Monthly Archives: May 2021

AU-USD Prices to 3/2021

Opinions of Trading

There is too much hype an charlatanism out there waiting to mislead and take advantage of newbies, pushing a lot of nonsense. This is a quick post, stream of conciousness with some of my personal opinions.
Myself, I use several trading strategies, from mean reversion and gap buying algos running on a 5m tick tuned using genetic differential evolution, mid range day to week algos, trend and mean reverting, to manual trades that take weeks and to long term holds in a custom index fund that get added to over time. Personally for manual trading/investing if I had to choose one technique out of them all, Ichimoku would be the one. Daily/Weekly for most assets, gold and silver, Weekly/Monthly.

Trading and Investing in General

 It’s not for everyone and it’s not something to jump into blindly. 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 $. There is a lot more to it than charts and excitement when TSLA and DOGE climb. It’s more about psychology (See Elder Alexander and Morgan Housel)and risk management than anything. Forget about get rich quick and fast money, let it ride out for the long term. Day trading is not the place to start either. It is much to0 confusing for a beginner as to read signal (trend) in the noise of random price movements at low timeframes. Myself, I leave the low time frame stuff to algos, and mostly mean reversion works better than trend following with high noise at low time frames. To do algos, you need to know/learn code, well I might add, not just wing it. It’s not for everyone, depends on your skills and motivation to learn, math, physics, CS, engineering helps here. Briefly, just look at the edge cases, buy and hold and super quick trades. Super quick trades, noise, fees and slippage will eat your $ up. Plus, 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. Buy and hold works and is super low maintenance, but in my opinion it can be easily improved on with a few small considerations. Use some basic moving averages, long ones, 1yr, 2, what ever makes sense on the major high and low cycles, then pick a multiple of this value not the time of the average, curve fit it to past data that is reasonable, DCA (Dollar Cost Average) in below the long base average, DCA out above the multiplier, like 5X the 730 day avg for BTC, for example. This helps get some more bang out of a plain buy and hold. The timing depends on how fast the asset moves. BTC, shorter cycles from peaks at about 3-5 years apart, think 2013,2018,2021 a 2 year MA works well and for the multiplier, look at the lows and highs and fit to them. Stocks, using an index like SPY, think of the last low, the real low, on March 9,2009, moves slower than BTC. But averages can be fit to the lows for a good DCA in. Gold, slower too. Look at an asset, see how long it took to 10x on a buy and hold hypothetically, that gives you a sense of the speed of assent. BTC does it in less than a year at times. Silver, just because, I know it off the top of my head was around $3 around 2003 and in 2011 it 10x’s that, a 1964 quarter was almost $0.25 in silver weight then, now it’s worth $4+ in Silver, so that’s it’s rate of change. Went on a bit of a tangent, hope this is helpful for someone.