take it? My wife once wrote an article describing the market experience as "sliding down the razor blade of life." One young man whom we taught to trade successfully wrote, "It is the most fun I have ever had . . . with my clothes on." Your scan be a life of freedom and fun; the responsibility for that freedom lies solely within you. And now, let's take a closer look at Chaos, which you will find to be another word for FREEDOM.

(Excerpt from New Trading Dimension: How to Profit from Chaos.)

Thursday, January 25, 2007

Einstein and Winning

If you follow the history of science, you will find nothing that predicted the introduction of the theory of relativity. Until the twentieth century, classical science dealt with four basic elements that were considered separate from each other: mass, energy, space, and time. Einstein, who seemingly came out of left field, introduced his theory of relativity, which basically states that space and time are really the same thing. He also pointed out that matter and energy can be converted from one state to the other and therefore are not different. He often stated that there are really only two components of the universe:

1. Nothingness.

2. Condensed nothingness, which we call form or things.

This led to undreamed-of innovations such as atomic energy and changed science's view of the world forever. About the only thing that Einstein left us as a constant was the speed of light. The next revolutionary development in modern science, quantum mechanics, took away even that constant.

After the discovery of subatomic particles, our conceptually logical world went haywire. Subatomic particles do not "behave" as they should, or at least the way we think they should. Our most basic assumptions came into doubt. A number of things apparently traveled much faster than the speed of light. In fact, there was evidence that some things travel so incredibly fast that they could be in two places at once. That was not supposed to happen, according to classical science. In 1964, John Stuart Bell, a brilliant scientist, introduced a notion he called the non locality of causes. This cast doubt on the entire theory of cause and effect. Bell said individual causes could not be isolated. This is quite a serious concept.

Most of us tend to run our lives and our trading with cause-and-effect assumptions such as "Why did I catch that cold?" or, more particularly, "Why did I lose on that trade?" If, as Bell maintains, this is not the way the world really works, we might have our ladder of learning leaning against the wrong building. Thousands of experiments offer positive proof that Bell's theorem is indeed a more accurate description of how things really work. Bell maintains that everything in the universe is connected. You are a part of me and vice versa; whereas Aristotle maintained that everything had its own discrete boundaries and could be located and categorized. The next science-changing innovator was another brilliant American scientist, David Bohm. Bohm was caught up in the terrible McCarthy hearings in the 1950s and chose not to live in a country that would allow such travesty of human justice. He moved to England and was a research professor at the University of London. Bohm went even further than Bell, maintaining that not only is everything in the Universe connected but everything is actually the same thing. Everything comes from the same shimmering quantum soup. In the market, we are looking at a very non-Aristotelian world in which there are no discrete categories, no actual nouns, and no real long-lasting stability. In this new view of the world, everything is constantly changing and those very beautiful smooth shapes of Euclidean geometry are themselves aberrations and not the norm. The materials that scientists through the centuries had ignored as "random" variations are actually the cornerstones of reality. As mentioned before, the two areas where classical science makes little headway are: turbulence and living systems. From the shoulders of relativity and quantum mechanics came a new approach whose goals were to study turbulence, living systems, and nonlinear behavior. The techniques were impossible to deal with mathematically before the advent of very powerful computers, but the questions had been asked centuries before.

Before Columbus landed in America, the fifteenth-century mathematicians were asking questions about Chaos. Their theoretical questions concerned the various levels of Dimensionality. For example, a point has no dimensions, a line has one dimension, a plane has two, and a solid has three. They understood that even a crooked line has only one dimension as long as it does not cross itself and create a plane. Suppose then that a very crooked line is placed on top of a rectangle (plane) and moves over the surface of that plane but never crosses itself. It is so crooked that it covers up 50 percent of the plane as it moves off to the other side. The mathematicians' question was, quite simply: What is the dimension of that line? It can't be one dimension because it covers half the plane (which is two dimensions), and it can't be two dimensions because it doesn't cover the entire plane. (Stay with me here because this concept has changed our world and will change it even more so in the future.) In addition to this concept of higher dimensions, two other scientific developments have altered our world view. One is the concept of cybernetics, which came from a Greek word meaning steersman--the man who holds a boat's rudder, and who can, with a small amount of force, move a much larger force (the boat). Cybernetics does not follow Newton's law of motion, which says that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. A small action on the rudder produces much more than an equal reaction. Cybernetics came out of information theory, which was developed during World War II in an effort to get more communication through the existing cable that crossed the Atlantic Ocean between America and England. Basically, information theory points out that there are at least five parts to any communication: (1) a source, (2) an encoder, (3) a message, (4) a decoder,and (5) a receiver. The important point here is that the decoder comes from and is attached to the receiver whereas the encoder comes from and is attached to the source. Any qualitative difference between the source and the receiver will always be distortion between the intended message and the received message.

It is not an accident that we misunderstand each other; it is a miracle that we ever do. Our personal decoder is the home of all our prejudices and preferences. That is where our categories (belief systems) and desires live and work. Our decoder is the filter that distorts incoming messages that do not fit into our existing beliefs (categories). Another scientific breakthrough since the 1950s was the discovery of the hologram. The insight gained here is that information can be stored in ways yet to be discovered, and unbelievably large amounts of information can be stored in extremely tiny spaces. Before you were born, your entire body including the size of your muscles, the number of hairs on your head, the shape and size of your teeth, the color of your eyes, the number of cells in your brain, how you will age, and, barring accidents, when you will die were all stored in your RNA/DNA in a space so small it cannot be seen with the naked eye. If you take a holographic 8 x 10-inch film and cut off one corner a slice smaller than l/l6 of an inch, it will still contain the same details as the 8 x 10-inch picture. Information theory, cybernetics, and holographic theory do not support the Aristotelian view of the world. When we say "Our world is changing," what we really mean is that we are getting a different view of it. And this is what the approach in this book is about: getting a different, more accurate view of what the market actually is and how it operates. We do this by examining five dimensions of the market. These dimensions could be compared to looking through five different windows, each of which adds to the total picture. These dimensions are:

1. The fractal (phase space).

2. Momentum (phase energy).

3. Acceleration/Deceleration (phase force).

4. Zone (phase energy/force combination).

5. Balance line (strange attractors).

Each of these different dimensions gives unique insight into the underlying structure of the market and its behavior. The recent advent of extremely powerful computers has now permitted us to get more specific insights into this world view that we now label as the Science of Chaos. If you knew everything there is to know about the Science of Chaos and you decided to give it a name that would confuse the most people, you probably would choose the name Chaos. Chaos is not craziness and it does not mean randomness; rather, it is an insight into a much higher form of order. (We will examine this new science, and how it can improve our trading, in the next chapter.)

Next Post:
WHY GORILLAS DON'T PROCREATE IN A CONTROLLED ARTIFICIAL SETTING AND WHAT THAT HAS TO DO WITH THE MARKET.

Monday, January 22, 2007

Living Life in the Fast Lane

Now if u look carefully, u can see sis ateo's husband's camera and sis ateo next to him.......... kidding! hehe

Now THATS one hugh Harley!

Welcome to the Hotel California...... err... Vegas..

In God We Trust.. In Liberty We Stand!!

Golden Eiffel.

Thursday, January 18, 2007

Swimming on Our Own



Ausgroup ~ stored energy supp .535 , breakout .575





Banjoo ~ Superman, breakout lvl .14






HL Asia ~ bullish engulf with volume, supp 1.93 , res 2.06






Hongguo ~ ascending star, breakout lvl .965 (vested)






SPH ~ consolidation, supp 4.40 , res 4.56 (vested)






Wilmar ~ flag, supp 2.50 , res 3.00




Our own personal ocean of logic started approximately 2,500 years ago, when a philosophical war was going on between two opposite camps represented on one side by Aristotle and on the other by Heraclitus. Aristotle basically seduced the world by saying that if you don't know something, you should go to people who know more than you do, and ask them. That advice sounds quite reasonable, and it has been accepted by much of the earth's population for two and a half millennia. Acceptance does not necessarily make it true. Remember that the civilized world functioned adequately for hundreds of years while believing that the world was flat. Businesses and mapmakers flourished. But then Galileo and a handful of others looked through a telescope and saw round planets in orbits in the heavens.

They knew that the flat-earth paradigm was wrong, but it took close to 200 years and much suffering on their part before the reality of a round earth was accepted. The Aristotelian/Heraclitian dispute was much more insidious than the conflict involved in understanding the heavens. Because Aristotle won this intellectual war, your life is as it is today. Had Heraclitus won back then, we would have a completely different civilization. Aristotle influences almost every thought you have and each of your analyses of the markets. Why do you read the Wall Street Journalor listen to FNN or call your broker or the trading floor? Because you think THEY know more about the market than you do; after all, "They are in the business."

Most likely, they don't!
I do not know any broker who would be a broker if he or she could trade profitably. The designation of broker probably means that you are the brokee. Of the newsletter writers and market commentators you know, how many have made money in the markets? I have never met an economics professor who made a significant amount of money trading.

Aristotle believed in a reductionist approach: if you break anything down into its smallest primary parts, you can understand how that mechanism works. Thus began our search for the smallest part of the universe, which was thought to be the atom. However, with more sophisticated tools, we developed an entirely new science based on subatomic particles, and this subatomic research has totally changed our basic ideas about the universe. It is also interesting to note that all the subatomic particles that have been discovered were named long before they were discovered.

The old questions return: Do we believe what we see? Or, do we see what we believe? Aristotelian philosophy has influenced our legal system (precedence), our educational system (the teacher-student relationship: the student is dumb and the teacher is smart), medicine (double-blind studies), and science (reliability and validity). Following this path of reductionism has produced the concepts of cause and effect, "laws" of motion, "conservation" of energy, and entropy. The latest findings of modern science have proven all of these assumptions and concepts false. Aristotle's philosophical counterpart, Heraclitus, felt that the universe was in constant flux, and stability and homeostasis were not the norm.

Probably his most famous saying was: "You can't step in the same river twice," meaning that when you put your foot in and take it out and immediately place it back into the water, not only has the river changed, your foot has changed also. Heraclitus's most famous student, Clayitus, went even further. He said: "You can't step in the same river once": you and the river are changing during the process of putting your foot in. Science in the twentieth century will be remembered for three very basic innovations that completely changed our way of viewing the world:

1. Relativity.

2. Quantum mechanics.

3. The Science of Chaos, which includes information theory, cybernetics, holography,nonlinear dynamics, and fractal geometry.

Monday, January 15, 2007

Speculation and Life

Here is the key. Trading is a game that you set up and agree to. You only have two choices about how you will get to where you are going. The first is an unconscious method; your mind will create your reality from your pictures of the past. And you know that it is most ready and willing to do that. In fact, that is one of the main functions of your brain's left hemisphere. But this part of your brain can only duplicate earlier situations--IT CANNOT CREATE. In fact, your mind cannot accept the notion of creation or the notion of disappearance. Your only other option is to become conscious of your notions. A notion is another word for noticing. When you notice something (or get a notion), you give it your attention. When you begin to notice how you are noticing, you fall into AWARENESS. When you start becoming aware, you will be out there on the razor's edge of choice and always willing to make one. You will become aware that what you see on your brain screen is much more important than what you see on the monitor screen. The market can become your own tree to sit under until you reach enlightenment. Enlightenment in this case is seeing the market for what it really is. So let's repeat:

The market is nothing but agreement on price and disagreement on value. No trade is made until there is disagreement on value and agreement on price.

No market moves until there is new incoming information (Chaos). Most traders disagree with the purpose and function of the market and thus lose. Picking tops and bottoms is disagreeing with the market. And because we are all stubborn to one degree or another, we make following the trend of the market, which should be the easiest thing in the world, one of the most difficult tasks in speculating. Most traders feel that what they need is some new "genius" who can create a trading system or indicator that will make sense of the "craziness" of the market. A muddle of conflicting indicators united by the force of greed is the worst possible instrument for trading the market. Irrevocable commitment to this kind of indicator is financial suicide. We do not need a new indicator or strategy. We need a new experience--a new feeling of what it is to come from the right hemisphere and intuitively understand the market. One must take care not to confuse the image (chart) with fact, which would be like climbing up the sign post instead of following the road, or eating the menu rather than the meal.


Cosco ~ sailing away, supp 2.49






Ho Bee ~ breaking out mode, supp 1.37 , res 1.50





Enviro-hub ~ breakout! supp .70/.65






Sino-env ~ consolidation mode, supp 2.49 , breakout lvl 2.80




Sunshine ~ breakout! supp .375/.33


Kepcorp ~ reversal, supp 16.7 , res 18.10

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

From Losing to Winning

This book is basically for traders who can't win for losing and for winning traders who want to improve their efficiency at winning. It is not for those individuals who have no interest in working through their power trips in relation to themselves, other people, and the market. If you are not willing to allow sweeping changes to occur in your life as a result of this material, you should not attempt the techniques described here in. Every trader is responsible for his or her own behavior. Part of maturation is the ability to draw the "honesty cards" about oneself to the forefront of awareness, in order to decide on a course of action. The consequences of immature judgment or of toying with trading can include psychosis, aggravation of neuroses, acceleration of disease processes, and suicide. On the other side, an awakening into certain states of consciousness can bestow gifts of such value that they are beyond price--and I do not mean only monetary profits.

The markets themselves are the most accurate and brilliant psychological mirrors in the world today. Trading can be the most naked and efficient psychotherapeutic growth program in which one could engage, if approached with an appropriate attitude. Here is a statement that many traders will hoot at: Making profits is not the most important reason for trading. Read well--I did not say unimportant, I said not the most important. To us, the primary reason for trading is the most important reason for doing anything: TO FIND OUT WHO YOU ARE.

That perspective makes all the difference. The intention of this book is not to please. Its purpose is to tilt you from the limited possibilities for experience that you now have. The material is offered to those who are ready to begin an awakening process--those who know at the deepest level of their awareness that they are ready for a change. Your desire to change your unfulfilling life and unsuccessful trading patterns into a state of consciousness is vital to your success. In this chapter, I want to deliver a truly believable message from a true believer in your trading and investing success. As you know, there are basically two kinds of traders: the successful ones, and everyone else. Michelangelo once pointed out that there are two ways of creating a statue. The first way is to create a statue from a piece of material.

The second and more masterful way is to see that the statue is already inside the material, and sculpting is merely a process of getting rid of the material that does not belong there. Another equally famous philosopher pointed out that there are two ways of becoming enlightened: (1) by building on your good qualities and (2) by eliminating what doesn't belong. Robert Frost wrote,"Two roads diverged in a wood,and I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference." In this book, we are going to take a journey on a road less traveled by eliminating much that isn't true about trading. We are going to unravel some tangled ideas and win for a change. I want to share with you our truth about trading. Let me hasten to add that I am not much enamored by the concept of TRUTH. Actually I have very little interest in The TRUTH. I am much more interested in lies that work than I am in The TRUTH. The reason is: Truth (with a capital T) doesn't last. In fact, it seems to change with each generation. Truth once was that the world was flat. All of the intelligent people in the world agreed on that "fact." Mapmakers made a good living by believing that Truth.

Truth once was that Zeus ruled the world from a mountaintop in Greece. Truth once was that bleeding was a cure for many ills; check with our first President about that Truth. It cost him his life. And let me state here that some of the Truth you know about the market today is costing you your financial life. Let's look at the Truth of the current situation. If you are attempting to categorize this material, you would most likely classify it as an unpopular trading guide because it contradicts what I call the popular guides to trading success. Any popular guide to trading will tell you exactly what you want to hear. That's why the guides are popular. They have titles like BigBucks NoRisk! They are worth their selling price because the publisher always promises:

An easy to understand, proven system for turning little or no initial investment capital into a fortune, in virtually no time whatsoever.

Wouldn't it be great if we really could make a fortune like this without working? Well, we can't. These things could never be right. Be real; if we are raking in all that money, who is going to supply the losers? Who is going to lose all that money to us? And if it really works that well, why doesn't the publisher of BigBucks NoRisk take its publishing budget and put the money to work in the markets? There, "with little effort and absolutely no risk," it can make vastly more money than by publishing a competitive book that has skinny profit margins. The only sure thing about popular guides is that you are going to lose your money following their advice. If the popular guides tell you what you want to hear (so they can sell you books) and we tell you what is actually true about trading, then this must be an unpopular guide to trading.

The Truth is that a limited number of talented, rational people who know what they are doing can beat the market consistently. This is not just a game, it is life. And one of the primary purposes of the business of speculation is to make money. These are turbulent times. Past generations were not as turbulent. Remember when real estate was a fortune-building safe haven? Bonds were safe as the government. Savings and Loans were safe depositories, and heaven knows there could never be a problem with Insurance companies. If you chose to hold cash, it could never make you poor. As a hardworking trader/investor, you probably know about seminars, tutorials, books, systems, hotlines, and soon, that are supposedly designed to give you an edge in the markets. Maybe you have even attended a few, and perhaps you feel guilty about the ones you did not attend.

Tell me, have you ever known anyone and I mean anyone who has gone to a weekend seminar as a losing trader and, from something learned there, has become a consistent winner? I have spoken to over 25,000 traders, and I have yet to find the first one. Nor did I~o from losing to winning by attending workshops. Does that mean that they are useless or not worth the money? No, not at all. Workshops are great places for getting ideas but are simply no good at changing behavior, which is the topic of our discussion here. If you change your beliefs, you will change your results. Let me ask you two questions. (1) If I gave you $10,000 and a ticket to Las Vegas and asked you to go there and lose that $10,000, do you honestly feel that you could do that for me? (2) What if I gave you the same money and ticket and asked you to go there and double my money?

These are quite serious questions. If you really understand why you answered both of them the way you did, you are very close to understanding why you are not a more consistent winner. Let me throw a different concept at you. Whichever way you answered the questions and whatever you did when you got to Las Vegas, you would be successful. In answer to the first question, you would be a successful loser because you did exactly what you expected to do. You were successful at losing. You were a winner at losing, and there is no difference in being a winner at losing and a winner at winning. You get whatever you set up for yourself. Trading is a self-discovery process and a very personal experience. To make money in the markets consistently, you must know what your job is. Let me tell you the most important words you will ever hear about speculation and trading:

Speculators get paid for buying what nobody wants when nobody wants it and selling what everybody wants when everybody wants it.

While we are at it, here are a few things that speculators never get paid for: fundamental analysis, technical analysis, overbought/oversold analysis, Elliott Wave analysis, Gann analysis, cycle analysis, pattern analysis, oscillators, relative strength, econometric models, seasonal analysis, profile analysis, value analysis, sunspots, star positions, and a dozen other vogues, fads, and fantasies, except to the extent that they happen, by luck or design, to cause their proponent to demand the supply or supply the demand.

(Excerpts from New Trading Dimension: How to Profit from Chaos)

Thursday, January 04, 2007

Relax your Goals



HL Asia ~ breakout! supp 1.69/.66 , res 1.82





Hiap Hoe ~ Superbull, supp .12 , professional trade on retracement back near .12





SPH ~ breakout! res 4.52 , supp 4.38 (vested)





Despite what all the "do it better" gurus are saying, we diminish the present any time we set goals. In the market, things sometimes work out the way we want them to, but sometimes they don't. We don't enjoy our preparation for trading the market if we are worried about losing. We don't enjoy the miracle of our children's growth if we worry about how they will turn out.We don't enjoy maturing if we are worrying about what malady will take us from this life. We lose the freedom to soar that comes from enjoying the vast riches that life and the market are offering us in the here and now.

In trading, if you set your heart on a certain trade result, you enter into a state of rigidity
. On the other hand, if you set your heart free, you enter a state of flow. The question then is: How can you trade without setting goals? The answer is: Set as many goals as you want. Then do the necessary preparation, and work to bring that goal to fruition. When you are satisfied that you have done the most appropriate trade for that moment, LET GO OF THE OUTCOME.

Years ago, I traded with a very bright trader who was decades past the normal retirement age. After observing my trading for a while, he said, "Bill, if you were a farmer, you would go broke on your first crop." When I asked him why, he replied, "If you were a farmer and farmed like you trade, you would plant corn and then come back everyday and dig up the seeds to see how they were doing. Once you decide and put ona trade, let it grow, mature, and ripen. Don't keep digging up the seeds." He was exactly right. I learned a great deal from that mature trader. One of the most important lessons I can teach you is how to monitor your trading minute-by-minute in the market. It is really quite simple. When you look at the current chart and you know your present positions, ask yourself this simple question:

Do I care which way the market moves?

If you care, you are addicted. If you honestly don't care, you are trading well and you want what the market wants.
Any time you care, you are wanting what you want-not what the market wants. The market is neutral. It doesn't know or even care what you want. As traders, we are simply not capable of knowing what the market is going to do, nor can we see the grand possibilities that the market will offer us tomorrow. Sometimes, losses can be turned into great assets if we learn from our experience. In that situation, we gain either profits or learning, and both can be wins.

Tomorrow's market is not just unknown, it is unknowable.
Traders are simply not capable of knowing what the market is going to do or what grand possibilities the market will offer tomorrow. Probably the most inappropriate question we can ask at the end of a trading day is: "Did we make money today?" From our point of view, that is basically irrelevant. The only appropriate question at the end of a trading day is: "Were we in tune with the market?" There will be days when you will be in tune with the market and lose money, but if you stay in tune, the market will bless you greatly.

There is no much thing as a bad trader.There is only a well trained or a badly trained trader.