This article about the success of some website traders is interesting.

Davis says he generally holds on to websites for at least a few months before flipping them. Sometimes, though, the process is much quicker like the time he bought a forum about day-care centres for $US1500 and sold it six hours later for $US3500.

“I used to make my own websites and sell them, but then I realised, hey, this is much easier than making them,” he says. “It’s as simple as buying a website from someone and making it more attractive. It’s about creating value where there was none.”

Congratulations to Polaris for winning the Man-Machine Poker Competition in Las Vegas. I knew you could do it. Polaris 2.0 won the event with 3 wins, 2 losses and 1 tie - beating Matt Hawrilenko and other competitors convincingly by winning both sides of a duplicate match.
Computers have long been the best chess players. How long before they are the best day traders? I would say there is a good chance that they already are.

“There are two really big changes in Polaris over last year,” said professor Michael Bowling, who supervised graduate students who programmed Polaris. “First of all, our poker model is much expanded over last year–its much harder for humans to exploit weaknesses. And secondly, we have added an element of learning, where Polaris identifies which common poker stratagy a human is using and switches its own strategy to counter. This complicated the human players ability to compare notes, since Polaris chose a different strategy to use against each of the humans it played,” Bowling said.

“Repeatedly, I heard players exclaim that they had never seen a human do that before,” said Bowling. “Switching strategies really threw the humans for a loop.”

Even though Polaris beat the humans in Las Vegas, the University of Alberta group said it expects to be asked for rematches by the vanquished pros as well as by other poker experts who will claim the win by Polaris was a fluke. “Even after Deep Blue beat Kasparov, there were still some skeptics, and I think the same is true here,” said Bowling. “Over the next year or so there are going to have to be several rematches before everyone is convinced that humans have been surpassed by machines in poker.”

I am impressed with Byrne’s ranking on Hacker News. He is currently in the #32 spot overall (edit: #33 because pg is unlisted). Here are some of his most up-voted submissions:

• Y Combinator Ad
• Living With the Computer Whiz Kids
• The Technology Secrets of Cocaine Inc.
• Gmail’s Quota Secrets (slideshow)
• ‘Excuse Me. May I Have Your Seat?’
• More than 100 scientists and thinkers discuss what they’ve changed their minds about
• Bountii - New YC Startup
• Max Levchin: “The last time I got kids to drop out of college, they all bought houses for cash.”

I highly recommend Brian Shannon’s new book “Technical Analysis Using Multiple Timeframes.” It is great. Brian is a pro - as real of a trader as they get. And it’s always best to learn from those who not only know what they’re doing - but those who live off of what they do.
The book is filled with a lot of wisdom that you can only get from a trader who spends every day in the market - year after year.
Nice job, Brian.
I also recommend checking out his blog for his daily market analysis videos.

The ATS made a new high, in terms of profit defined by risk per trade (R) this week:

The expectancy of the system continues to hold steady at around 0.15R per trade (i.e., we can expect to make 15% of whatever we risk on a trade).

Finally. The brain-computer interface headset is finally here. Chuck your keyboard and mouse out the window, write a check for $299, and sit back and let your brain do all the work:

To help players master the art of moving on-screen objects solely through concentration, the headset will come bundled with a game, set on a magical mountain, that includes practice exercises, said Geoffrey Mackellar, Emotiv’s research and development manager. “You clear the mind,” he said, and then do 30 to 40 seconds of training, by concentrating, for instance, on visualizing a block lifting from the earth. “On the first or second attempt, you can lift it at will.”

…The system doesn’t just lift boulders. It can also detect some of a player’s facial expressions and emotional responses: smile, frown or wink, for instance, and an avatar on screen can do so, too. Grow bored during a battle, and the system can detect ennui and supply a few dragons, or change the music. The device tracks a total of about 30 responses.

…Players of shooting games, for instance, may use eye movement to trigger a shot, shaving milliseconds off of their response time and sparing their hands.

Just imagine what impact this will have on trading. You think the NYSE has changed a lot in recent years? Just wait.
And make very sure to keep your firewall and anti-virus software up to date (although I would still probably be able to hack into your headset and control your mind with the use of anonymous proxy servers).

The automated trading system had it’s fifth straight day of gains, which is a new winning streak record. To commemorate the moment, I have decided to take Johnson’s advice and start calling it the ATM - which stands for Automated Trading Machine.
I was only able to withdraw $389 from the ATM today, even though it was up over 6R at one point (+$1400), as some short trades reversed at the end of the day.

The market got crushed today. That is the great thing about day trading - when the market tanks like it did today, you have a lot of opportunity to make money. And all of the profits are already booked on the run up yesterday. The automated trading system made 4.47R yesterday and 2.49R today. All (and more) of the profit today was made with a short of UAUA:

I’ve been looking at various stats of the system, now that we have almost 3 months worth of trading data. Last week, I posted the chart of the expectancy leveling off. This chart of the win-rate leveling off is also interesting:

A 34% win rate is nothing to brag about, but if it works - then I’m fine with it.
The best thing about these charts is that it gives you a good idea of how your system performs. Obviously, it can have streaks of different results - and you have to plan for this - but I like getting more data because it gives you a better idea of what you can expect.

May wasn’t the best month for the automated trading system, but it made a slight profit:

Mostly we just started off poorly (dropping down below -10R!), but had a steady recovery for the rest of the month. The ATS made 96 trades with a win rate of only 32.29% and an expectancy of 0.08. The 8R we made this month brings our total since mid-March (when we started) to +36.2R.
As I was looking over the results since we started in March, I found this chart of the automated trading system’s expectancy interesting:

It seems to have leveled off at the 0.15 area, which is fine with me. With an expectancy of 0.15 and an average of about 100 trades a month, we can expect to make 15R a month and 180R a year. If the current rate continues in the future, the ATS will reach the +100R mark around October.

The automated trading system made a new high in terms of accumulated R (risk per trade) and profit ($) today. It always feels good when that happens, especially after a nosedive start to the month of May. Now we’re up over 10R on the month with a 35.48% win rate and 0.16 expectancy.
Today the Damn Thing made a beautiful short trade on GA - I don’t think I could’ve done it any better: