We are all familiar with it. Some of the more paranoid among us believe the chart is manipulated to put us to sleep or cause us to abandon the screen just before a big move. "I just need to close my eyes for a minute." "I wonder has stocksandbondage.com updated for today?" "Has the stripper economist Frederica Hayek posted a naughty chart to her blog yet?" You may laugh or you may weep, but to my trading therapy clients it is a serious issue. And for me, too. In the present environment of low volatility, my clients are getting behind on their payments, and even asking me to prove that I am actually improving their trading. So I decided, "I will get control of the boredom issue by hard-quantifying it, and making a virtue of a vice by measuring the chart manipulation that induces boredom." The attached shows my boredom metric (times Pacific) from today's open to a bit after the FOMC non-announcement. The top pane is price, the Hydra we dare not look at directly but only reflected in the mirror of indicators. The bottom pane is boredom on a scale of zero to one. Zero is full heightened awareness signalling readiness to fight or flee. One is stone cold ennui signalling a somnambulent stuporous lack of awareness and volition. At the open, boredom ordinarily is zero, but not so today, it being FOMC announcement day. Thereafter boredom fluctuated with the vain hope of a significant manipulative pre-announcement move, but ultimately wound up around .75. The total predictability of the non-announcement never fully woke market participacts, with a .1 boredom value recognizable by the recognition, "I think it's time to break for a piss." As more dramatic examples occur in coming days, I will post them for your amusement.
Yes - Trading is boring. Very boring. Focus on your prior jobs that were not boring. What made them not so boring? The stress? For me, that was the case. Focus on how much better boredom can be than the stress you can have at a job that you may be working at for 12 hours per day just to "keep your job". Write down in your trade plan what you hated about prior jobs, and how fortunate you are to be able to trade for a living. Then forget about the boredom. That boredom is a good thing, right?
Well, back in the day, what made work not so boring was jiving with the young secretaries, that was before computers when the secretaries were the computers. And trying to get to work and function, barely unstoned. And fucking in the copulatious warehouse spaces after lunch. Ah, the 60's and 70's. My new 60's and 70's are not nearly so much fun. Hence the boredumb. But my boredom metric is predictive, which helps keep me at the computer during slow times despite the insistent demands of my old bladder. So, yes, boredom is good.
Indeed volume is funny. Like when price moves on invisible volume and volume moves on invisible price change.
I've been cutting back on coffee and took a new trading analysis method on day two of it's maiden voyage this morning... I was falling asleep watching the NQ just after 7am and thinking "narrow range day, what a waste, Fedspeak day on top of that, the strategy probably won't work today". I was on the right side of the market too, all I had to do was set a stop and doze off but nooo.. I had my supercomfy mattress calling my name and was too far into sleep to think, I closed it out.. That probably obviates the number one reason I never slept on the job, there weren't comfy places to lay down!
I can relate. My goal is to invent a new system every day. Being an elderly alcoholic, I have mastered the art of dozing while trading. When overhelmed by ennui, I shift from my trading desk chair to a comfy recliner nearby from which my 23 inch screen is still nominally readable. Obnoxious audible entry and exit alerts for my systems will rouse me from damp (no longer wet) dreams of nubile sixty-year-olds. Back in the day, we never let the lack of beds at work inhibit our libidos. Packing crates and dusty old shipping quilts did just fine.
My reasons for posting are purely eleemosynary. ET has pegged my dual dumb/dull-ometers for several months running now. It is low time for some high intellectual content. Hence my sharing of the boredom metric. You can see from this little chart snippet of the hour before the close that market participants were bored by down and excited by up.