Interdum stultus opportuna loquitur...

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

TootRant: It's Like This, See...

Note - from June 24th 2009, this blog has migrated from Blogger to a self-hosted version. Click here to go straight there.

I promised yesterday that I would stop writing toot-toots in the prefatory remarks - why is life so full of broken promises?

The only reason I am going to have one final toot (and I promise - no more after this one) is because if the $A gives us some lovin', the account will tick over a 50% gain for the month-to-date. Recall that the start date was January 19th (actually Jan 20th Strayan time), so the gain of 50% has been achieved in a tad over 3 weeks.

Yesterday was one of those innings where you don't really time the ball; I was early or late on every shot, and thus instead of making long-off fetch a series of lofted drives that cleared the fence, I was almost invariably running singles and twos. That is what happens when you're seeing the ball well but your timing is off - if you try to 'thrash' your way out of it, you end up mistiming every shot, and the commentators are constantly saying 'great shot for no run' or 'Transom drives... slightly mistimed and they take the single. He's set and seeing the ball well, but he's having trouble finding the boundaries.'

The problem with mistiming entries is that trades then spend a long time underwater before they 'come right' - an that means that you tend to mistime exits as well (I don't get 'stressed' by bad entries, but it is natural to be relieved when the trade moves into the black if it has spent an hour or so underwater).

It makes the craft a bit harder, is all - but it doesn't stop the runs from accumulating. The account made about 40 hunjie for the day yesterday, and is up roughly another ten hunjie today so far (US$210 in Crude, €275 in DAX, and US$150-odd in the long bond... convert to $A, shake well, and you get a number around a 'k').

Yesterday it was raining hunjie - in the morning it was ten hunjie fiddie in the DAX and five hunjie in Crude; for the rest of the day there was 12 hunjie in Crude, 8 hunjie eighty in DAX and a wee bit under 5 hunjie in SPI. All done with scalps.

So, dear Reader - next time you see some consumer watchdog bureaucrat who maunders on about how such-and-so a claim by a trading or investment 'scheme' is palpably impossible, think about what happens if you compound 50% a month (or even half that).

Of course not everyone can do it, and a lot of the schemes out there will be ripoffs - but a bureaucrat is the wrong person to assess if some or other thing is possible, since bureaucrats spend their entire careers sucking taxes out of people's pockets and paypackets.

Stonkingly incredible returns are possible: as I have written countless times, a sensible contrarian trading methodology is remarkably forgiving (and pretty lucrative even if you're not in Gilchrist-like form). As an example, I am fairly sure I have not taken a single short in Crude in the last three weeks, and yet yesterday banked $1700 from Crude trades alone... all from long-side scalps.

There will be loss days (there have been a couple already in the past three weeks - they help cleanse the palate).

No USRant today - I'm going to have a bath, because my non-mouse shoulder seems to have decided to give me the gyp.