One year ago today: April 14, 2019, reflections on turtle dancing.
Five years ago today: April 14, 2015, not fun people.
Nine years ago today: April 14, 2011, the AARP third degree.
Random years ago today: April 14, 2016, when banks go bad.
At least I have a firm price quote. The trees overhanging the house would cost $90 per limb and there are six that have to go. That’s cut only, the limbs are left in the yard for me to cut up and dispose of. The trees, I’m told, would be damaged by cutting them back from the roof line. They should be cut right at the trunk to allow the tree to heal. I’m not concerned about that. I had in mind $300 but the guy will have to use a bucket truck. I may invest in a 30-foot ladder and see what I can do. Meanwhile, here’s a photo of the thermal chimney taking shape in the back yard. That’s untreated lumber so it is getting maximum coats of paint.
This is week three, although caution is advised. The first week was incomplete and I’d accidentally turned off two of the trading windows. Last week was fine, and this week is not over. The average weekly return is not the 3% they crow about. So far, the average is 1.508%. But you know, if it could do it consistently, I’d be okay with that. These are probably not the best of times to make any conclusions about the money market. Our work patterns are beginning to emerge. Between us, we have damn good coverage of the trading alerts.
The overall pattern is still a lot of buying Sunday and Monday, and a lot of selling Tuesday and Wednesday. Then get out of the market. The word is that later, when you know what’s going on, you can take your profit and decide to keep trading. Naturally I want to get to that stage, but they don’t exactly make it easy for a beginner to figure out the why and how. The number of transactions on an average day appears to be around 15. If there are reports that spell out the activity, I can’t find them.
Here’s what I think I have figured out. What I say about buying has a corollary congruency to selling. When parameters are invoked for buying, there are 8 levels. Now listen up, I may be the only one in the group that’s figured this out. The software suggests a trade when it sees prices falling. If you okay the trade, some time has passed so the order is modified to the actual price, which calculates a “sl” and a “tp”. From here on in, a simple example explains the process best.
Suppose you okayed a buy order when prices fell below $60 and your levels were set at intervals of $1. A certain quantity is bought at $59, that is, level 0. If the price continues to fall, another batch is bought at $58, level 1. And so on until you have gone 8 levels. The process then stops even if the price continues falling. In accounting terms, this is called dollar-cost-averaging, but using price rather than time as the interval. Each purchase appears to calculate a new “sl” and new “tp” unique to that price.
I thought “sl” might be stop-loss and “tp” might be termination point, but there are problems with both thoset. For example, stop-loss is normally associated with selling, not buying. Also, this information comes from reading the logs, which are a mess. I had to export them in text format to a spreadsheet, which cannot handle the time log in tenths of a second. There are a dozen reports, I’ve only had time to reverse-engineer this one and it was an all-day headache.
Beans with watermelon.
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I put in four hours with music. One of my emerging regrets is how I somehow got convinced bass players don’t sing, and resultingly regarded all vocals as somebody else’s job. That attitude cost me 40 years. Harmonies have opened a world of difference. TheNashville summer of 2019 was one hell of a wake-up call. I’ve recently found I spend as much time singing as playing bass. And singing is fun in itself, where bass is a delayed reward.
The harmony 3rds has led me to try 5ths. They both add different dimensions. I’ll give the 5ths a try to selected tunes. As always, once I get familiar with a technique, I begin to take chances and I’ve decided to include a couple tunes where I play bass only, no singing. It’s to let them know that even if I can barely sing, my bass playing is overkill for local pubs. But they’re worth it.
ADDENDUM
And what’s with this bailout of the airlines? Phooey on that, there is plain something wrong with an airline business model if it needs tax money to survive. Let them go under so somebody with the sense to make it work take over. I realize the airlines are drowning in regulations and taxes, but they’ve become like the taxi system. Paying every fee that comes along without protest and passing the cost on to the paying customer. It would be different if flying was still fun, but it isn’t. I used to love airports, now I barely drive past them.
