So yes I’m still alive. No updates for a while, I know. Not that things are quiet, on the contrary, lots happening, especially since we got back from trekking in Sapa. 2009 was a good year, may 2010 will be at least just as good :-)

Anyways, after trying a couple of times to watch Avatar at the IMAX just to find out all normal timeshows were sold out (who goes to watch a movie at 3am??), we finally managed to watch it yesterday. It’s a good movie, especially the visual effects. Story-wise it’s a mix of Pocahontas / Matrix / Dances with Wolves / Last Samurai, i.e. an outsider white guy falls in love with a local, ‘goes native’ and saves a world from the bad guys with some Jurasic Park elements thrown in too. Maybe it’s the amazing graphics together with the 3D and IMAX huge screen but I didn’t feel the movie was long despite it being over 2 hours. The flying scenes and the forest at night were especially fantastic. Go and watch and see for yourself.

So it’s been ages since I wrote anything here. I’ve been busy ( as usual) with a bunch of projects. I can’t believe how time flies, it’s almost the end of 2009. I’m still trading as usual, plus always looking at adding more strategies, styles, instruments and timeframes.  My usual stocks trading is taking less and less of my time as the whole process became so ingrained as a second nature that I don’t need to spend too much time thinking about it.

So what else is going on? I’m (still): reading a lot, sim trading futures, enjoying life here and traveling and that’s about. it.

Ah yes one interesting tool I’ve added to my permanent opened sites is for goal tracking, it’s called Joe’s Goals. A really nice little web app that allows one to track daily goals. It’s not designed to keep tracks of huge life goals (when will I get to the moon?) but more of the routine stuff like, did I eat a good healthy breakfast today? Did I update my trading journal? Somehow ticking those boxes helps in getting me to do some of those things. There are also reports you can generate to show graphs of trends in meeting your goals. How will my world look without graphs and statistics I cannot imagine :-)

As everyone knows, making money decisions, investing or trading can be a highly emotional experience, especially for those who are not used to it. There’s something about human psyche that ramps up emotions to extreme levels when money is on the line. Looks like Philips has not translated those concepts into a little gadget. It’s tough to know how accurate it’s going to be and how people will end up using it but it might be a useful tool in at least helping to monitor those emotions and becoming more aware of them as well as tracking their impact on decision making.

Emotional investor? Try using the rationalizer

Philips Electronics has teamed up with a prominent Dutch bank to develop a system of warning home traders when they’re about to make a decision to buy or sell stocks while feeling overly emotional. It’s called “The Rationalizer,” and a test model is on display at an innovation summit in Brussels this week.

Who knows, maybe the next step is hooking up a bunch of people to this at the same time and showing aggregate emotional stress levels. That could be a really useful indicator, for a change.

למי שמחפש מידע על מסחר יומי דרך החברה קולמקס / טריידנט יש בפורום דה מרקר מידע רב עליהם.

עזרה בקשר לקולמקס - TheMarker Cafe

כמו שכתבתי בפורום את דעתי.

קולמקס איננה ברוקר אלא חברת מסחר פרטית שמתווכת בינך לבין הברוקר. העמלות
זולות יחסית לבנקים בארץ אבל יקרות יחסית למספר ברוקרים מובילים בארה”ב. החברה רשומה
באיי הבתולה.

Tags: מאיר ברק, מסחר יומי, קולמקס, טריידנט

I’ve just received an email from INO offering readers a trading course packed with information for the best price possible = free :-) Check it out here. It includes 10 lessons covering various topics. Not a bad way to potentially pick up on an idea or two to research or integrate into your trading.

I’m reading an interesting book called The Davinci Method. I’ve only just started it but a lot of the material rings very true to me, on a personal level both the positive and negative traits the author associates with people who strive to break away from social norms do their own thing. Also on a more general level there are interesting observations about the society we live in. For example the author makes a point about the fact that these days in most of the Western world governments don’t have much control over individuals anymore, the power lies with corporations. Take for example comparisons of expensive structures in the world, back in ancient civilizations it was mostly kings and rules of empires who built monuments and extravagant structures, then in the middle ages power transferred and it was churches and cathedrals which clearly demonstrated to the masses who had the power and money. These days when you look at impressive structures in cities they’re more likely to be buildings of financial companies or other huge conglomerates. OK, so it’s not something really that ground breaking that companies wield increasing power but the author does make some interesting observations that at least I didn’t think about before. Another example is that no generation has been marketed to as heavily and as sophisticated as we now see. Are there long term implications of this? Creating on mass scale strong emotional needs from very young age: if only you have this or that then you’d be happy / complete / successful or just simply fit in with “everyone else who already have it”.

I’m only about 20% into the book so I will revisit this mini review later but if you’re a rebellious, risk seeking, non-conformist type of person then I would highly recommend the book. There is also a website here accompanying the book with some tests and other tidbits.

There’s an interesting post over at Brett Steenbarger’s blog on viewing sectors performance during the day. I find it more and more useful myself when looking at the market. It doesn’t tell you of course what’s going to happen but it helps frame a bias for the day and acts as confirmation/non of other analysis. Anyway I thought I’d another tool along the same lines. This one from Google Finance. In the past I’ve always defaulted to Yahoo!Finance for the (relatively) rare occasions I needed to check up on a ticker and see what’s the company behind it. However recently I’ve started using Google Finance more and more, they keep rolling out new stuff and making improvements to layout and content. So here’s what their sectors overview look like. I like the clean and easy to read format.