One of the advantages of being in Spain is that the New Year starts an hour earlier, so I will be well and trully w***ered by the time it gets to midnight in the UK.
Unfortunately I missed out on running in the annual St Silvestre 5k Run in Girona tonight, as my leg is still recovering from my recent ski crash, but I will be doing it next year!
A couple of resolutions for 2010
The main one is to get back to doing proper training and lose the spare tyre that I have accumulated since the summer!!!
I'm skiing again for a week at Easter, then there are several Masters rowing regattas that I'm entering and a 10 day mountain bike trip in Switzerland, so I should have enough motivation.
I may also start smoking this evening so that I can give that up
I've been doing a fair bit of statistical analysis of many sports and markets over the last few weeks.
I've spotted some potential winning strategies and programmed them into my Free API Bot program and I'll be starting these off with a £200 bank on 1st January to see what happens. The stakes will start out quite low and only increase slowly as I need the bank to be able to ride out any losing streaks that will inevitably be part of any systems based on probability.
My manual trading for the next few months will be with low stakes (£2-£5) mainly in the horse, dog and tennis markets. I'm hoping that low stakes will take off any pressure to do anything other than read the markets and trade without emotion.
I'm at the point in my trading development where I should be able to start making consistent profits if I can maintain good discipline and good habits. I need to stop taking two steps forwards and three steps backwards. I will think about increasing stakes again around Easter time if it goes well.
I read a good post by Jibiko about trading and edges on The Toy forum yesterday, so I've posted a link below:
Once you find an edge there's no reason not to try and automate it. But I'm also aware that any edges I find are liable to move, so I will need to keep monitoring and refining them.
Awareness
I noticed that Adam Heathcote has made a second post about Self Awareness in his blog and set up a new website http://www.adamheathcote.com It will be interesting to see how this develops and I'm more interested in this than I was in his trading blog.
Several years ago I quit a well paid job that was destroying my soul so that I could focus on living and personal challenges. I've been much happier (and poorer) since I did that.
It's reassuring to see someone like Adam who is known for making lots of money saying that making money isn't what it is all about.
It is blatantly obvious that the current financial systems based on debt and personal greed combined with ever increasing consumption and raping of the earth's resources is not sustainable for much longer, and there are going to have to be some big changes soon. So if you want to do anything or go anywhere my advice is to do it now while you can.
It may be strange for a wannabe trader, but even from the outset my goals have not been about making lots of money. It is as much about the challenge of reading the markets and learning about myself as I react to what the markets throw at me. It is a bonus if I can make enough to pay my bills as this will then let me work for free at the things I enjoy doing instead of having to charge for them.
I managed to walk (although some would call it limping) to the shops without my leg hurting
Might even be back on the skis by Thursday.
Spent most of the day trying to install SQL Server SP1 and seems it's a common problem with failing to update shared features and none of the solutions I found worked, although one of them did completely screw my visual studio install so I had to spend two hours reinstalling that... have now given up. I'll probably just leave it not patched.
As well as being a free trading application (that in my opinion is way ahead of the alternatives for manual trading) there is also a traders forum where traders can exchange ideas and opinions, offer and seek advice, and you can openly discuss/praise/criticise any trading products you like.
And it will be free at least until the end of 2010
I'm now in Switzerland and Germany skiing for the next 3 weeks (it's a tough job but someone has to do it) so I may not be updating the blog much until January when normal trading and blog service will be resumed.
