Monthly Archives: May 2023

sellbuy-o-meter

We are governed by laws, not by laws, but by people. Government is by people.

We all need a sellbuy-o-meter

  • Get the timing just right every time.

  • No more missing the tops and bottoms.

  • Maximize profits right from the start.

  • Be a winner every time.

Hey there, it’s your favorite lawyer, Saul Goodman, and I’ve got some advice for all you traders out there. You need a sellbuy-o-meter, plain and simple. This little gadget tells you when to buy and sell, so you can get the timing just right every time. No more missing the tops and bottoms of the market, my friends. You’ll be maximizing your profits right from the start and be a winner every time.

With this sellbuy-o-meter, who needs stop losses? You’ll be making maximum gains with no losses. Your eyes will thank you, too, because there’ll be no more chart reading voodoo and magic. Put away your lucky charms and get ready to use some 10x or more leverage.

And let me tell you, you’ll sleep like a baby at night knowing you’ll never get a trade wrong. Risk management will only entail replacing the batteries in the meter. (Batteries not included, unfortunately.)

So what are you waiting for? Order your sellbuy-o-meter today and get a free spouse-o-meter! This little beauty tells you what mood your significant other is in – mad, sad, or glad – we’ve got them all covered. Don’t hesitate – order now!

sellbuy-o-meter
sellbuy-o-meter

Sometimes these Clickbait con-tra-prenur social media ads just get under my skin. It feels a little bit like I am being sold a scam by Slippin Jimmy a.k.a. Saul Goodman.

Daytrading: Response to Clickbait Ad

I responded to an clickbait ad on social media with the following.

Daytrading, I would not recommend it for newbies. It’s not for everyone and it’s not something to jump into blindly. With trading in general, start very small, like 1% of your net worth, learn and then build up your position sizes slowly as a reward for success. Other than your ‘play’ money, while learning just buy and hold with the bulk of you invest able $. Daytrading is something to do only when a level of mastery of trading on higher time frames using small money. Trading will cost you money and time until you gain experience, these are the facts, plain and simple. It is part skill, part art, timing and luck. The shorter the time frame, the higher the market noise relative to the signal that you are trying to capture and make trades on, this combined with fees and slippage makes daytrading difficult to begin with (Super quick trades, noise, fees and slippage will eat your $ up.). Is it possible to make money daytrading ,yes, but you will be strapped to a computer to do it, is that something that will be enjoyable in the long run, seriously think about it. Do you really want to sit in front of the computer watching 1,5,15m candles with a finger hovering on the mouse all day. That’s for machines to excel at, really, that’s how the big firms can even make money at all, besides low fees and getting paid for order flow. Being able to code algorithms to trade for you via an API, then you just have to babysit the system to make sure it is working right, less work than sitting in front of charts on PC all day, requires math,coding and fintech type skill however. That might be a path to daytrading for the committed in the long run. If none of the preceding jargon makes sense, time to study up. Knowledge of probabilities and statistics go a long way, I had to relearn quite a bit of this, yeah it sucked a bit, should have paid more attention in those classes. Understand what the Kelly Criterion is, “Fortune’s Formula” the book, covers it. That way you can get a grasp on risk management and don’t blow up your account. A so-so trader with good risk management will make money. A good trader with poor risk management will fail, the account will go up and down, maybe most and more down,boom and bust and potentially fully bust. Works by Ed Thorp, Elder Alexander, Perry Kaufmann, John Murphy are a good foundation to understand trading. Reminiscences of a Stock Operator Book by Edwin Lefèvre Zen, they hand this out at Goldman when you start there. Get to understand the Psychology of trading and money (Morgan Housel), the ups and downs are rough. If you don’t get a grasp on how it impacts you emotionally it will be painful in the gut. Position sizes, watch those, you want to be able to sleep at night, once again we are talking risk management. If you’ve studied the foundations and it still doesn’t make sense keep studying, it might keep sinking in while you practice trade with small money and put a chunk in buy+hold. As you gain experience some of the material you study will start to make more sense, time to reread. If after all this, it still doesn’t work, find a mentor who will help you, someone who has “made it” and is willing to give back to help the next generation. Ideally buddy up with someone from the start, find a club. There is too much hype and charlatanism out there waiting to mislead and take advantage of newbies, pushing a lot of nonsense.

Another Similar Response to an Ad on how to figure out Bull/Bear conditions

You can tell if it is bullish or bearish in a few minutes, why it is bullish or bearish, well that can take much longer to figure out. But, you can learn this yourself or find a mentor. Hang around the right people and you will learn, find a mentor who will help you, someone who has “made it” and is willing to give back to help the next generation. Ideally buddy up with someone from the start, find a club. There is too much hype and charlatanism out there waiting to mislead and take advantage of newbies, pushing a lot of nonsense………But for now, practical wise, an example of figuring out bull/bear bias of an asset. Ichimoku chart is good to use and learn, on it, is the Tenken above the Kijun? Is the price above both of those? Is the price above the cloud? Also is the asset in a golden cross 50 day MA > 200 day MA. Then look at the macro picture, over all market up? Is the sector up? These are Bull signals, the more the better. Better yet, figure out your own method and come up with a checklist. Also, price can always change on a whim, you can’t predict it. Use risk mgmt to mitigate against loss, tomorrow there could be a banking crisis, political crisis, war, flash crash, protect against those as well as you can.

laptop

Scraping a WordPress site for text to use with char-rnn

As with anything else in life, it is possible to change nothing but yourself.
The first step toward making change is simply to change yourself.

In this quick example the gist of scraping a WordPress website using Linux and Lynx will be shown. Wget is great at scraping from the web but, I have found out that it does not always work well with WordPress sites.

Grab some text

Step one of the process is to grab some text to work with. In the example I tried I grabbed all of the text of the posts of this blog by scraping it with wget. I also used the text of the US Constitution to see what the tools would do with it as well. Generally the more text, the better the machine learning code will be at generating something interesting.

Scraping the posts

Using the command line web browser lynx in a script I was able to download the text of the posts on this site. Initially I thought to use wget. But, I remembered that wget will do a good job downloading static sites and sometimes will not do so well with ones like this one that is created in WordPress.

There is probably a way to loop this code in bash, and increment a counter for the pages. But, being that this is a one time thing, I opted for a quick approach instead of thinking too hard on making a loop.

#!/bin/bash
lynx -dump -nolist http://erick.heart-centered-living.org/ > my-posts.txt
lynx -dump -nolist http://erick.heart-centered-living.org/page/2/ >> my-posts.txt
lynx -dump -nolist http://erick.heart-centered-living.org/page/3/ >> my-posts.txt
lynx -dump -nolist http://erick.heart-centered-living.org/page/4/ >> my-posts.txt
lynx -dump -nolist http://erick.heart-centered-living.org/page/5/ >> my-posts.txt
lynx -dump -nolist http://erick.heart-centered-living.org/page/6/ >> my-posts.txt
lynx -dump -nolist http://erick.heart-centered-living.org/page/7/ >> my-posts.txt
lynx -dump -nolist http://erick.heart-centered-living.org/page/8/ >> my-posts.txt
lynx -dump -nolist http://erick.heart-centered-living.org/page/9/ >> my-posts.txt

This code will output a file that contains all of the text from the posts on this site. Up to Fall of 2018 when I ran it.