No changes this month.
Dirty Dozen, Long Only Portfolio, End of October 2017
Two changes at the end of October: selling Tesla (bought last February) and buying Twitter (sold last January).
Everything Looks Perfect From Far Away
Great cover ... love this girl's voice, reminds me of Tracyanne Campbell's (of Camera Obscura) ... hilarious crowd shots in this video ... when I was a kid, we took a trip to Scandinavia and were in Finland ... we took a public bus somewhere and had to walk to the back of the bus, and when we got to the back, my family spontaneously burst into laughter because we'd never seen a more grim-looking group of people in one spot -- sort of like this crowd of killjoys. The hipster band's energy offsets them well.
Notes for Chat with Traders, Episode 148
Episode 148 ... John Grady (83:26)
- 41 years old
- Learned about Level 2 at prop firm in Colorado
- Next worked at prop firm in Chicago
- In Chicago was the first time he saw Depth of Market (DOM) for futures
- [Has a southern twang, wonder where he's from?]
- Look for big orders
- Guys on the floor weren't geniuses, they just understood order flow
- Left prop firm, on his own now for ten years
- Order book also know as Depth of Market (DOM) matrix
- When you see market orders wiping out limit orders, you know someone is moving size
- Volume is most important, price chart doesn't represent volume as well as the DOM
- Important volume to watch is at each price within the DOM (horizontal bar)
- Jigsaw is the DOM he uses
- Trades Treasuries exclusively
- Treasuries are liquid, logical and steady ... bank-traded and the banks are trading spreads
- Crude oil, for example, is thin and erratic ... easily manipulated
- Can't ramp up your size trading gold, for example, you'll max your size at 10 or 20 contracts
- With Treasuries you can trade 100 or 200 contracts the same way you can trade a ten lot
- He trades outrights, only watches the spreads, doesn't trade them
- Market context is important, depending on the regular news releases
- No real average number of trades for him, can go from two to twenty trades a day
- Extraordinarily boring to take three trades a day as an order flow trader, but that's the job
- Trading requires tremendous patience and discipline
- Almost all of his losses are the result of forcing trades out of boredom
- People who trade from home need ten times the discipline (no in-office banter to distract them)
- You start surfing the net out of boredom, that's the exact moment a trade sets up
- When you see you've missed the trade, you chase, and end up losing (of course)
- He might hold a trade for ten seconds to ten, twelve, twenty minutes
- Market moves two ticks in his favor, he can always scratch the trade
- On average holds trades three to twelve minutes
- Retail traders try to trail a stop instead of just taking a trade off -- a mistake
- If he gets out too early, he'll instantly re-enter
- He figures out his trade size based on the situation
- He think in terms of ticks, how many ticks will he possibly lose, sizes appropriately
- Sometimes you need five ticks of leeway, just have to give it room, size appropriately
- Never move your stop loss
- Don't turn a planned three tick loss into an eight tick loss by pulling your stop
- He always places an emergency stop loss in the market (3-5 ticks away)
- Manually figures out the exit, Treasuries liquid enough to do this
- He markets out, doesn't want to chase out with a limit order
- He always wants to use a limit order, but often circumstances don't allow
- Use a market order to get the fill, sometimes you just have to pay up
- He goes all in and all out, no scaling
- Don't screw up your risk reward by scaling in or scaling out
- Most people screw up scaling, they average losers and minimize their winners
- Big differences among markets ... must choose the right market to trade
- To trade DAX you need orders in the book, it can reverse in seconds ... too thin!
- Automated orders are essential in thin markets like DAX or Gold
- Liquid markets like Treasuries, S&P, Bobl, Eurostoxx, can use discretion, manually adjust orders
- Try to watch total amount of contracts at each price
- Specialize in one market, study that one DOM and only that
- Same players in the same markets every day, they behave consistently
- You must record your trading screen or do market replay
- Pay attention to market turning points when you're watching the replay
- Fast forward, rewind, pause ... study the replay closely.
- You will learn more from watching replays for a month than you will from journaling trades for a year
- You need a lot of study and screen time with a good DOM
- Only three good depth of market providers:
- Jigsaw has inside columns, uptick/downtick splits are key column, exlcusive to them ($50 a month, stupid cheap)
- TT's X_Trader
- CQG
- No subsititute for screen time
- When learning, watch two to three hours a day, don't watch all day
- Then open a live account and start trading one lots, enter the fire
- Anyone trading a longer time frame doesn't need the DOM
- Most people shouldn't swing trade: too many things can happen to take you out
- HFT can spike things up and down in seconds
- If you think you know where the market will be in two hours, you're delusional
- People who understand fundamentals, that's a different kind of trading
- Swing trading is the worst, just crazy that people try to do it
- He's never met a successful swing trader, and he's been around awhile [me too]
- You can predict the next six minutes better than you can the next sixty minutes
- If you trade size, you can scalp for six cents ... sensible only with serious size
- Fifteen or even ten years ago, the speed of trading very different
- You could hit a big order as it was leaving, not anymore!
- HFTs try to be in a breakeven trade immediately
- HFTs will instantly scratch if they think they're on the wrong side [they never reveal scratch rate]
- HFTs want to risk nothing to make something
- You need to be able to anticipate so much more in the age of HFT
- There's a lack of volatility today too, so much volume now, nothing can run anymore
- His edge is in his discretion
- If AI develops that can replicate that human discretion, the human traders will not be able to compete
- Best AI can already beat best human chess players, trading similar to chess
- The big guys have the speed locked down, huge unfair advantage
- Market makers game the time-price priority of the book
- HFT get a free look from their constant partial fills [the bastards], you can't compete with that
- By knowing your market, you can spot the spoof orders more easily
- Spoofing happens all day every day
- "Order Flow Basics" -- basic principles video
- "Order Flow Scalping" -- a popular video of his
- www.nobsdaytrading.com
- Twitter: @nobsdaytrading
Movies Watched -- The Dark Horse
124 minutes long so at least 24 to 34 minutes too long. A W.D. By movie (written and directed by the same person). It started off well. About a mentally ill Maori guy (New Zealand) ... one-time chess champion. You feel bad for him, mental illness is no joke. I was not aware of the whole Maori underclass thing, so that was enlightening. "Genesis" ends up finding some purpose in life by coaching a chess club for poor Maori kids.
There are some good lines, some good scenes, but it ran too long. And it was kind of hit you over the head preachy in the end. I loved it at first, then only started liking it, and by the end, I wasn't that thrilled with it. If you're interested in mental illness, the Maori underclass, or chess, you might want to see it ... otherwise avoid it.
A king for a king
280 Killed Twitter
Since Twitter rolled out the 280 character limit, my timeline has been destroyed. All of the charm and cleverness that the service once had is gone. I follow around 295 people ... about 25 have them have quit Twitter (since T___p was elected), and a half dozen or so have unfollowed me since I said I'd block anyone who tweeted >140.
This month I will systematically go through my following list and unfollow anyone who is tweeting over 140. I might end up following no one this way, but so be it. You can rest assured that none of my tweets will ever exceed 140 characters.
Movies Watched -- Eye in the Sky
Under the sacred 100 minute mark, so it had that going for it ... the end credits were like 10 minutes long. Sort of reverse War Porn but I wasn't buying any of it. Somali Al-Shabaab Islamic crazies in Kenya ... Colonel "Big Balls" Mirren has finally tracked down several people on the "kill list" and it's time to take 'em out with a drone strike. Trouble is a bunch of Guardian-reading British politicians throw a spanner in the works when the collateral damage estimate comes in a tad high. They have to keep "referring up" to a higher level of Guardian reader to know "where we stand legally."
Jesse Pinkman is the weepy American drone operator accompanied by some big-eyed girl also given to tears. Look, the real drone guys would be high fiving each other given this opportunity... they would be chomping at the bit to blow away some bad guys after doing *years* of boring surveillance runs. Finally, finally we get to kill some people! Oh, there are some kids playing in the street nearby? Tough shit, this is war. The pan flute and violin score ain't going to tug on these heartstrings.
Do we have the authority to prosecute the target? Hell yes! And why are you talking like a lawyer, asshole?
You remember we dropped two *atomic* bombs on cities *full* of civilians, yes? And you remember we fire-bombed every major Japanese city for THIRTY days straight (and the rotten bastards still wouldn't surrender?). Remember when we dropped hundreds of thousands of gallons of *napalm* (thanks, Dow Chemical) across the Vietnamese jungle? We're not going to go all weak in the knees because there's one kid selling a loaf of bread nearby. Got-damn weak Baby Boomers have ruined everything!
There are no beetle- or bird-sized drones. We don't have that technology yet. Shameless pandering to China scene where the US Secretary of State is playing ping pong there ... thankfully brief. Can't recommend this one ... it's unrealistic, the premise is bullshit ... and though it was not overly long, it could have been even shorter.
Jesse Pinkman, teary-eyed drone operator
Configurable Buttons at Interactive Brokers
Took me about six months to set up my buttons the way I like them in Interactive Brokers' Trader Workstation (TWS). Here are all the things you have to figure out ... useful ones are Add Target Limit Order, Buy, Sell, Duplicate, Increase and Decrease (size): Modify, and Presets.
Movies Watched -- Arrival
116 minutes long so at least 16 to 26 minutes too long.
SPOILERS. Mind-bender movie. Alien invasion. If I understood it correctly, the aliens give the gift of their squid-ink language because they're going to need our help in 3,000 years time. For learners of their language, time becomes non-linear. Does this make sense? Wouldn't that change the whole nature of life on earth? I wasn't thrilled with this.
Have I seen Amy Adams in anything before? Can't remember. Also stars Jeremy "Ugly Bourne" Renner, Forest "Sleepy Eye" Whitaker -- a token black guy who surprisingly isn't killed, and the charming Jewish mobster, Arnold Rothstein -- here a CIA agent. I recognized no one else.
There's a large and annoying part given to China and their "General Shang" in a shameless kowtowing attempt to be chosen as one of the handful of American movies that the Chicoms allow into their protected market. On par with "The Martian's" kowtowing -- disgusting.
If it were 20 minutes shorter and cut out the Chinese, I could give it a sort of weak yellow rating, but as it is, this gets a red AVOID rating.
"If you had your life to live over again...."
Movies Watched -- The Witch
I haven't watched *any* movies from 2016 so I'll start to work my way through the top 100 now.
92 minutes so within the sacred 100 minute mark. I was a little leery since The Witch is a W.D. By movie (written and directed by the same person, which means it's their baby, for good or ill). Surprisingly, I enjoyed this one. I'm not big on horror but there were no jump-scares or other cheap ticks in this movie, thankfully ... it's more of a witchcraft thing ... 1630s America, you know, 60 years before the Salem Witch Trials. Well plotted, well acted, well done ... and scary.
Don't see it if you're sensitive ... kids definitely should NOT see this ... but if you're a jaded old guy like me, you will enjoy it.
Wouldst thou like to see the world?