Global Macro Trading Journal

I'm still not able to trade bitcoin directly as the dealers take forever to approve documents, process wires, etc. But I was able to put some trades on proxies like GBTC and MGTI. Hopefully, this tank will cool off the interest and the dealers will get a break from so many people opening accounts and sending documents. This week was such a classic top pattern, South Koreans were paying $2000 over the spot price to get in, Bitcoin soared on that news and then put a NASTY reversal, that same day almost all of the other coins were down, some even -10%. It felt like it was a capitulative top, that people sold all coins to buy bitcoin and when the reversal happened, it showed that there was almost no one left to buy, that everyone thought it was going higher. Prices just kept going lower since then
I really messed up because one of my brokers had GBTC to short but I didn't had enough margin there, they are using a 200% requirement for GBTC shorts so I needed new cash and I took too long to wire. GBTC had a huge predictable sell-off 2 days ago, its a shame I would have made great money
Yesterday I noticed IB had some shares to short by the end of the day so I shorted a little along with MGTI. Hopefully bitcoins is bellow $1,500 by tuesday and these things gap down 30-40%
 
Daal said:
http://www.zdnet.com/article/apples-macbooks-still-the-most-reliable/

Good article talking about Apple, reliability and customer satisfaction. Some anti-Apple folks don't seem to understand this, the funny thing is that their dads usually do understand that when they recommend to their sons not to buy cheap products/cars, etc but to rely on good brands instead.
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Absolutely agree, maybe because I'm the wrong side of 60. I found decades ago you get what you pay for, and going for best in class has never led to regret. That also applies to the likes of Apple, where no doubt you pay a premium for the brand, the quid pro quo being superior quality and meticulous attention to detail.
 
justrading said:
Absolutely agree, maybe because I'm the wrong side of 60. I found decades ago you get what you pay for, and going for best in class has never led to regret. That also applies to the likes of Apple, where no doubt you pay a premium for the brand, the quid pro quo being superior quality and meticulous attention to detail.
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Absolutely. And the higher the income/hourly rate of the person, the less they can afford to have a product go bad on them and having to waste time with tech support/fixing things. A lot of the 'apple fan boys' that are made fun of, are actually just people that can't waste 3 hours dealing with problems and losing productivity as result. This is also why I think Linux is just retarded, you waste so much time with that thing trying to do basic tasks. Now with OSX, there is little reason for most users to have linux if they dislike Windows security/stability

Now that said, I use a late 2013 macbook pro with 3 external monitors to day/swing trade (Running Windows 7 through bootcamp) but I wouldn't recommend that setup at all, these things are not really made for windows and you run into driver issues. On top of not being able to upgrade the hardware (which I like to do for fun when I need to). I'm considering selling and going back to a good old typical desktop setup.

I will say this, this macbook was quite realiable in terms of me not missing any days of work, I don't think I had a single day that I wasn't able to boot it for almost 2.5 years and it was very rare that I would have to reset during trading hours. So it did its job just fine, I'm just starting to run into RAM issues as 8GB is not being enough and apple soldered the RAM of this model into the motherboard.
 
I was thinking that one way to potentially mimic the Apple reliability is to buy a Dell machine with a 3 year warranty (with the option for home pickup). The extra cost for the warranty will mean it will cost a similar price to the apple computer but it will be a true windows machine that will be highly upgradable. So realiable and future proof
 
Daal said:
I was thinking that one way to potentially mimic the Apple reliability is to buy a Dell machine with a 3 year warranty (with the option for home pickup). The extra cost for the warranty will mean it will cost a similar price to the apple computer but it will be a true windows machine that will be highly upgradable. So realiable and future proof
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Well I have a Dell Precision T3600 with 3 27" monitors and when the 3 year Next Business Day Onsite Service warranty expired, I extended it for another 2 years, since it was pretty cheap. Had a HDD develop bad sectors and a blue vertical line on 1 of the monitors, in both cases the tech came over and swapped the disk and monitor. Monitor was refurbished of course, but I made sure it was a newer build than mine.

No regrets, solid server class stuff.
 
Along with this convexity stuff, something that I always knew about but never truly got it was the power of the subconcious. "Gut feelings", "instincts" "body reactions" and things like that. I knew about it, and understood that there was some usefulness in it but I probably vastly underestimated how powerful this really is. This isn't some new age hippie psychology stuff that is trendy and fun to bring up to be cool like I thought, this shit is very powerful

I'm finding it more and more that a lot of gut reactions, instincs, body reactions and subconcious tendencies are actually very deep well thought out cases for doing certain things but we either:
-Understand in some level but cant express that something logically yet
-Don't understand that something but certain parts of the mind do and we are naturally drawn to certain decisions because of that

Its only much later that we get to fully understand that something and are be able to explain why that gut feeling was the right decision, and that understanding gets deeper overtime. So much so that it proves the decision in such a dramatic fashion that it begs the question of whether the person already knew that all along but not with the concious mind but with the subconcious one.

I was a little turned off about this subconcious stuff because I always thought that thinking about something logically really hard would yield a better decision than relying on feelings, but the problem is that we make too many mistakes or cant do much analysis with imperfect information/under uncertainty. It isn't that logic is not useful, its just that using the gut will probably lead to less mistakes.
Furthermore, there is plenty of deep logical reasoning behind gut feelings, they are just not concious yet. It will take time, out concious mind is a little dumb frankly. Even Soros used his back ache for decisions. It appears that the subconcious is a lot wiser and tends to be one step ahead in a lot of things.

I should probably listen to an audiobook or two on things. I did listen on the audio program "Suceeding Through Inner Strength" (which is great btw) that one relationship expert even went so far as to say 'The biggest mistakes I have made when dealing with people happened because I ignored how my body felt' or something like that and the author of that audiobook also put a lot of emphasis to not ignoring intuition and body reactions
 
One of my rules is 'shorting is stupid' and I 'discovered' that largely by listening to gut feelings.

I short all the time, and I do think it has a place in a trader arsenal but at the same time I know that thinking that shorting is stupid has so many benefits.
The best shorters I see around also think that shorting is stupid but not in the concious level, in that level they will bs themselves by saying 'it helps to reduce market risk' 'there is plenty of frauds' yet they behave as if shorting was stupid by being extremely selective, being VERY careful when they are losing money, doing tremendous amount of research, making sure they are right, cutting losses, having small positions, finding great entry points, etc etc. They treat the strategy as if it was pretty much the worst strategy that they have, as if it was so bad it required all kinds of subsidies to make it work. So effectively they think shorting is stupid but decide to do it anyway under very special situations

But by being direct and saying shorting is stupid, it frees your INDENTITY/PERSONALITY from being attached with being a short seller which enables you to get good at other things, like being a long (and not just good but great, much better than trying to long as a closet short-seller), and other forms of bets. Bets that offer a lot more convexity, are easier to implement, don't require subsidies, etc. So it has tremendous benefits and I only realized those things when I decided to listen to my insticts that kept telling 'man shorting is so stupid' but I couldn't figure out why
 
Saying 'shorting is stupid' can lead to a great outcome, which is to be very good long/bull (SF type mindset) and ocasionally drop a short hammer instead of the opposite is which is to defend short selling/idenfity yourself as a bear at heart (A NY skeptic type mindset), then do a shitty/ok/average job as a long and work like crazy to get returns from shorts

Overall, saying shorting is stupid helped me better BALANCE the natural biases that I needed to improve my performance. Losing money in longs also helped that (its kinda like jumping on the pool helps you not care about jumping on it again). This balance will make me a lot more money long-term even if short-term it has a cost. Perhaps my subconscious mind even decided that it was going to be great for me to lose money in stocks like VRX because would it solidify that balance and long-term I would be better off.

This better balance through rules like shorting is stupid worked great for me because I came from a very skeptical mindset but for other people there is probably other rules and ideas, and thats where gut instincts can help instead of just listening to our conscious bs stories over and over again
 
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