Wow I could not have said it better myself. Listen to the wise man he knows exactly what he is talking about.
Gotta admit. I gave up on tape reading a while back after super montage, I got shaken out by blackboxes and late prints too. After reading your post Im excited again. Would you mind sharing how you read the tape? If you don't want to do it here, please reply to the pm I send. Without watching you I get a feeling that you have a handle on it. Which reminds me...I heard that you work with traders on a floor in Rockland is this true? What about the Q's on AMEX? Again, I'll PM you. Thanks in advance.. By the way, you do great stuff on here. Please stick around. Thanks. LB
I think that decimals instead of fractions has led to more crotch groping. Just my opinion. ROTFLMAO!!! You're the best PL!
Doesn't really matter how fast or slow it moves.I want the price to always come back to me,when I'm wrong!I hate swans.
It is so funny. All the people here are talking about books they read and didn't understand. Listen quietly. The tape machine is there. So are the traders. they are sitting in chairs (expensive and free to sit in). The tape is slow. I was reminded of this last night at a Seal concert. here is what is not in books. the guys in the chairs talk to people on the sidelines (they are called brokers with telephones.) A grid is on one wall and it has a narrow raised deck under it. The trades tell their brokers what rows they want on the grid. As the day goes by the price and volumns are filled in and then later when the grid is full it is all erased and then it is filled up again. The wall is called "the board". The traders tell brokers what to put on the board. The board lists the "time" (in a column) and the price and volume.(in the cell of the grid) for the stock's row. I'm watching the open. I see that the P/V is static chalking after chalking. I also watch the prettiest gal in town pick up the correct chalk color. She has a length of tape in her hand and is skipping everything that doesn't matter to the guys sitting in the chairs. The chalk is a lump and it has many sides that she moves around so that the "chalking" is very clean and clear in values. she has a rhythm that involves bending lower and lower to go down the rows. So you read the baord and know you know how much time you have until it is the last moment to "take a trade". EVERYONE DOES ENTRIES AND EXITS. BROKERS KEEP "CARDS" THAT MATCH "FLOOR CARDS". Lots are traded. the tape reader is a chick. traders who are "tape readers" read the board. Today this has a Computer Science name:RDBMS. All the talk on ET is about book reading and has no content about THE TAPE IS READ TO MAKE MONEY. Taking the full offer of the market is done by the same means as the original "tape reading". The one pager on PVT was dictated in 15 minutes. Later someone ran a sample of 400,000 events and there was no need to change the PVT one pager. Why was it exactly correct and perfectly normalized for any Universe stock? How fast a chick can chalk a board is just like a tall blonde in a very tight form fitting dress at a Seal concert (standing all night RIGHT in front of me) Her husband is a sexy airlines pilot. Trading during tape reading of stocks was like Darvas' trading (the box trade). In my parlance, you watch during DU; when you see FRV, you have an hour and 1/2 to enter. later when you see (use your notes) volume can't keep up with "peaking" volume you have an hour and 1/2 to make the exit. Traders did X-over trading. They made an exit and then found something else on the board to enter. So you can see what is was like for me. I looked 14 1/2 in those days (check my picture in the two column cut in the NY Times.) I was carded @ 42 yo in bars in NYC. Tape reading was a neat and really fun thing. It was competitive and other people always wanted the same action. Thats how you learned to come into a brokerage through a back door and sit in the "research room" and have your trained broker sneak around to get your trades cause he could read the board the way you wanted it read. So that cam be done by phone calls if you have a "hot list". In ET a hot list was traded here as calls for over a year. The cummulative anual ROI was also posted. There is a thread on how times changed. I commented there. As life goes on, you get to be a noticable trader (POA's on many accounts and the accounts are not small). In the tape reading era, others wanted to follow your trades. Latter in the era where infomation was distributed, regulators (SEC) wanted to see cheaters. ET today has detractors. They see "unbelievable things" or they want to "get into the room with you to see you". It is just like the SEC looking at your records of your accounts. They see the coattailing too. as in the beginning, I always looked like "I knew something". So the SEC started to give me citations. I was different. What I could do was "tape read". Any one can if they build their mind to be able to "tape read". Covel can't, xpurt can't, ocean 5 can't, hypostomus can't . The SEC see's none of you can. I can and those who coattail me look like they can to the SEC. Go get the public record. If the SEC got my pic out of the NY Times; it showed I had NO expreience either. I was just a socialite. So the dumb question of this thread has an answer. Tape reading is alive and well and maybe someone will write a book about it that actually tells a few things. How tape reading was done and how it works today. Here is the punchline. get this week's Bloomberg/businessweek and go to page 66 and see Jim Walsh's article on Manny Backus. It is entitled How To blah blah. This is electronic tape reading and it duplicates my old hershey's 30 minute trading. Or the way I call the open on the commodities. Or the way PVT trading works on the one pager Blowinsky cannot code up or what Trader666 did to cheat and get "Tomorrow's Newspaper Today" to be statisitically insignificant. Read Manny's profile; see if you can understand that smart people look like "insider traders" to regulators and ET types I mentioned. "Its tape reading, stupid" (as Clinton would have said. So I am thinking about connecting PVT to Vet's families where vets with PTSD who can't keep jobs get to have an account that is traded for them by B/BW cronies so they have all the money they need and can get professional help the VA and DOD is fucking up (See suicide rate of vets). Anyone want to help vets by trading their accounts by coattailing me (you can be rich, too)?
Very entertaining history. Until you started fictionalizing. As to can't, Sunday or Monday Professor Doaks will prepare for me a sanitized view of a one second tape reader code. Impossible to reverse engineer, so no harm showing it to you. This code is as close as he can get to your ideal of "no stops, never a loss." Pity it only works to scalp for seconds.
Spydertrader can`t,bundlemaker can`t,tikitrader can`t and the list goes on and on................................