PYenner

Head in the stars, feet in the mud. Want to leave the mud behind, before senility beats me. The price of daring to dream an ambitious dream.

Gee Doc, I had been concerned that I might get my wrist slapped for spamming your threads. Practicing shrinkage without a licence. Particularly the James_gxs thread "coulda woulda shoulda". Apologies if I bounced off the walls with that one but it struck a chord. Now I have the dubious distinction of attracting professional attention. It was not a cry for help. My big crises were 30 years ago so I learned to dig my way out of them. I would not have described it as articulate, I was struggling to string it together. The mire was more a reference to the depression realities, my own mire is more like the humdrum realities. Forrest Gump on one level, it would be funny if it wasn't for real. I did get a harsh eye-opener 10 or so years back, that poverty in old age could be a nighmare, not a risk to be taken lightly. That did prompt me to wake my ideas up and give money a higher priority. I do fear being helpless in a society that no longer cares, money is a security blanket against that, money is options, independence. My current business was supposed to see me through 15 years to retirement. The government cut the turnover in half, it meets survival needs but offers no security beyond that. Most businesses take maybe 4 years to get to payoff stage, I can't afford to lose another 4 years on top of the last "investment", because there is a big dream that has been on the back burner since my teens. In that field they say that if you don't do it by age 25 you will never do it. Senile confusion is the thing that can beat me, so there is something of a race against time and that is not a good thing with trading. The market was a low entry cost business, so no 4 years to get to breakeven. Just learning curve. So yes, miracle answer, holy grail, yeah yeah okay. There have been ups and downs, but there is reason for optimism provided the irrational moments get understood. Familiarity helps. You may think thay our James_gxs has high ambitions, but mine were so improbable that I had to recognize that no-one would pay me to chase that dream. So my career was 2nd choice, from a list of only two. The Government sank that carreer 5 years down the road. There was no third ambition so the bulk of my working life was nothing about aspirations, just survival. Used to be a sometimes computer geek and gamer. Still gaming in my 50's and it is still escapist stuff but without the insights that you get from some movies. One part of me would love to be computer gaming the market, just fun no serious consequences. So the addiction, obsession-compulsion, selective exclusion of reality equipment is all in fine working order and is being "helpful". Can't fool you about addictive denial huh?

"IE double whammy time" The willingness of governments around the world to make prompt shows of support, gives me concern along with dubious comfort. Have this feeling I should be expecting the unexpected.

It is said that the average American has $10k in credit card debt and pays $1300/year interest on it. Spending is about freedom, debt is imprisoning, conflict there.

"a male friend helped me sneak into a men's locker room to listen to their conversation" Oh boy, no, resist the temptation... Money has a huge impact on our circumstances, options. We judge ourselves against our circumstances. It is an ever-present reality check. And it is way too serious for the locker room or a party. It is a biggy (oops).

The talk abruptly switched from the assets they were holding to the liabilities they were holding. Could the big money find a counterparty to allow them to exit the forex market, or is it also dependent on nothing major ever going wrong?

Amazing video. A fund of that size has no exit strategy because exit is self-destruction. There is more in Heaven and Earth Horatio, than is dreamed of in your philosophy.

One of the first "rules" I read about trading was that intuitive traders inevitably fail, a paper system is the only option. It is good to see that many disagree. I tend to see any paper system as liable to be or to become inadequate. They amount to turning off your brain and trading like a robot. It would be nice if you could leave it to a robot, we could all retire with ongoing income.

In forex, maximin adverse movement seems to be like 3,000 pips. Stops get hunted routinely, but you can't rely on it to happen for your entry. Margin spread happens more often on US feed than on Swiss, suggesting it is deliberately done. It is one aggressive market and when you think you have seen everything it finds a new way to surprise you.

Or maybe, what was your biggest loss in one month? Arrgh !#@%

Don't want to be rich. Just want a security blanket for the future. Perhaps some self validation, freedom from the conflicts at both ends of the scale, a rat silencer. Yet the dopamine is still there at times, damn light headed stuff, it can be a liability.

Somewhere between then and "Thunderbirds are go", somefing got broke. Odd that he can make $4,000/hr trading but still has time to peddle courses.

Thats an Englishman speaking the Queen's english, blimey. And they came close to owning half the planet at one stage!!!

Your posts are constructive, wide ranging and informative. Your steady optimism is a rare thing, hope it will be contagious...

These are only my impressions, not solid fact. Institutions offer bonds, effectively in a currency pair like NZDJPY. NZD has one of the higher interest rates and JPY one of the lowest. They rely on accumulating interest payments but appear to be influenced by anything that alters the NZDJPY exchange rate. They have fixed maturity dates, They appear to be off-market retail offerings that are backed up by forex trades held by the institution. Discussion of the carry trade often brings up talk of thousands of Japanese housewives etc trading forex with Yen based accounts whose tactic is to hold longs in high interest differential (swap) pairs like NZDJPY. It works on a rising market and inflates the value of the kiwi. When the market looks soft there is a panic profit take and the kiwi returns to something closer to its fundamental value based on balance of trade. Currencies with high interest rates get inflated values as a result, the swaps favour holding long term positions in them, except when the exchange rate looks set to fall. Why is it traded in pairs? My guess is that it is partly to encourage speculation and removal of the gold standard appears to have the same motivation. Speculation is touted as the holy grail that keeps any currency from getting far out of step from the rest. I am suspicious of holy grails.

Full honesty seems to go against human nature. It is as if we need some lies, some indulgences in order to avoid feeling hard done by or robotic. The things we want are the most difficult to be honest about, most reluctant to set aside.

Reflects my experience. Impatience- waiting for the market to come to you, waiting more hours for the trade to develop or come out of drawdown, hard to maintain perspective and avoid kneejerk reactions that may or may not be justified. But if you can't out wait the market then you have given the market one more way of out smarting you. Part of me wants to be playing the market like a video game, full on, non-stop, no waiting, no real sense, but fun instead. The market has its own inconvenient time scale and it is not what I would chose it to be. Perfection- As the Doc says, its about probabilities and certainty or 100% probability isn't available. Relying on something you know to be imperfect is easier said than done. Very easy to lose the plot and confidence with it. Keeping an overview on yourself is more difficult than following the market. The market is on a chart in front of your face, your view of your thinking is not nearly so visible. Agree with Jakew too.

Doc, thank you. In reverse order- "Whats a girl to do?" Pat yourself on the back and keep going. The article was right and I hope you feel confident about that, it applies to any demanding area of learning where there is a large content of unknown and uncertain, so you may have had direct experience of watching the process unfold inside your head. Worked that way for me anyway. "It is a trained response, so, in a way you think of it like a reflex." They said the same thing about learning a golf swing, but they didn't say why. We think of it as reflex but it isn't. The golf swing can also get sabotaged by questions, even the simplest one, the putt, perhaps because it is the payoff stroke, perhaps because it has the least in common with the rest of the game. The rat brain thrives on uncertainty levels and tends to pounce on the largest one in sight. "This is a big challenge for traders who want to be right, be perfect.." Just got bitten by this one, as you say it is about probabilities, it will never be about certainties. The need to be right with certainty, has to be held aside as unrealistic. So long as the trading record is adequate, useful, that is as good as it gets, or needs to be. Got to learn to value and rely on something that will always be less than certain. Adequate becomes the measure and humility helps.

It's easy to talk the talk, not so easy to walk the walk. Second attempt, may get closer this time. This one is motivational in both right and wrong ways. Your asperations will always be distant, thats what asperations are. Your view of them will come and go. If only the rat brain could be kept at an even greater distance. The objection I have is that "talk the talk" encourages you to monitor measures of failure or uncertainty, which is wrongheaded and unconstructive. It encourages you to run along a knife edge of insecurity, the road to a stomach ulcer. Keeping your rat nibbling into you constantly. Unrealistic over confidence is also to be avoided. The ideal path is a persistant and realistic belief in your abiliy to achieve constructive outcomes. On top of that is some optimism that you can go the extra mile when need the need arises. Your realistic abilities are what will pull you through the wanted and the unwanted challenges and leave you standing a little taller on the inside regardless of what the outside circumstances may be. Keep faith in your constructive abilities. Keep that as your focus, your strength and friend. The knife edge of uncertainty is not your friend it is baggage that loads you down. It remains that fear of poverty or adversity will always sensibly remain part of what motivates us, it is part of the reality mix. Another story. At the first place I worked, the factory manager was always cool and balanced, nothing would him wind him up. I would look at him and see myself as a twitchy mess in comparison. That guy has got the right perspectives, carrying no baggage, got it all sorted out. How come I missed the plot? Turns out he had Multiple Sclerosis and with MS you cant let stress or fatigue take you down because you may never get up again. 20 years later he was on TV, in a wheelchair paralysed from the waist down. His one liner was "I only want to have a normal life".

James A real life story fwiw. There is a young guy in my town, no education, no money, two kids. Worked for my brother, minimum wage. Impressed my brother, impressed me as someone who would not be spending much of his life working for wages. I passed on to him a chunk of a business I was quitting and encouraged him to look for the next step up. He sold that business, did a year overseas for 100k, came back. Started in real estate signs, sold that. Billboards, I think he still has that. He lastest scheme was a multi megabuck vision, drought relief, but it has been ruined by the 5yr drought breaking a year too soon. He will probably be smarting but I doubt if will slow him down for long. He has had a taste of how it works and he knows he has uncommon talent. Now I will get to the point. Entrepreneurs are a rare breed and that makes them isolated. No one to talk to who speaks the same language. This young guy cold calls a commercial property developer and asks if he would offer any guidance on the steps he took to get there. That developer has been mentoring him for 5 years now and has offered to do a 10 house residential development with him anytime and split the profit as a training exercise. I think the young guy wants to do it on his own and not be taken on as an apprentice. This young guys plans are not just 6 steps ahead of anyone elses, its more like 6 city blocks. I struggle to keep my mouth shut because I am a dunce next to him and I don't want to slow him down but that is what I most want to tell him. Turtle or hare, I dont know. Anyone who told Bill Gates to go another way would be feeling like a dummy. I don't know what the odds are. I dont know if a CEO type will give you the time of day, but for the price of a phone call and some embarassment, maybe. If you can pick up tips plus hindsight from someone who has been down your path ahead of you, that is way better than finding everything out the hard and slow way. Don't waste time inventing the wheel if you can talk to someone who already makes wheels. Leapfrog off their experience if you can.

"Next game: More of the same? OR- do we learn so as not to keep doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results?" Doc, There is a third part of the brain that learns to drive a car by reflex and takes the load off the reasoning brain, leaves it free to go into overview or even daydream modes. This seems to be the dependable part, experience, assuming it has been soundly programmed that is. Is that where this leads, trade by reflex while keeping reason in watchdog mode? Like riding a bike?

So the human canoe is being paddled by two very different life forms. They don't have a common language to comminicate in and their roles conflict when we most need them to work together. It put a man on the moon against all the odds. You have to wonder at the audacity and the achievement of it.

"I see an opportunity and I sit on it, and I don't act." A Homer Simpson moment. The nearest thing to intelligent life in the universe, reponsible for four meltdowns. It seems like the rat brain doing its thing, asks a question without saying what the question is. Effectively derails the intellect, duh. Normal ambivolence but stress or fatique brings it out more. It would be funny if it wasn't serious. We claim to be intelligent, reasonable but it is more of a hope than a reality. The rat brain takes away reasoning and that is supposed to be a bonus in the survival stakes? The human brain seems to have been designed by something even less intelligent than a human, more like a lottery in progress. Primordial mud is still mixed in there. I want to be a fighter pilot, fly at 3 times the speed of sound. Lets see, reaction time 1 second, distance traveled 1,000 miles an hour. Prone to inattention, day dreams, fantasy, itch scratching, shopping list. Yup sounds just dandy to me. They tested the first critical nuclear reaction under a stadium in a city. Confident it would not go supercritical before they could shut it down manually (???). Supreme confidence in a bucket of primordial mud and reaction times a zillion times slower than fission. In total denial about Homer Simpson moments, made of the right stuff we are. Duh. Nobody has a Ferrari engine upstairs, we all got clunkers from the scrapyard. Bill Gates said no OS needs to be bigger than 360k. Vista runs 1GB of resident software in the system idle state. Humans should never bet the bank because the best of us still get it wrong.

It's easy to talk the talk, not so easy to walk the walk. This is a taunt, ignore it. It encourages you to act impulsively when your actions should be guided by informed reason. The bigger the step the greater the need for due diligence. Business moves do involve elements of risk and the unknown. Boring due diligence is the tool that a businessman relies on to minimize the risk and optimize the certainty. Feel good or who cares impulses are superstition, they get what they deserve, random luck outcomes. When you quit school and when you did the state and national you showed yourself to be not risk averse. Risk averse is about going with the flow, another sheep moving with the flock. Most people spend their whole lives relying on the risk avoidance message and they have the lives of sheep. It does not look like your path but impulsive gambles and unreasoned exposure must also not be your path. Your Best Buy customer is in a bind, his persistence is admirable but he may have started using his head a bit late. The idea is not to get in a bind to start with. I'm not sure that there is ever a good time to lose and especially not to bet the bank and lose big. It is most important that your losses are never seriously damaging, it can set you back decades and that is to be seriously avoided. You only get one life, giving away any chunk of it is not good news, young or old. You may feel you are standing at the edge of a pool hesitant to dive in knowing there will be a cold shock. You can't stand there forever so the only option is to just do it right? Wrong. There are lots of ways of getting wet progressively and head first immersion looks more like a crazy gamble than any other option does. Look for alternative entry modes and alternative exits, same as trading, same goes for the % equity you expose to risk. Business is a lot like trading, slow and steady progress is the backbone of it. The risks that businesses take need to be familiar risks, you need experiance at what you do and build up. Jumping in big without experiance is asking for a hard lesson in thinking first, boring due diligence, and being brave (or just reckless?) last. It will always pay to use your head first. At first you lack the informed judgement to ask the right questions. A business mentor can help, tell you the path they took and what they now think of that path. I have taken uninformed risks and paid the price for it, I have also followed paths that other small businessmen have followed (more like a sheep but neither a total sheep nor a total gambler) and that did work, not spectacular but pleasing, reassuring. If you can find a way of wading in from the shallow end that would now be my recommendation. Gain the experiance progressively with light risk exposure. Increase the exposure only as experiance and equity allows. I don't know what big move you have in mind. If it was quitting the job and trading full time, I might say build up the trading equity progressively first and only quit the job once the trading income says it is justified. Cover your bets. Prudence. Keep options open. Avoid the either/or option that has total bust as the only other outcome. Use your head to protect yourself from what amounts to a suicide effort, do or die. Do and do again a little bigger is what you are after. The killer outcome is not businesslike, it is foolish, desperation, end of the line stuff. Microsoft was initially a nothing special company, it snowballed after Gates spotted an opportunity he had been waiting for. He did not jump in cold, he grew from a nothing special base. I have a feeling you see an ordinary level of success as more like failure. Ordinary is still the place to start and build your base from which bigger things might come.

This is strange. For 6 months I have been aware of an irrational area in my trading that goes with the biggest losses. It only ever happens on a falling market. It is a silly as a possum in the headlights, when you trade that way roadkill is what you get. There is a home movie of me age 4 doing this fixated possum thing and it is comical once you get past the wounded pride. Thought it had fixed itself yet trading a falling market somehow brought it out. Then identified a gambling trait that I had in the early teens and had disposed of, apparently not when the going gets hot. Damned emotions, whoever invented them should be put up against the wall. At least gimme an off switch for when there is work to do. Two irrational bogies located in like half an hour after 6 months of huh??? Seems I no longer think about bogies as often as I should. When you do get to be senile, a return to the past is what you get. Hell I hope they don't let me wander down the road at night