Hi Tony and DaqTrader. Suffering succotash, I'm sipping saki in the Osaka Hilton, a sensuous geisha by my side. How, you ask? Friday morning 9:27am (USA ET) After another sleep-deprived night resulting in the elimination of a proud USA team, I was slumped in front of my monitor drinking a much needed cup of coffee and performing my premarket visualization routines (censored). The phone rang. me "ehhh?" caller "Ullo! Umbanga dubgaa oopalom walla walla Subman." The caller, an as yet unidentified male, was speaking in Wolof, an ethnic Senegalese dialect. My Wolof was a little rusty, but I have a good command of key phrases in 27 tongues which I immediately put to use. me "Kurva anyad. English please." caller "My name is Diatta Amara from the Senegalese Ministry of Sports." The Nigerian scam? Was he going to offer me $30 million for the use of my bank account. Better hear him out. caller "I've heard about your talents. Now that America is out of the World Cup, I want you to help the Senegalese team." It's no secret that I'm probably one of the best football tacticians alive today. After a brilliant playing career in Europe which was prematurely cut short by an injury (caught in bed with the manager's daughter), my coaching services were a sought after commodity in the international arena. 9:30am (USA ET) The market had opened. Like a submissive male in a bordello, PSFT was getting whipped about. Not yet time to enter. me "How can I help you from here?" caller "We have a car waiting for you. There's enough time for you to make it to Osaka for tomorrow's game against Turkey. Just grab your passport, we have everything else you need. Don't worry, you'll be well compensated." I peeked out and could just discern the red, yellow and green colors of the Senegalese flag fluttering on the Yugo. me "Could you be more specific vis-a-vis my payment?" He mentioned a low 3-figure sum (IRS ). Within seconds, I had found the Turkish Soccer Federation's Istanbul number and was dialling it on the second phone. me "One minute, Diatta, I have another call." The Turks weren't as generous, offering a free doner kebab at a local Turkish restaurant if I stayed home. Oh well, I always wanted to study the origins of candlestick charting. 9:33am (USA ET) me "Diatta, I'm coming!"
the "white trash" model shoulder-top...that is too funny! I rolled around for a good ten minutes laughing at this one. While I was rolling around, I must have hit my function speed key to buy 'cause my software apparently purchased 9k shares of MSFT. I hope it gaps up on Monday. Good stuff M. S! -Pound
LOL, LOL, LOL, LOL How do you come up with this stuff. I must have read this post 10 times. Still laughing 3 days later. Speaking Wolof, hahahahahhaha. Less than an hour to kick off ...
The Momoyama restaurant in the Isezaki-cho area of Yokohama caters to the European palate, and was therefore the best compromise we could come up with. I had no choice but to extend my stay in Japan owing to unrelenting pressure from FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) who even provided me with a state-of-the-art workstation including 8 Sony 22" flats, not to mention a beautiful bi-lingual personal assistant to help with the paperwork and those awkward pre-market gap-ups. Watching the spoos and my P&L tank when I'm long 2,000 PSFT takes on a whole new dimension when viewed with 8 22" monitors. Not that I had much time for trading. I had given countless pre- and post-match interviews to the international press and my coaching services were in demand at local sports clubs. Cultural sensitivities were put to the test yesterday when I unwittingly called the wife of Mali referee, Mahamane Toure, a "high-class ho" in their native Bambaran. An international incident was only averted after I had reassured them that these were the only words I knew in Bambaran and had thought that it meant "good evening". That was about the only problem I had encountered at the dozens of social gatherings I was forced to attend - a lifesaver was the When someone asks "what you do for a living" what do you answer! thread which I had the foresight to print out and which assured smooth conversational sailing after that first inevitable question. Tomorrow there remains the minor detail of Brazil versus Germany and then it's home. "Are you ready to order, sir?" I couldn't keep my gaze off my date sitting opposite. The waiter at the Momoyama was displaying great cool and patience - throw in some risk management and he'd probably make a good trader. "Come back in a few minutes." He skulked off for the third time. What else could I say? She was rubbing my inner thigh with her bare stockinged foot beneath the table and I wasn't about to interrupt this moment with the mundane ordering of food. "So, what else do you know in Bambaran?" I didn't bother replying.
In keeping with the lighthearted nature of this thread, starting tomorrow I shall be posting my trades at the end of the day. From my perspective, I would like to see the effect of such an obligation on my actual trading. From your perspective, it will serve as pure entertainment. I have no intention of emulating Seanote, Hitman or any of the other logmeisters out there - I may allude superficially to the odd trade or two, but you'll have to look elsewhere for particulars like reasons for entry, exit etc. I reserve the right to cease posting these trades whenever I wish and without explanation. In short, I promise nothing and intend on delivering. As if things weren't bad enough, I still have a technical problem - my daily log as a jpg is about 600 KB and after converting to gif reduces to about 200 KB. The maximum attachment to an ET post is 100 KB. Is there any way of slicing a gif file into smaller pieces? (In MS Paint, I cannot select and save the appropriate half because the file scrolls both horizontally to the right and vertically down, making such "selection" impossible.)
I am pleased with my performance today and feel that overall it was beneficial having someone looking over my shoulder, as it were. Apart from the issue of cutting down a gif file into "attachable" proportions which still remains unresolved (see previous post), I am also looking into ways of streamlining the creation of the gif file. After a strenuous day of trading, I am not about to spend an hour each time cutting, pasting and combining a bunch of different screen captures. The creation of a text file is just as cumbersome and lacks the verisimilitude of a gif. I therefore appeal to anyone with experience in this area to come forward. Lurkers not wishing exposure may PM me at their own risk.
The latest in a series of Island ads featuring attractive female traders appears in the August issue of Active Trader Magazine. Just what exactly is Island trying to prove? http://www.island.com/corp/campaign/print2large.asp
go to snagit.com download snagit, self install, within minute you can capture the screen or portion of screen to a gif file. snagit is the best and the easiest software to use.
Thank you Tony Oz for your suggestion of HyperSnap - to date it's the best screen capture utility I've tried and brings me closer to my goal. I'll also try SnagIt, thanks nkhoi. While the level of knowledge impartment on this board is at a 52-week high, the decision to reveal my trading plan in the following post should be viewed as an attempt to fade this move. Perhaps now you will finally understand how I worked myself up from nothing to a state of extreme poverty (Groucho Marx).