by Curtis Faith on January 9, 2012
I cried when my father died. Though not as much as I expected I would.
We had many months to prepare for his death as the lung cancer spread to his spine and ate away at it day by day. As my father grasped at any straw held out to him by the charlatans that live off the desperate fear that the dying have of their own mortality, we knew. We knew he was passing. There would be no miracle cures. No shark cartilage or herbal remedy would save the day.
It surprised me that when viewed from the right angle, in the right sort of soft lighting, it was a beautiful experience watching him die with so many of his loved ones in the same room. Those of us who loved him had our chances to say goodbye. He was finally free from pain. He died knowing that he was loved and that those he cared for, cared back.
But I never expected to cry when Steve Jobs died. This surprised me.
And as my thoughts drifted the night I read the first Tweets of his passing on my MacBook Pro, I realized that even though we had never met, Steve Jobs had been the most pivotal person in my life.
If not for Steve, I would not have dropped out of college.
If not for Steve, I would not have become a commodities trader.
If not for Steve, I would not have become a software entrepreneur.
If not for Steve, I would not have become a bestselling author.
If not for Steve, I would not have had so much early success in life that I came to believe that anything is possible; anything at all.
(cross posted from my blog at http://www.worldhouse.org/)
by Curtis Faith on December 9, 2010
As my book readers know, I have always had interests outside of trading since I left the Turtle program.
I guess like most people, I’d like to leave the world a better place for my having been here. I’ve been lucky at times and have been helped by some amazing people along the way. So I want to give back.
One of my core interests has centered around using technology to make change easier and more effective. I have been thinking about ideas for tools to help change for perhaps 15 years now. I keep up on the latest trends and languages and dabble here and there to understand what is going on. I have some good ideas that I have been waiting for the right time and opportunity to develop.
Lately, I’ve been thinking alot about communication tools for focused groups of people looking to make change.
Seth Godin calls these groups with common interests and goals: Tribes. I like that word (except in trading it tends to make people think of Ed Seykota and his Trading Tribe which is more specific than Seth’s use or the normal English meaning). In the more general world outside of trading, the word tribes works well. A tribe is a group of people with common interests and purpose.
I believe that the social tools and structures we have no longer work well. Governments are too slow to react and too far disconnected from the domains over which they legislate. Corporations can’t keep up with the pace of change without massive government assistance. This will only get worse until it gets better.
The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different and probably different in ways that we can’t anticipate.
So the question arises: Will the future be one that happens to you, or one that you help make happen?
Any decent trader can look at the trends of current society and see that there will be some major problems in the future if we don’t make some big changes. Many different kinds of problems under many different potential scenarios. We can let the future happen. Or we can give it a push.
I prefer to take an active role in the future. I have a 9-month old daughter. I don’t want her to grow up in the world as it will be if we don’t pull together and make some things different.
If you are interested in helping make the world a better place, contact me via the About page and let me know what you want to change and what kind of help you need to make that change. I can’t promise that I’ll be able to help everyone but I would like to get some idea what each of you would like to see different and what kinds of assistance you need so that as I’m assembling the tribes and technologies for change, I can help as many people as I can along the way.
Even just a few of us working towards the same goals will be more successful than we will be if we work alone.
by Curtis Faith on December 7, 2010
[NOTE: I apologize for being absent the last few weeks during this important time after having been so active posting. I've had some personal family issues that kept me busy.]
I’ve been very metaphorical lately, but in this post I’ll be nuts and bolts.
The insiders have been driving the U.S. equity markets for the last 1 1/2 year rally. They have made a lot of money. They are largely long.
In order to make a profit they need to sell their stock to someone.
In order to do this, they need to find some suckers. They generally find them. They usually end up being green traders and “investors” who know even less about the markets. The public has stayed out of the rally because they were burnt and still remember the 90s tech rally and how that ended as well as the 2008 crash. So what would the insiders do if they wanted to sell en masse? They’d need to get the public to start buying so they could unload their shares on the way up.
The rally of the last few days has been on relatively light volume, less than average for the big up days.
If I were an insider I’d be hoping to get the price high enough to start a buying binge and then dump my stocks.
As a trader, you can’t look at things this way. The price is currently going up so you can’t be short but we are at a market cusp. A few percent higher is bullish over the long-term. One or two percent lower is very bearish, a breakout failure and one of my favorite short trades.
So pay attention if you are a trader. And don’t pay attention to the news.
If you are a trend follower, you might be in for a wild ride. I advised my friends who were trend followers to exit a bit lower a few weeks back. If the markets fail the breakout that advice continues only with more urgency than the last time. If the prices go higher, and they certainly might, then all bets are off. Respond to what the market does. Don’t predict.
You can judge current conditions but you can’t predict the markets reliably except over the very short term. For example, if this breakout fails, one can predict with much better than 50:50 odds that prices will drop at least half way to the lows after the November highs. This applies to gold, cotton, silver, stock indices, essentially everything that has moved with the same basic price structure, rally for the last six months followed by pause in November and recent new breakout.
The trend followers are all having a huge year. This will end spectacularly at some point. My gut says that time is very close. When these things end, markets all tend to correlate in ways that don’t show up in testing so you end up seeing all things reversing at the same time. It’s not pretty and one of the reasons that trend followers needs iron constitutions.
But you don’t want to fight the trend. If you have relatively small positions, I’d get out and and back in over a very tight percentage range surrounding the highs of early November. The alternative strategy is to risk a 20% to 50% drawdown. If you have large positions and can’t get out without moving the markets, well then I’d do this with partial positions.
Trading From Your Gut
Way of the Turtle
Inside the Mind of the Turtles