Profile

Text in RED are edits or additions. 

Hello, I am Formerly ADD Trader, and yes, I do have ADD, which is being treated.  I was born in 1967, and I live in the western United States, in a place that had a TV show named after it.  I can’t tell you the name, but the initials are “O.C.”  I am a full time trader, and if you are on my site, you may hear a ticking sound.  Relax, it is not a bomb under your desk, it is the timer ticking away the minutes until I……

A.  Blow up as a trader

B.  Just abandon this blog (hey…I do have ADD)

C.  Have a rich relative die and just retire

…..But I have been here a year already so maybe I will continue with this blog.

HISTORY

I went into a Sears store back in 1983 (Dean Whitter used to have offices in Sears) and purchased my first stock….300 shares of Altos computers.  I didn’t know what they did, but some guy on the local VHF channel said it was a good stock.  Can’t remember what happened with Altos, but a couple of years later, a friend of mine had a company that was working with another company name Adobe Systems.  They were going to be the standard for IBM’s desktop publishing, and blah, blah….okay I’ll buy the stock.

Of course as most traders know, the worst thing that could have happened at this point did….the stock went on an incredible run and I made a few G’s.  Maybe it doesn’t sound like much, but to an eighteen year old kid, it was more money than I had ever seen before.  That was it, it was all over.  This trading thing was so easy.  I had found my calling, and was on track to be a millionaire in about six months.  Unfortunately, life intruded and I went off in another direction, buying and selling stocks fairly unsuccessfully in my spare time for the next few years.

In the early nineties, this thing named Prodigy came around, which gave you on-line access.  I found the Money Talk BB and began posting with other stock investors.  However, there was something different about these guys.  They talked in ways I had never heard of, and they were in and out of stocks pretty quickly, usually for a profit.  This was my first exposure to technical analysis and to a more pure form of trading.  I learned a lot from these guys, who were mostly engineers or held advanced degrees of some sort, but I could never really get the grasp of the “quant” style of trading they used.

I continued to trade, being moderately successful, but in retrospect it was probably because basically every stock was going through the roof (at least NASDAQ ones).  Fortunately I got so busy running a company I had started a few years earlier, that I had all my money in a hedge fund, run by a trader I really respected, when the bottom fell out of the market.  If I hadn’t I am pretty sure I would have had all my equity wiped out.  Fast forward to 2005, and after 20 years of running my company (totally non-trading related), I decided I couldn’t take it any more, so I sold the company and decided to trade full time.  On the first day of trading full time, I decided the home builders were ready to tank and shorted a bunch of them.  Once again, the worst thing that could have happened did, I made about $7500 in one day.  Just like 20 years earlier, I figured trading was so easy, and that I would be a millionaire, but this time in only 3 months.  (You don’t even want to hear about how I was still short them a couple weeks later when they went on the run of a lifetime….let’s just say “doh”)!

METHODOLOGY

Didn’t you just read my history…..I don’t have one.  Well, that is not exactly true.  I have bits and pieces of different ones, which randomly work or fail.   I like trading chart patterns.  Momentum stocks, breaking out with expanding volume.  My gut tells me that to be successful over time, you have to pick a style that fits your personality, and my personality is to KISS (keep it simple stupid).  I have always thought that you couldn’t be successful without twenty different technical indicators, fib numbers, and Gann lines all over your charts, but I have been inspired by reading the posts of Trader Mike, The Wall Street Warrior (Jamie), Trader X, and others, who use a structured but more simple way to trade (and to trade successfully).  I have switched over to day trading exclusively.  I run a gappers scan in the morning and look for set ups based on candlestick patterns.  I am using a fixed loss on each trade or “R” factor, and size my trades based upon chart based stops, and their distance from my entry points.  I am also using FIB extensions for profit targets.

I have realized that my best trading is very short term (day trading) and longer term (position trading).  I just get killed in the middle (swing trading).

REASON FOR BLOGGING

No matter what it may seem like, I really want to be a consistently profitable trader.  I love doing it, and don’t ever want to do anything else.  Also, I have a wife and child to provide for, so I either make it, or I am in big trouble.  I hope that by blogging, it can serve as a journal of my trades.  Up until this point in my life, I don’t think I have had the discipline to develop a true methodology for my trading, and I am hoping that this  blog, for myself and all the world to see, helps force me to develop and stick to a consistent method and become a better trader.  Also, it is my Mea Culpa to the Trading Gods whom I hope will take pity on me.

EQUIPMENT AND RESOURCES

I don’t know why anyone would be interested in my computer setup (let alone my blog), but it seems that every trader who blogs out there lists theirs, so I will too.

I have a Dell XPS 600 CPU that is factory setup for four monitors (all MAG 19″).  I can’t remember the hard drive size, processor speed, etc, suffice to say they were the most and fastest you could get with this model when I bought it a year or so ago.  I had always just bought HP computers at Best Buy when I needed them, and they always worked great for me, but I succumbed to the hype and ordered this Dell when I began full time trader.  I think I wasted my money on it.  It works fine, but so would have any other brand and I could have saved a couple of thousand.  I also use a seperate laptop with a wireless card.

I use TC2007 to sort stock and review charts EOD.  I use Schwab Street Smart Pro for my charting and order entry.  I used to use CyberTrader back when I wasn’t doing enough trades each month to get rid of their monthly charge, and I might revisit it in the future.  However, SSP uses the CT order entry platform anyway, so for now it is fine.  I switched back to CyberTrader in Feb 2007, and it worked fine until they were bought out by Schwab.  Now it is SS Pro again, and it sucks, having incorporated almost none of the most important functions that traders use from CT.  As I write this I am planning to switch to Interactive Brokers by year end.  I also used to use Qcharts, which I loved in terms of ease of use, but their data was too slow and buggy so I had to bail on them.

There are two “letters” I subscribe to.  I know in the world of traders this is sometimes looked down on, but all I can say is both make their subscription price back in spades every year.  First is Chartpattern.com.  This is Dan Zanger’s letter, you know, the former pool builder who took $18,000 and ran it into 45 Million back during the Internet boom.  His real trick though was keeping a lot of it when the market tanked.  It is geared toward momentum stocks.

The other letter is Brookins Buys, put out by Henry Brookins.  Henry is a real trader, who has been doing it successfully since 1991.  If you want to learn how to trade for a living, get his letter.  By the way, I am not affiliated with either letter and get no benefit from mentioning them.

 I also subscribe to Active Trader, SFO, Technical Analysis of Stocks and Commodities, etc…all of which are usually too “quant” for me.  I also get Trader Monthly which just is for fun and inspiration.

Books on trading are the same that most list….Elder, Weistein, O’Neil, Schwagger, etc……!