It giveth ... and it taketh away

Well, reality has hit me in the face the past couple of trading days My "go to" stock has changed on me. I haven't had a profitable day trading SLV for probably over a week. I noticed sometime around last Wednesday that things were a lot different with the timing of the stock quotes and their correlation to the Silver futures. A lot of the quotes for SLV are run by black boxes - unmanned automatic systems created by large institutions. I had been exploiting an inefficiency in these systems and was reaping the benefits.

Well, the party is over.

I haven't had a winning day now since last Friday, and things have pretty much sucked. I knew this was coming, but really didn't plan ahead too well. I have some ideas that I am going to start trying come October 1, but I have decided to take the rest of the month off. I have been in need of a break for a long time. So rather than try something new and risk losing any more of what I made the month of September, I am going to call it a month, chill out, and enjoy the wonderful weather we have been having the past few days. After all, that is one of the benefits of this job ... flexibility. But as one of my friends told me ... it is only a benefit if you allow yourself to take advantage of it. So that is what I am doing.

Other than that, I have been spending my time reading and watching more videos on YouTube and Google Video. Which leads me to the real reason I posted this evening.

I ran across the following video on another trader's blog site. I have to admit, I am somewhat a sucker for conspiracy theory videos, but this one is absolutely awesome. At a little over an hour and a half long, it sent disturbingly eerie goosebumps across my body for a large portion of the film. Although lengthy, please take the time and watch it. It is WELL worth it. And if you thought Fahrenheit 9/11 had some interesting arguments, it has nothing on this.

Chugging along

Not much new to write about.

Last week was one of my better weeks in a while. I was pretty happy with that. We also had a "pod" Happy Hour at Little Woodrow's on Sixth last Wednesday. That was enjoyable, too. My coach picked up the tab, and we were able to discuss a lot of things about trading. Hopefully, I will be able to apply a lot of what we discussed to my personal trading. I also received my second paycheck last week - it was a little more than double the first one and still a far cry from the tech job paycheck. One of these days, whenever I am ready to step up to the plate, I know that will change.

Speaking of tech job, I had a nice run in with Intuit Tech support this evening. All of a sudden, my Quicken 2005 stopped updating from my financial institutions. I went through all the troubleshooting steps available online and found the problem. However, the web site said I need to contact Intuit for support if this problem occurred. I called and was on hold for 15 minutes (after the approximate wait time announced at the beginning of the call said "2 minutes"). I described my problem to the man, and he said that he could help me, but it would cost $25. I told him I diagnosed the problem for him, and that all I needed was the solution. He said it would still cost me $25. I told him I wanted to speak to his supervisor. The supervisor told me it would cost $25. I told her I was a software engineer and knew how these things worked (yeah right). I asked her if at any point and time in the super top secret solution steps, I would be asked to uninstall and reinstall the application. She said "Yes." I said "Thank you very much," hung up, and did just that. The program works like a charm now.

Let me just mention that I will be going out of my way tomorrow to try and short Intuit stock and make at least $25 off of their sorry asses. That was the most lame excuse to try to rip off their customers I have ever seen. Heck ... I might have to go away from using Turbo Tax next year just because of that. We will see.

6 Month Anniversary

I know I haven't written in a while. There have been a few times this past week where I have thought about writing, but honestly, there just isn't much new happening with my job or in my life these days. I would just be writing to write, and quite frankly, I have been enjoying watching a lot of US Open tennis these past two weeks, so this always gets overlooked.

As far as my job ... I celebrated my 6 month anniversary this past week. Again, I have been pleased with my progress, but I struggle to take my trading to the next level. I had one of my better weeks this past week, but mostly, I feel like its "Groundhog's Day" everyday. I am positive mostly everyday, but struggle to find ways to make money other than trading one stock, SLV. I look at my P&L at the end of each day, and I am positive whatever I make in SLV. Sure, I trade other stocks, but they end up washing each other out -- positive in some, negative in others. This has been going on now for several months and is starting to get a little old ... and frustrating. Everyday I go in looking for something new. I am ready to find another stock I can consistently profit in, but everyday .... same thing. Dare I say I am getting a little burned out already?

The one thing about trading is that everyday you are working. Sure there are down times during the day, and I need to take advantage of that more I suppose. But I remember the low stress times in between projects at my other job where I brushed up on skills, or unwound a little bit from the subsequent months of intense work. There definitely isn't much of that going on with trading. However, I need to remember I am never asked to work weekends if I don't want to. Pluses and minuses to everything I suppose.

One of the things I have been getting worked up about lately at my new work place are the IT staff ... developers and testers to be exact. There are a lot of people who work their butts off at the company, I won't deny that. But there appears to me to be little or no accountability of these particular people and their jobs. I started noticing several months back that nearly everytime I would get up from my trading desk to use the restroom, get something to eat, or go talk to another trader, I would see these group of 4 to 6 people roaming around. Sometimes they would be playing ping pong, sometimes playing foosball, sometimes eating leftover food from lunch, and sometimes just hanging around. A couple of weeks ago another new trader mentioned this to me, and I guess I started paying more attention to it. Now, I have become obsessed with it. Once again, this is something I can't control, and I am getting worked up about it. Ugghh.

But seriously, figure this. This is a private company that has a development and QA software staff that creates software for internal use only. None of the software is going to be sold to customers, so there are no defined development or testing procedures in place. I started asking them about test plans or content documents and they looked at me with a blank stare. Furthermore, there are no defined release dates for any product that is in production. If it takes a few more weeks to get something finished, really ... who cares? It's not like traders are not making money because a new product hasn't been released. If something crashes or doesn't work, it is all internal ... no big deal. Also, I have yet to have one of my software improvements or suggestions actually be implemented. I am continuously met with the response ... "Yeah, we can't do that. Sorry."

So, lately, I have been paying more attention to the work habits of these people, and I have become more and more frustrated. After all, I am helping pay these people's salaries with the split from my profits. That wouldn't be bad if I was getting my money's worth, but with the percentage split as it is and my "Groundhog's Day" performances, I am struggling to make ends meet in my own life. Yet, I have to go into work everyday and watch these people play ping pong and foosball all day long and know that I am helping pay them to do these things. All the while they tell me that they can't implement improvements I think would help make me more successful. And this behavior is acceptable.

Don't get me wrong. I am thankful for the opportunity that has been extended to me with this company. I am thankful I don't have to use my own money to trade and don't have to worry about that in the back of my mind everyday. But, I can't help but come to this realization: if I traded with my own money at a shop that gave me a split between 80% and 90% and I was able to continue my "Groundhog's Day" performance, I would be making as much, if not more than what I made at my previous software job. However, with the my current split being what it is, I won't even make as much as I did when I was a school teacher. Combine that with my rant above, and hopefully you can sense the frustration. I really need to start taking advantage of the fact I am not trading my own money. I need to trade with more size ... a lot more size and go for broke. If it doesn't work out ... oh well ... not my money. Start looking for a place where I can trade my own money and trade how I do now. That would be a pretty comfortable living.

So, there is my soapbox rant for this posting. By the way, the company is hiring more software developers and testers, so if the work environment described above appeals to you and you know of anyone looking for a technical job, let me know. If I recommend them and they get hired, I would get a $1000 bonus. Just trying to make my money back anyway possible :-).