The Senescent Trader

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Emil Kraepelin

As my patient base ages, more and more I find myself counselling them on how to spend what may turn out to be their last days. Most of them are patient traders, taking the long view. But now that long view is here, and Macbeth-like, they become impatient with the daily chart, thinking to themselves:

"To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time."

So perforce to ease their declining years I have with my trading strategy associate Joe Doaks devised systems suited to the senescent trader. More to come.
 
The senescent trader typically can no longer practice most of his youthful addictions, probably the very things that are killing him: smoking, drinking, drug use, promiscuity. Only one addiction remains available to him: trading. Besides that fact, why does he persist in trading in his waning years? The Christian expects to go to trading heaven, and wants to keep his skills sharp. The Buddhist believes he will be reincarnated, and wants trading to be the last thing he remembers of this life so that he will begin trading anew in the next. The Muslim thinks of heavenly virgins who will be impressed by and give themselves to a canny trader. The Jew has no delusions, knows that he will slip into permanent oblivion, and wants to die doing what he loves and does best. The Heathen simply thinks "Too much is not enough!" and wants to die with the most markers. Each craves the accelerated trading excitement my practice offers.
 
The basic objective of senescent trading is to make the patient feel more alive. We achieve this by accelerating the pace of his trading. When he was young, he had the leisure to agonize over daily charts, because he would live forever. Now death is no longer optional and we have to speed the chart up. First we wean him from his beloved daily chart. We reduce it to imperceptibility at postage stamp size, but leave it on the screen as a security blanket. Everything we need from the daily chart we put on our one-minute chart: OHLCP and his favorite harmless voodoo. Daily S/R prices are irrelevant until you get there, so why waste any chart space on them? Next we quicken his pulse with a compressed one-second chart showing market internals in real time. Gotta keep up with what the trading computers are up to. Then we give him a three-second chart which shows turning points with exquisite clarity. Our goal is to trade there. We can't hope to out-trade the computers, but we can follow their lead. Finally, our one-minute provides context for the trades that keep his pacemaker ticking (we've bypassed the internal clock and wired him directly to the market). Does he make more money? Probably not, but HE FEELS MORE ALIVE! The longest trade we called in our ward today was six minutes as the overnight gap closed. That was so long one of our patients died during it. But he died on an uptick!
 
The senescent trader typically suffers from one or more debilities which inhibit full-performance trading. My esteemed associate Joe has overcome most of them with clever chart enhancements. For the blind or near-blind trader, we have a sophisticated set of progressive audibles which mark the evolution of price throughout the day. While it is not possible to trade continuously with audibles, we do prompt high-probability no-brainer trades which cherry-pick the interior of large moves. For those previously hypersexed traders who miss having a boner during a big trade, we have a battery of prostate electrostimulators (assuming the trader still has one) to artificially recreate that concomitant excitement. Tiny underpaid Asian ladies are on call to calm any whose excitement becomes to great. As professional elephant circumcisers lament, "the pay's not good, but the tips are big." Many of our traders are indigent, or have exhausted their disability benefits, or have been abandoned to our tender mercy by their families. The only way we can support them is if they trade our house accounts profitably. For the contumacious among them who resist learning our methods, we have other less pleasant electrostimulation attachments wired to our accounts' PNL statements.
 
We found the audibles system to be so beneficial to even our sighted patients that our hearing-impaired patients became envious. So we added a scrolling window of printed trade call alerts such a "short a one tick test of the HOD" or "long a test of (proprietary) estimator." Truth to tell, we have not a few patients in full command of all their faculties who are nonetheless too dull to spot such simple patterns, so this is good for all. It also helps our hyper-excitable patients who get caught up in the thrill of the ride and attempt to hold through an ominous confluence of multiple S or R. You may wonder at the lack of reference to systems popular with ET at large. We don't waste computing resources testing for things that aren't there. However, we are considering franchising and think that Jack would make the ideal poster boy for ST. No doubt many would enjoy seeing him wired up for a demonstration of accelerated trading education.
 
Thank you for the trenchant observation. Who else but a madman would "buy when they cry and sell when they yell"? You can see in the mad rush of the crowd to buy or sell the last tick before R or S that most traders are "sane". One MUST be insane to think he can succeed at trading as a lone unsupported individual, which is what most ET losers aspire to.
 
Quote from Emil Kraepelin:

That was so long one of our patients died during it. But he died on an uptick!
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Wow. What a heart warming thread. you've inspired all of us.

Now go away.
 
Quote from jnbadger:

Wow. What a heart warming thread. you've inspired all of us.

Now go away.
More...
Hey, wait a minute, not so fast.

Maybe there's a point to this thread.

Um, there is a point, isn't there? :confused:
 
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