Tuesday, February 16, 2010
teddy bye and cheerio!
The other day, I was updating websites I manage and realized I've been posting and creating web content for 13 years! My active web participation started with with a 'personal site'-- bandwidth from my internet provider, earthlink at that time. If you are a web newbie and don't know much about the early days, this was a few years before
blogging software automated personal journaling. "Posting" was the most common way we communicated ideas, and posting popularity is still quite high, both at interest-based communities as well through blog site commenting. My primary interests at the time were publishing--
The Mystery Box being the fruit of those efforts, and of course, trading which consists of this blog as well as my
trading pages where I share all sorts of technical analysis based trading methods.
I began by swing trading NYSE stocks, my first stock trade was T and was a purely fundamentals based trade. I had a Mac at the time and discovered the lack of trading software compatible with Macs. I grit my teeth and bought my first PC since the early early days of a massive IBM/DOS machine. Now having PC-based software at hand, the evolution from fundamentals trading to technical trading was almost immediate.
I don't know if I ever mentioned that my interest in technical analysis came about through reading
How to Make Money in Stocks by William O'Neil. The link is to the fourth edition, which looks to have been enlarged and expanded from the more basic earlier editions. The
CANSLIM approach is simple, but like all trading methods, depends on the trader knowing his limits. Like all my endeavors, I dove in head first and whole-heartedly. I found my journals from that time and was astounded at the number of issues I was trading and the detailed notes I kept.
The first technical trade I shared with the world --at clearstation--was ODP. As The Bubble heated up, I was drawn to trading NASDAQ issues. It is odd to look back at my early approach. I analyzed the cash index (COMPX)to determine general market direction and selected issues from Investors Business daily for swing trading (3 day to 3 month type holds). I subscribed to the paper edition and kept all sorts of folders with trading articles, both technical and fundamental. IBD was wonderful at blending these two interests.
My swing trading days ended with the bursting of the bubble,
which I did indeed call at clearstation I used the FTEXX board as a sort of blog...Posts 2, 6, and 9 trace my move from fully long into fully cash. I was using moderate stops (7-8%) on my trades. I had nearly two dozen trades active and one by one, the stops were hit, I think six on one day. It didn't take a brainiac to see that something big was happening. My interest in stocks nearly completely vaporized and after a few months, I moved into futures.
I continuted to post at clearstation and in parallel, opened an account at stockcharts.com where I could plot Andrews pitchforks. I created daily pages with my trading ideas, downloading charts from stockcharts.com and inserting them onto my hand-coded-html pages at earthlink. I was very active on the clearstation boards then and had a rather large following. I was also voted the
best chartist at stockcharts.com for six months running. It was, looking back, a kind of facebook/twitter concept for traders. Both sites are still around, still successful, and many of the same people are still posting over there.
I grew to actually detest that COMPX index. I switched to NDX futures and continued to use technical analysis of the COMPX and NDX to place my trades. It worked but my disgust with the NDX grew to the point where I switched completely to SPX futures. On January 9, 2002, I logged my
first entry here at actio-et-reactio and shortly thereafter, I discovered
Ensign. Ensign charting is perhaps the only thing that might pull me back into trading, or at least technical analysis...that software is just the best. Using Ensign eventually lead to the
dacharts community. Then, one day a smooth-talking kiwi showed us
The Box and then came many happy years trading the INDU. This latter phase is condensed as my actio-et-reactio blog journalled my adventures with over 300 entries.
And this is the last "actio-et-reactio" post. I often think of my trading buddies-- sputnik, Alan, rabbit, and pk, as well as the many many correspondents I've had over the years. I don't reckon I'll ever again trade as actively as I did in the past. I view the analyses, calls, comments, and methods I've shared as a gift for that moment in time. Like a cake, it was lovely to look at, wonderful to eat, but once it's eaten, it's gone! I look forward to a new adventure and I hope it has even a half of the intensity, interest, depth, breadth, and appeal as trading had.
Oh, the reason it is the last post is that as of March 26th, Blogger will no longer support ftp blogging sites (like mine). I don't fancy doing a blogspot blog or having them host my blog, so I've decided to close out my 'market notes' blog, and most sad to say, my meanders blog. I've installed WordPress on my own site and hope to be posting thoughts to a new journal I call "Word Matters" in the near future.
It's been fun, especially all the very special and wonderful people I've met and called friends along the way!
teddy-bye and cheerio!
Ana Maria
(gads! all those words and nary a chart!!!! what to do? what to do? I may come back and annotate this...but I'll need to chart something first!)
later the same day...OK...here's an obscure chart analysis: VIX. VIX has to be one of my favorite obscure charting fascinations. It still intrigues. What is vexing about VIX is its relativity. The addage "VIX is High, Time to Buy, VIX is Low, Time to Go" works, but Low doesn't mean "lowest" or high "highest". It channels! I've written about this before, but there weren't tags back then. Anyway, here's a quickie from
stockcharts.com. My wager is some channeling (market chop) with perhaps a run at another high, which will fail. If you look at market indices, there is a MACD cross, but sub-zero, indicating a weak rally. That and RSI is now channeling under 50, indicating weak channeling at best.
Labels: chart-analysis, Journaling, sentiment
