Yclept Trades

[yclept]

Both sides of the coin:

seekingalpha.com/article/287995-why-the-bulls-and-bears-are-both-almost-right?source=email_macro_view

[2kids10horses]

yclept,

I understand what you're going thru with your trading system. My system gave a Buy signal last night. It was long over the weekend, then Monday night it gave a Sell, go short signal, then last night, it gave a Buy signal. It's an end-of-day signal.

So, as usual, I placed my orders overnight to execute at the Open.

THis morning, I took a look at the Futures, and cancelled my orders, thus keeping my short position.

We'll see what my system says to do this evening.

But sometimes you just gotta break the rules.

[yclept]

sold TSO @ 19.3425 -10.44% one day
sold SFD @ 19.7901; -5.3% one day
sold KEM @ 8.5014; -15.86% one day

bought QID @ 60.1862

I think there is more than enough renting of clothing and wearing of ashes to explain the above moves. Maybe this will prove wrong again, but at least it's back in line with my 4/14 moving average signals.
I reckon I was trying too hard to tell the market what to do (or predict what it was about to do without waiting for the signal that it had done so).

The QID I hold with today's buy is only enough to counterbalance about half of the long positions I still hold as a play against the USD, but should help. Maybe with a little better definition I'll be willing to take on more downside positions.

The long positions I still have are: EGMIQ (worth nothing, but at least it's a long-term buy and hold! ;-)), EWD, EWS, FXS, NBY. So, I'm whittled back down to nearly all cash, and reckon I can't get pummeled much from here.

[danshirley]

'...renting of clothing' I just can't figure out what that refers to.

If you are talking about behaving irrationally, there are always situations where you will not be able to behave rationally and the best thing is to just avoid those situations completely.
e.g.
In the early 1980's I had to travel on occasion from Frankfort West Germany to Gottingen. The train you took went through a piece of East Germany.
The first time I took that train I was by myself and no one had prepared me for what might happen.
A few miles outside of Frankfort the train slowed down and I looked out the window and there were soldiers in these sad grey uniforms holding sub-machine guns lined up alongside the track. The train stopped and the soldiers got on the train, one to each car each soldier holding a submachine gun. The train started again and I asked a fellow traveler what the hell was happening and he said it was just an East German harassment and that everything would be OK.

At this point I became completely unhinged and began to yell at the soldier (quite a young fellow) in our car things like: "how can you do this to your own people?", "Are you an animal?" "Don't you have a conscience" etc.

This was obviously not a rational thing to do, but I simply couldn't help it. The next trip I was able to take a different route which went around East Germany thus avoiding the possibility of being shot for having a big mouth.

I am still out of the market because I am afraid that the daily volatility and general irrationality will unhinge me and make me do something stupid.

(I am reminded of this event by a story in our local paper about this August being the 50th anniversary of the building of the Berlin Wall... remember "Ich bin ein Berliner" ??
urbanlegends.about.com/cs/historical/a/jfk_berliner.htm)

[yclept]

Maybe renting of "garments" would have been more familiar.
www.askmoses.com/en/article/165,2110324/Why-do-mourners-tear-their-clothing.html

Primarily I see my irrationality in deciding to use a mechanical signal; then acting before the signal occurs due to anticipation based upon a judgment that the moving average crossover is inevitable. The ultimate insult, of course, is when the crossover doesn't happen. It just seemed so inevitable (put a 4 and 14 ma on a chart of SPX and one will see they looked like they were going to cross at a 90 degree angle).

Now, use of signals like this may itself be a mistake, for I too have read a lot of studies that say there's nothing valid about using them, be they moving average crossovers, or fancy moving average crossovers like the MACD, etc. But to put that part of the issue aside since I have decided to use one, the absolute insanity is in not waiting for the signal -- and then subsequently being proven wrong.

Until Aug 15, I had heavy positions in QID and DXD, both of which had served me well over the previous 2+ weeks that I had owned them. Then I dumped them because it looked inevitable to me that the 4 sma was going to cross above the 14 sma. The next day I compounded the error by starting to pick up a few long single positions, all of which proved to be brutal losers over the one day I owned them. More importantly, I missed large gains I would have seen had I kept the QID and DXD.

Any such signal is lagging by nature. When I did some pretty exhaustive studies to chose the moving average pair that gave acceptable results for me (balancing whipsaws versus signals fast enough to get in fairly early on worthwhile moves), there were, I'm sure, times when anticipating the signal would have proven right and other times when it would be proven wrong. In any case, I just studied results based upon trading the day after the signal, not based upon anticipation of the signal. In that sense, watching in real time is a disadvantage as it seems to make me think I can predict what the mechanical signal will do.

Anyway, it's all water under the bridge. I missed what should have been some substantial gains, and simultaneously incurred some quick losses (less important since the position sizes on the errant long positions were much smaller than the sizes of the negatively biased ETFs I sold). Now I'm kind of gun-shy and have only bought back about enough QID to balance some of the long positions I still hold. At any rate, I've got some garment repair to keep me busy, so maybe won't have as much time to go on the red light and stop for the green.

[yclept]

Just tucking this away here as I fear it will be deleted from the thread in which it appears.

www.elitetrader.com look for me in options

[yclept]

Good-bye to all. I am gone.

When links to well-established, long-standing trading forums are deleted (as is the case in the post above), it's just time to figure this message board is not worth the effort. When entire threads are "sanitized", brooking no dissent and re-titled to exclude reasoned arguments from said dissenters, leaving only the "approved" posts -- well, enough said. I just wanted to say good-bye to all the folks I've known here and at MSN over the last 15 years or so.

Good grief! Now I'm a refugee from the MSN refugee board; how bad is that! ;-)

[mmhmm]

Yclept, I wish you wouldn' t be quite so hasty. Of course, I can't stop you from doing whatever you wish, and I really wouldn't try. I'd just like to see you make the effort to endeavor to find a middle ground, or a compromise, to settle whatever problems you have. I think, from what I understand, no harm was really meant. There was just an effort to clean up a thread that had gone completely off track. Perhaps, with a bit of effort on both your parts, the rift that has developed between you and DI can be mended.

It's just a thought, but I do hope you'll consider it.

[yclept]

I logged-in to see if any of our normal moderators were aware of what went on and were going to comment. I guess not. The thread has been re-named and "sanitized", so the evidence is gone.

I don't think it was D.I. who deleted all my work. I've never seen him censor things with which he simply disagrees. Nor do we have any particular personal problem that I am aware of -- he's wrong about a bunch of stuff, but it's his money at risk. I sometimes try to throw in counterparts to what I see as dangerous errors people post. The Reuters article (no doubt spoon-fed by Fidelity as a "press release") fell into that classification as many people would take something with their by-line (if that's what you call an anonymous article from a normally reliable source when the actual writer is unnamed) as reliable. The article was full of distortions/outright lies. Some editor at Reuters needs to be fired.

I'm guessing the "cleansing" was by Moon mod or whomever that other mod with a cat avatar (same avatar as yours, but a different name) was. On this thread, Moon deleted a link Dan posted (and I transferred to this thread for reference) to Elitetrader thinking (I guess) it was Dan's website! So I would not be surprised that a general "clean-up" of some other thread (deleting what was perhaps and hour or two of my work) isn't something she would do.

What went on here was a very nasty display of authoritarianism; brooking no dissent. It was under the guise of posts being personal insults, though nothing in any of my posts was pointed out as having met that criterion for deletion. Nothing Dan posted (at least of the posts I saw) was half as bad as the every-day insults thrown back and forth on many of these boards, supposedly in jest.

I have better things to do with my time than to research and write posts that are going to be arbitrarily deleted.

[rovo]

Yclept, I'm not sure what happened over the weekend and although I have found some of the posts, I have not found them all. As such it is better for me not to comment on the actions as I do not have enough knowledge of what happened.

rovo -- Moderator

[moon/Laura]

yclept, none of it is deleted.. it is moved elsewhere, is all. It was my understanding that DI only wanted to remove the portions that contained personal attack.. he may not be done with it yet..

[mtntigger]

Don't go yclept! I really would miss your knowledge and your opinions on this board. Take a time out; they help (I've done it numerous times), and come back when you're ready.

[moon/Laura]

Moon deleted a link Dan posted (and I transferred to this thread for reference) to Elitetrader thinking (I guess) it was Dan's website!

yclept, as i said, none of this is actually deleted. if that link is not to dan's personal site, then i am more than happy to put it back here. The phrasing was such that i did believe it was his, personally. if i'm incorrect, which it appears i am, then i apologize.

[Driftr]

Aug 22, 2011 0:13:15 GMT -5 @yclept said:

Good-bye to all. I am gone.

When links to well-established, long-standing trading forums are deleted (as is the case in the post above), it's just time to figure this message board is not worth the effort. When entire threads are "sanitized", brooking no dissent and re-titled to exclude reasoned arguments from said dissenters, leaving only the "approved" posts -- well, enough said. I just wanted to say good-bye to all the folks I've known here and at MSN over the last 15 years or so.

Good grief! Now I'm a refugee from the MSN refugee board; how bad is that! ;-)

Good luck to you in whatever you do yclept. Thank you for everything you've shared.

[uncle23]

....
post #187

sold TSO @ 19.3425 -10.44% one day
sold SFD @ 19.7901; -5.3% one day
sold KEM @ 8.5014; -15.86% one day


bought QID @ 60.1862



as of today 2:50 pm

TSO.........18.72....close at 18.59
SFD.........19.40....close at...19.33
KEM......... 7.96....close at......8.00

QID.......61.44....close at 61.46...


ETA: Good move....stopped the bleeding then move on forward..

[2kids10horses]

I took a look at the site Dan had given as to where he was going.

There is a Thread over there "Conservative Option Trades" that has the same name as the thread he created here.

I assume that's his thread, not his website.

I hate to see three long established posters on this board leave or get kicked out for such petty nonsense.

Perhaps a "kinder gentler" way of stopping the argument (or name calling or whatever) would have been to close the thread from any new additional posts.

Thankfully, we rarely have outbreaks like that here in IBB.