Sunday / November 10, 2019 / 4:00 p.m. PST I recently wrote up a protocol somewhere, but I don't remember its location. However, I also scribbled a hard copy so I could memorize the list while taking care of chores outside the house, which I will refer to instead. I need to modify it in light of the above so that it fits how I am now conceptualizing my system... QUESTIONS THAT MUST BE ANSWERED BEFORE YOU ENTER ANY GIVEN POSITION: Where is price located within...? All price range envelopes/channels—be they simple moving average, adaptive price range, or Donchian. What is the slope of...? Each directional bias line—be it short-term, intermediate, longer-term, or overall. That vast majority of candlesticks are forming on which side of...? Each directional bias line—be it short-term, intermediate, longer-term, or overall. How much of a distance is there between price and the...? Longer-term and overall directional bias lines. (This is closely related to the first question.)
Friday I saw all kinds of film trucks while I was walking home, so I thought maybe some studio was going be incorporating the Veteran's Day parade while filming/shooting a movie the next day. I therefore went down there the next morning to see what was what, but all the trucks were gone, so I guess they did all their filming BEFORE the parade started. Anyway, as long as I was there I popped into the library to get out of the heat for a spell and ended up checking out Money Master the Game by Tony Robbins, curious to see what information he might have in it. Mostly it was stuff I already know and a whole lot more of nothing/filler. After the first 40 pages I started skimming so as not to waste so much of my time. After having still seen nothing I considered of much value by page 200 I skipped to page 442 (the end of Chapter 5) where I saw that first new thing that might be worth looking into, something called private placement life insurance. Chapter 6 sent me back to page 390, which listed Ray Dalio's All Seasons Portfolio: 30% stocks 15% 7- to 10-year treasuries 40% 20- to 25-year treasuries 7.5% gold 7.5% commodities I also saw something interesting where supposedly Tony Robbins and Elliot Weissbluth were going to work together on a project to democratize opportunities for the average individual investor, but based on the research I just did, it appears they never followed through. Finally, the book did mention Stronghold Financial as an independent wealth management firm that might be worth a look. Aside from that, probably all of the useful information found within the main body of this 600+ page book could have been easily and thoroughly covered in just 100 pages or less.
Sunday / November 10, 2019 / 10:30 p.m. PST I am currently short EURJPY and NZDJPY. The fist pair has been falling since February 2018 and the second since August 2017, so I'm hoping they will continue this pattern and that they have each initiated a new leg to the south—that EURJPY will not rise above the level where I entered the position without first falling to at least 118.00 for about a 230-pip gain, and that NZDJPY will not rise above the level where I entered the position without first falling to at least 68.00, about a 110-pip gain. But, time will tell.
I though about taking profit off the table when NZDJPY hit 69.08, but elected not to do so...too bad.
Monday / November 11, 2019 / 7:15 a.m. PST The market is pretty much dead on this Veteran's Day here in the USA (Remembrance Day in Canada) so I am reduced to scalping for a few pips here and there, wherever I am able to find them.
Risk-to-Reward Ratios I already wrote my thoughts on this topic, but I can neither find the text here, nor on my own laptop, so here it is in another form... Correction...drops down to only 30% if I set my stop loss... Tuesday / November 12, 2019 / 3:10 a.m. PST
Friday, November 15, 2019 I attended a free Online Trading Academy (OTA) class this morning at the Long Beach Marriott. Everything they had to say rang true based on my experience, but I did not sign up for the $200 three-day course they were promoting. (There were six other people there besides me, and ALL of them DID sign up.) As an experienced Forex trader, OTA didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know. (The other six attendees did not seem to know all that much about trading.) In fact, from my perspective, the only thing OTA might be able to offer me is how to figure out the location of key levels where the big financial institutions have stacks of orders waiting to be filled. (This is with respect to equities, since I already have my own method for accomplishing this task when it comes to Forex.) However, I question whether such information is really worth $200 to me for two reasons. First, I’m not trading stocks in a live account right now. Second, yesterday marked my initial testing of a strategy for buying stocks on one day to be sold at a profit the next to avoid FINRA's pattern day trading rule, and I did not know whether it might work or not. (I checked when I got home, and on its first day of testing, the system worked spectacularly well, which will totally eliminate my interest in OTA if it continues to do so on a consistent basis.) Still, I wanted to get a better idea of what I might find out about OTA’s Trade Zones (the only thing they offer in which I might be interested) if I were to attend their three-day course, so I went online to see what I might discover…and it wasn’t good. I ended up on a Better Business Bureau web page where I read that one person who attended one of their courses never got the mini tablet they were promised, and another said they never received the flash drive they were told they would get. (Everyone in the class I attended received both—no problem.) However, there were additional problems shared about the $200 three-day course, including the following: "At the end of the course, an educational counselor took me into his office and explained that OTA has different packages they offer to students and if I wanted to buy one asset class along with their Core Strategy, I would have limited access to OTA’s website. He also explained if I wanted to assure my success with OTA, I should purchase their Mastermind package and that would give me access to the Mastermind grid levels, which are levels given to Mastermind students to help them earn money while they learn to trade to give them an edge in the markets." "They tell you the 3 day orientation course is money back guarantee but they don't tell you that you have to request it at the end of day one. The problem is they try to up-sell you a longer course of up to $55,000 at the end of day two, so you can't make a decision if this is right for you or not until the refund no longer applies." First of all, I am not interested in up-selling, nor am I interested in piggybacking on the live trades of so-called OTA professionals, something else that was mentioned in the complaints. Most importantly, I don’t want ACCESS to grid levels, I want to know how to calculate the grid levels on my own—INDEPENDENTLY. Besides, I don’t use stuff I don’t understand, so if they are not going to teach me how to compute the levels myself, I’m not interested. Oh...and one more thing...someone wrote: "OTA's Core Strategy has no good results and they are misleading people by hiding the truth about its performance," so at the very least, they would have to provide me with a year's worth of third-party verified performance records before I would be willing to give them a single penny.