I did quite a bit of soul searching when I was away on vacation about life, work, and this blog. The most important thing I realized was that I start too many projects and don’t focus my time effectively. I’m involved in so many activities that it’s stretching me thin and taking quality time away from my family.
Right now I’m involved in two professional societies, one as President and the other as Past-President. I’m a manager at work that requires my constant attention, I’m a landlord that always needs to fix stuff and find tenants, and my family is growing more active as the kids get older. On top of all this, I usually wake up early and write this blog.
I spent time thinking about my priorities and opportunity costs (that MBA sure comes in handy) and realized that I had to prioritize my life based on the things valuable to me. So I listed them from highest to lowest priority.
Right off the bat, I should serve out my term as President and Past-President and then stop volunteering for those organizations. Next, I considered shutting down Neural Market Trends because it competes for time and no matter how much I love writing it, coming up with quality content takes up a lot of my limited time. I thought, “I use my Rapid Miner models to trade and position my accounts, so why not free up some time by shutting down the blog and concentrate on that? My models make me money, this blog doesn’t.â€
Then I thought about the time when I had members, protected posts, Forex trend forecasts, and sent out a weekly S&P500 Market Timing/Volatility Report. I had over 100 members, that signed up for free, and things went smoothly. The goal was to monetize the members section at some time in the future. For reasons, unknown to me right now, I abandoned the report and the member section dwindled.
This had got me thinking that if I want to continue writing this blog and not have it eat my time without making it worthwhile, maybe I should monetize the members section? The trick to making this work is providing content that my readers find valuable and would be willing to pay either a monthly or quarterly membership.
While I mull this idea over, I’ll be opening up the membership section for free again (signup or login here) and will give members who sign up between now and when I start charging, 3 free months of access. I’ll start post protecting new and improved S&P500 market timing posts starting this Sunday and gradually add more content as things move along.
My currency positions pulled back yesterday after the mini USD rally and I decided to take profits. Entry into a position is never the hardest thing to do, its closing that position that can give you sleepless nights! I sold the majority of my holdings in EURUSD and AUDUSD for a profit but my USDCAD position was sold at a slight loss.
I’m still long with a small position in EURUSD and AUDUSD, and short USDCAD. I plan on scaling into these positions as they strengthen and weaken, respectively.
Position Summary:
Looks like investors are angry after their stock market hits a losing streak, the largest in 18 years. Some say its because of fears that the ruling coalition might collapse but I suspect its something else.
So how do you take out your anger after market collapses and your life savings vanish?
Pakistan stock investors threw stones and smashed windows at Karachi’s stock exchange to protest the worst losing streak in at least 18 years, prompting intervention by the police and paramilitary officers.
There had to be another reason for all this volatility and reading further I found it. In my opinion, the main reason why the Pakistani market is crashing is that foreign investors are fleeing.
Foreign investors slashed their spending on Pakistani stocks to $62.2 million in the 11 months ended May 31, from $1.76 billion a year earlier, according to data compiled by the central bank. [via Bloomberg]
Looks like Musharraf had a lot of friends with money and strangely I feel like throwing a rock at Greenspan!
My positions took a slight tumble yesterday after oil dropped like a rock but then they firmed up. That little pull back triggered two of my three limit orders and I added to my EURUSD and USDCAD positions. I’m still short USDCAD, long EURUSD, and long AUDUSD.
Like I posted before, I expect the Euro to break $1.70 and the Aussie Dollar to hit parity soon. Here’s the profit/loss summary so far:
In my opinion, yesterday’s “rally” is likely to be short lived and I’m staying short the USD.
I hear this type of conversation amongst my struggling friends as well.
Heat or food? Gas or electricity? Medicine or mortgage payments? What to give up? What to cut back? The conversations were everywhere. In the supermarket, I heard one man tell another: “When I was a kid, you woke up, went into the bathroom, and broke up the ice in the toilet. Now my kids will have to do the same. America is moving backward.” [via Business Week]
It’s a sad state of affairs but we’re too blame, we elected socialist leeches and idiots to power.  Only true capitalism can save us now.
With everyone scrambling to see how low the Dow, Nasdaq, and S&P500 will go, I’ve decided to throw my Monte Carlo simulated price targets into the mix. They’ve been pretty accurate so far and I use this system to find my Forex stops and limit BUY/SELL points. I also use it for work creating complex budget risk Excel spreadsheets but you wouldn’t care about that.
The benefit of the using the Monte Carlo simulation is that you can update the model with new information and get a fresh perspective on where the “key†price areas in the market and how you can profit from them.
The price targets below are from low to high as of this week and the bold numbers are the most likely prices to be hit this week:
Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) come in so many flavors these days that it’s hard to keep track of them all. I really like them because it gives the average investor exposure to different asset classes such as currencies, commodities, and emerging markets. The beauty of ETF’s is that you can usually buy them for your 401K or IRA accounts thereby giving you the ability to diversify very broadly.
Currently there are 8 major currency ETF’s available that I know of and they are:
Sorry to all you South African Rand and Brazilian Real traders, you’ll have to stick with a currency brokerage account for now.
Update: Soren has kindly updated the currency ETF list in the comment section; it goes to show you that it truly is hard to keep track of them all! As a special shout-out, take a moment to sign up for Soren’s Stock Tweet @ Twitter, it truly is a piece of genius.