“It is one of the great paradoxes of the stock market that what seems too high usually goes higher and what seems too low usually goes lower.” - William O’Neil

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Good morning, my name is the chartist formerly known as Ugly, and I am a loser. I have it in me to do serious financial damage to my account.

Dear Diary,
CHINA is #1 on my list today.
Let’s finish off February January the best we can.

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Perry has traded me 12 brand new, still in their boxes, double-headed gumball machines (with stands) for the subscription to trade-ideas. Thanks Perry!
Here is an opportunity to start (or grow) your own vending business - with 12 new machines. If any readers would like to offer a trade for these machines, email me and let me know. They are currently located in San Diego, CA.
Also, if you don’t have any ideas for a trade, but would still like to help out - any publicity that you can direct this way would be very helpful - thanks!
I started with one blue paperclip and will continue to trade things until someone trades me one share of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRK-A). Here is a picture of the trades so far:

The Liberty Vending Catalog brochure lists a “Double Head Machine with stand” priced at $299. Twelve of these would be about $3500. For the purposes of this estimation, I’ll say their value is half that - $1750. I bought the paperclip at CVS - it was one of a box of 45 vinyl coated giant paper clips, that cost me $1.49. That would give the single blue paperclip a value of about 4 cents.
So I have traded the paperclip to the vending machines for a profit of about 4,374,900%. One share of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRK-A) is currently priced at $106,000 and the gumball machines are about 1.65% of this value. So I will need to get about a 6000% return on trading these gumball machines in order to achieve my goal. I’ve already returned over 4 million percent on this project so far, another 6000 percent shouldn’t be too hard, right?

Matthieu Ricard, a French academic-turned-Buddhist monk (and French interpreter for the Dalai Lama), is a very happy person. Scientists proved it by looking at his brain:

MRI scans showed that he and other long-term meditators - who had completed more than 10,000 hours each - experienced a huge level of “positive emotions” in the left pre-frontal cortex of the brain, which is associated with happiness. The right-hand side, which handles negative thoughts, is suppressed.

“The mind is malleable,” Mr Ricard told The Independent on Sunday yesterday. “Our life can be greatly transformed by even a minimal change in how we manage our thoughts and perceive and interpret the world. Happiness is a skill. It requires effort and time.”

via trader-x

Since day trading is a lot about recognizing the patterns in charts, I have decided to post a chart every day that would have resulted in a profitable dummy trade. I will post these in the dummy-a-day category which you can simply click to review for practice. The chart will be displayed as it looked when the trade should have been executed, and when you move your mouse over the image, it will show how the trade would have resulted.
HRBN is an OB stock that traded only 200k shares, but it set up nicely didn’t it?:

If you bought HRBN when it broke above the 11:00 candle at $10.01 with a stop below it at $9.84, you would only risk 17 cents. Holding until the end of the day would have given you about 229 cents for every share you owned, or nearly 13.5 times your risk.

And it’s only $60 a year - but it is FREE if you have a funded Ameritrade account. It is also free if you don’t mind ads or only having two days of historical intraday data.
PLUS, you get IQFeed for only $20 a month (reduced from $50) if you are registered with QuoteTracker. I tried this out today and there was a noticeable difference in the data as opposed to using Interactive Brokers or Ameritrade. Basically the data was perfect with IQFeed, but with the others I noticed some problems. BTW, everytime I click on a new stock, I have to ctrl+F to backfill the intraday data - is there any way to have this automatic? I only have to do it once and it is fine after that, but it is still kind of annoying to do it even once for every new symbol.
Highchartpatterns sent out an email the other day talking about how they use QuoteTracker, which was very helpful. One thing they mentioned - and that is very important to my style of trading - is the alerts. Not only can you set them to go off at certain prices (as with Cybertrader), but you can just draw a trendline and right-click on it to set an alert that fires when it is crossed.
I also like the vol % column on the watchlist - you can easily sort your list by volume as a percentage of average daily volume. I just put the QQQQ on the list and keep my eye on everything that is above it (i.e. has increased volume relative to the QQQQ).
I also hooked up trading within QuoteTracker today, which is kind of cool.
Really the only thing I miss from Cybertrader are the more sophisticated alerts. I’d like to be able to have automatic orders placed at certain prices or times. Maybe this is possible with QuoteTracker, I don’t know. I have to spend more time screwing around with it.
But overall I’m settling in to using QuoteTracker from now on. Does anyone know how it is with charting/trading futures? Another thing that would be nice would be some custom scans, for example to pull up the top % gainers for the day with average volume over 1 million shares.
I’ll have to spend some time reading the manual.

“It is one of the great paradoxes of the stock market that what seems too high usually goes higher and what seems too low usually goes lower.” - William O’Neil

– Click here for today’s full list –

“It is one of the great paradoxes of the stock market that what seems too high usually goes higher and what seems too low usually goes lower.” - William O’Neil

– Click here for today’s full list –

This iguana named Mozart has had an erection for over a week and veterenarians have decided that it is time to amputate. Ouch.

Veterinarians at Antwerp’s Aquatopia had sought to treat the animal’s problem, but decided removal was the only solution because of the risk of infection. The good news for Mozart and his mates is that male iguanas have two penises.

I thought they were going to say the good news is that it will grow back.