<i>"Well said austin, you obviously KNOW your stuff."</i>
In all honesty, my knowledge base is narrow in scope but deep in my topics of interest. There are a lot of guys with far-wider horizons of general knowledge here than me, for sure.
From late-1999 until recently my life has been dominated by research on trading, mechanical systems, discretionary methods, etc. I highly doubt there is anyone here who has spent more pure manhours trading live markets, studying charts in realtime and post-market than I have.
Not to say that's all a good thing. The obsession to become proficient contributed to an unwanted divorce and host of other things missed out on along the way. Easier roads to trading success exist than my path down the school of hard knocks.
Now I'm at a point where all that time (and money) invested has me trading pure price action measured on a chart, and nothing else. Zero indicators of any kind, just measuring price from different angles. It's working better than anything I've done before, and there really isn't much more I can strip away or clarify.
So... I spend hours researching other fun pursuits. One of my interests is rearing = breeding localized, resistant honeybees. You wouldn't believe how geeky a bunch of redneck farmers can get over this topic. I belong to a group that literally brings in world-renowned bee experts with more PHD degrees than I have hair on my forehead, waning as that measurement may be.
People literally breed queen bees via artificial insemination (grafting) with extracted bee sperm from prize drones (males) using tiny instruments under a microscope. They experiment with viral-resistant strains of bees from all over the world, recently Russian bees from Siberia.
I have some of those Russian queens coming next month myself, 100% pure strain artificially bred for $100 queen plus $45 next-day air shipping from CA.
All of this effort isn't done for fun & games. The big pollinators aren't happy to see their 4,000 hives colony reduced to 200 hives in three months' time. Huge money is lost, from several directions that ripples up the food chain straight to us.
Hobbyists are working on the problem. I personally think it'll be resolved in time, but the cost of bee propogation is rising which will push food prices higher in even the best-case scenario
Bee Happy
