Nick1984

Firstly love the new avatar Reaver. Predator is an awesome movie! On to money. Money for me is a tool. A means to an end. Only reason I see for money is to get me what i want. I want to work to live, not live to work. Theres more to life in my oppinion than chasing another dollar. I don't want to be another working stiff who starts work in their early twenties and stops in the mid 60's only to start to enjoy life when I'm too old to really do it. Think of it, with 4 weeks annual leave per year over 40 years of working you only get an aggregate of just over 3 years vacation in your working career. Sound like fun to you....HELL NO! The world is an amazing place with so much to do and explore, why should you be stuck exploring it on youtube stuck in your little cubicle procrastinating while doing an average of 2 hours real work per day making someone else rich? The thing that attracted me to trading is the flexibility of work/life that you have being your own boss. Before I decided to sit down and learn trading I asked myself some questions as to what would make me happy in life. Well honestly for me to be happy, I want to have a fully paid off house that my family and myself can live in. To be able to take care of my mum once she retires. To be able to have the freedom to sit down on a beach drinking coffee all day, play sports and talk to friends. Explore the world. I estimated that provided I have a house fully paid off for myself, I would only need about 100k a year to have all the freedom I need to be happy. Hell if you divert most of your trading profits into managed funds that pay regular income distributions you don't need that much to have 100k of passive cash flow a year! I would continue trading simply because I love the game of trading, not the money associated with it. Trading is a means to an end in terms of money. Life is waaaaay to short to screw around with a shirt and collar around you neck for 40 years. That being said, I'd still work for a prop firm for a number of years though so I can a) boost my own cash reserves b) learn c) have the life experience.

One other note on market internals is that while I believe they can give off their own signals and should 100% be used as confirmations they shouldn't become a crutch for you to trade off. After all the TICK etc is just a visual confirmation of things that your intuition and research should be telling you. Many markets you may trade won't have all these internal tools to use so don't ever let them become a crutch. In my studies at university Economics was a major for me so I am really into studying many of the fundamental changes to an economy which can in turn effects markets. Some traders expect on a Fed day the classic "1,2,3" move but they don't always understand the reason the markets move in any particular direction on the basis of key economic news. If you can interpret these types of news accurately then that helps you get in front of a large majority of traders so I would definately reocmmend you study books which talk about basic supply and demand macro economics.

Hey Timokrates welcome to the forum. First question I'd ask you is what itme frame are you looking to trade? You say that you're not fully comfortable waiting for a trade setup to present itself at a pivot etc so maybe you are more of a scalper? Anyhow what I have found through a bit of bad luck on my part on a search for a decent charting program was to not even use things such as TICK, P/C Ratios, TRIN etc. Those market internal tools I think should help to confirm your decision whether to go long or short. Why don't you just paper trade for a long time and get used to the markets. See how they move and start to identify patterns that occur over and over. Maybe you notice that on Mondays after a strong sell off last friday into the close for the first 15-20 minutes prices gap down and keep going down only to turn around quickly for a gap fill etc... Maybe you feel comfortable using fib retracements from swing high to swing low in the intraday cycle or even if you want to scalp a few points by retracing the most recent up or down trend. I started out with stocks myself and am still learning how to find my feet with futures. I saw the videos on this site and I thought to myself "you bloody ripper" and I could just copy Soul's setups and it would be all sweet. After paper trading for a few weeks I realised that I trade differently from Soul. I trade off pivots myself but also off visual support and resistance levels (see Walters "flip trade" thread its fantastic). I've been keeping a journal of my trades and seeing where I went wrong. Use the videos here to learn how to use various techniques but don't addopt them as 100% carbon copies because you'll forever be thinking "what would Soul do?" when you're trading and thats highly self destructive. In terms of actually building your repitoire of set ups just start simple and define maybe 3 setups that you can trade. Start to take these setups on paper when they occur and then keep records on how successful win/loss they are and also how proiftable they are. There's absolutely nothing wrong with having a set up that wins only 40% of the time if it's payoff is many times your risk tollerances. If you can strictly take a loss like a man and suck it up, then your winners will more than offset your losses on those types of trades. As time goes by you'll start to fine tune your setups and you may add in several more setups to cope with different conditions such as trending/momentum conditions, or cyclical conditions etc... You need to structure your system just as if you were building a lego castle. One set up at a time brick by brick. Come back to the forum on a regular basis and see how other people cope with trading. There's a wealth of information here to absorb but be selective what you take in! Not everything will apply to your trading style. Good luck and best of trading.

While we're still on the whole bodybuilding/drugs thing who's your prediction for Mr. O this year? I reckon Jay will win again but Ronnie is in amazing shape at the moment. Top 3 will be (in no particular order) Victor Martinez, Ronnie, Jay. Heath will win one day when his older. But I'd personally like to see someone like Dexter Jackson or Dareem Charles win cause they have the most aesthetic look like back in the good old days of the 60's and 70's unlike some of the freaks out now.

Physical training can kill you if you have an anurism trying to lift too hard. You can get a hernia which can kill you if left untreaded. I can't remember what the medical term is when you blow your intestines out of your poop chute but that can happen as well if you try really really damn hard to lift something you shouldnt lift. I do agree though it's not steroids that kill them its other drugs like insulin or other types of drugs that effect metabolism/body temperature/blood pressure to help increase oxygen intake, carbohydrate metabolism etc...

What is classified as a sub prime loan in the USA? Here in Aus the easiest loans we call "low doc" loans which basically mean minimal information is required to get a loan through fast. Basic imcome statement and asset valuation is all thats required. Loan doesnt need to be insured either. We haven't had the same problem as in the US with sub prime loans but a lot of these low doc lenders borrow US funds at your lower interest rates to pass on these low interest rate loans cheaper than our banks. They've taken a beating recently with the sub prime problem in the USA.

When did you actually enter into the trade if you don't mind me asking? On the candle where the arrow shows the entry it looks like the low is actually higher than the previous candle, and there was a higher high as well. The candle did finish down on the open though and in the middle of the range, just wondering what your thinking was on that one?

In terms of global stability the growth in the BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China) which has been pushing double digits if not close to it for a long time now should act as a counter to any US troubles. To me it seems simply since a lot of Western nations have been suffering from the effects of debt driven growth unchecked, the world is not shifting its resources to these new areas. Like Dogpile just said, should a high beta sector have a sudden boom due to a technological advancement or some other factor then that could stall any downtrend in the US markets. With horrible lending practices to the public sector in the residential mortgage market many consumers should be feeling the squeeze on the hip pocket as mortgage repayments become to burdensome. This in turn will effect spending power to pump more money into the consumer goods and services sectors which in turn hurts those company's bottom lines. Until the market shakes out all the bad debt in the US I think that in the medium turn the US will have more volatility but I won't speculate on the direction of that volatility. Money will continue to shift to those other markets and a housing price downturn in the short to medium turn in many Western countries (you can see that about to start happening here in Australia already) will have increased volatily even should markets turn around and start heading back up. The swings will be more frequent and more wild.

Awesome posts brown Didn't know diddly about candles before. I really enjoy these posts!

Intense exerce is required if your going to train your body to grow and develop an aesthtic musculature (Mike Mentzer is a genius) but you have to remember not to go too hard on yourself. World Strongman (2nd strongest human alive) Jesse Marunde just passed away recently from a heart attack while he was training at the young age of 27.

Its going to be hard to answer this without referring to the recent Fed interest rate cut. On candles alone there looks like theres plenty of buying pressure but that was sparked off by the aforementioned intervention. After 3 weeks of steady falls people have been buying in at bargain basement prices and the Fed announcement boosted things along nicely. On the candles alone I would say that we are going higher again. The strong volume on that last candle is telling. Even though it's red I would see it as being red simply on behalf of a late sell off by profit taking (I haven't checked the intraday charts so I'm assuming) which made the candle close lower. Edit: I just noticed that its a monthly chart! Silly me. Anyhow that doesn't really change my oppinion. I think we'll be going back up again.

I see that as going up. The Doji is closing up in the top half of the candle on significantly higher volume than anything for over a week prior. Tin pointed out nicely as well that the original longer term up trand still seems to hold. On a fundamental reason, the US Fed lowering interest rates will help divert cash back into stocks and out of fixed interest which should help push higher.

Market Profile has been one of the hardest things that I've been trying to learn. Initially I thought it would be as easy as treating them as pivot points...how wrong I was! The information generated by a developing market profile is priceless if you're good enough to spot what type of profile is developping. An automated bot can't do that in real time effectively. The only way a bot can analyse MP is to have someone plug in some paramaters which identify a market as either being balanced, trending, range extension etc.. and therefore will always be making its decisions in retrospect to an already developed profile! I have no idea how I'm going to begin to speed up recognition of MP development, I guess just keep on staring at it!

That video posted up a while ago on the forums about the crash of Long Term Capital was great. Putting 100% faith in a rigid system is a recipe for disaster. There are countless philosophies across a wide range of disciplines which derride rigidity as the downfall of any person or system. Look at Bruce Lee's philosophies on martial arts! Like torero said, in a bull market you don't need much skill to make money, discretionary or automatic. For a while now these automatic systems have enjoyed the run up and the programmers have been taking the praise. However with the recent volatility, and the market falling like a knife (just try picking the bottom on this one!) these systems aren't coping. They are too rigid. All automatic systems are based upon the thoughs of humans. Their advantage is that when it comes time to act the system will act without hesitation. However what a distretionary trader has an advantage over is in adaptation. A discretionary trader would have made a killing over the last 24-25 days where as these large funds are posting losses.

A mate of mine had an uncle who was as healthy as an ox. He was a big meat eater and at the age of 45 developed colon cancer. He lasted a year. Being big and beefy looks great but its better to get that way slowly and cleanly instead of putting things in your body that shouldn't be there! My health is more important than anything. Yea we synthesise around 2g of creatine a day from the foods we eat. Mainly meats. If your adding in 10g a day then you really are flooding your body with it. If you decide to take creatine then stick with monohydrate because it's been around longer and more tests have been done on it. Make sure you drink plenty of water cause creatine will make you bloat if you don't. Some people have reported increased acne with creatine but that varies I guess.

Fill me in on this a bit. Gotta blame my ignorance on geography here hehe. Who is CFC and why are they in peril?

I reckon I can sum that up with a quote by Napoleon Bonaparte. Take time to deliberate, but when the time for action has arrived, stop thinking and go in.

I tried it once and yea I definately lifted more on it and had increased muscle volume but I stopped and haven't touched it for a year. I don't think it's necessary at all. After having a good calorie intake with plenty of carbs i had all the energy I needed to lift heavy. Looking back creatine seemed more like a placebo. Also I don't like the idea of putting synthetic stuff into my body. I try to limit the amount of artificial stuff that goes into my body. Also ketosis diets I'm wary of cause all that meat that you eat can't be good for your colon. Colon cancer is a worry with all that meat slowly rotting inside my bowels.

Hey Notouch do you remember these? A couple of songs that take me back to when I started going to underage dance events and when I first started getting into chicks after the cooty phase finished!

Going back to Mr. Cavallera this is a great song by Soulfly and even though the lyrics are not extensive the message embedded within is very poignant at many stages in one's life. Enjoy: SOULFLY - BACK TO THE PRIMITIVE

Epic is an awesome song. I remember being at a roller rink when I first heard it. The clip itself caused a few controversies with that flapping fish hehe. Mr. Bungle was a little strange for me when I first heard it but there are some awesome songs. That one is pretty cool, always makes me imagine a crazy evil clown for some reason. This is my favourite Mr. Bungle Song: My Ass is on Fire (Live)

Be carefull with a ketosis diet, you'll get lethargic on it. Also don't go trying to kiss any girls cause your breath is gonna stink like crap and so will your trips to the bathroom! On a ketosis diet you have like 0 carbs so I wouldnt have that oatmeal if I were you!

Low carb diets are hard physically cause your body craves carbs for energy. No way I could go doing a heavy leg session unless im carbed up (leg day is my cheat meal day hehe). You'll be starving your muscles if you severely restrict carb intake. Sure it takes longer to loose the fat, but you also get to keep most of the muslce you worked so darn hard for! GNC is pretty pricey stuff for what you get. I get //http://www.bodybuilding.com/store/opt/whey.html from a local store where it's cheap as chips. I love the flavours they have and it also blends really easily in either milk or water. For a mega protein shake I take 2 scoops in low fat milk, one tbps of peanut butter, 2 eggs, and a bananna and all in a blender till creamy. Thats like having a whole meal in liquid form! Sometimes if its a hard workout I put in some raw oats as well.

Sierra charts has MP in it and so does Ninjatrader (but I'm not a fan of Ninjatrader myself). Ninjatrader has an offer upon registration with a one off payment for lifetime use of MP I think.

The new Tomahawk album is kinda...... but then again Patton seems like hes become a bit of a sellout since he started up Peeping Tom. I don't like the new stuff personally. The first 2 Tomahawk albums were awesome (my fav band of Mr Patton). Tool is a fantastic band and I love how they keep on pushing the boundaries. Love Schism!