fishbrains 2.0 - Blog of Bret Fisher » Stock Market

Trading: Method vs. Emotions

Bret Fisher — Sun, 16 May 2010 18:57:27 +0000

From the scripture of Mark Douglas in The Disciplined Trader:

As a result, I sincerely feel that success in trading is 80 percent psychological and 20 percent one’s methodology, be it fundamental or technical. For example, you can have a mediocre knowledge of fundamental and technical information, and if you are in psychological control, you can make money. Conversely, you may have a great system, one that you have tested and has performed well for a long period of time, yet if the psychological control is not there, you will be the loser.

Steps I’ve recently taken to increase my mental control (since we all seem to default to focusing on technique):

Meditation, both “empty your mind” and “visioning”. I took a quick $7 lesson from a local mind+body shop. Still working at implementing it daily.
Monitor/schedule my sleep. A Tim Ferriss trick is to use a timer rather then alarm for sleeping so I am focusing on my sleep deposit/debt. This works better if I don’t have a required wake time for a job (I don’t). Lack of sleep causes me to be more moody and thus more emotional. Goal is eight hours, so I often start “going to bed” at T minus nine hours.
Monitor/schedule my eating. Food is the most powerful drug we take multiple times a day (unless you live in a hospital I guess). Smaller meals more often keeps my blood sugar (the brain’s food) more level and thus my mood (emotional state). I also stay away from sugar and manufactured carbs which spike the blood sugar (but not yet conquered caffeine). The theory and application of this is found in The Zone Diet, which is designed to keep the body/mind “in the zone” of optimum energy by controlling what you eat.
Don’t trade when I’m focused on finances. If I need to pay next months bills with my "planned winnings” then I’ll trade from emotion, rather then if the money has no near-term impact on my lifestyle. Even once trading becomes my only income my plan has me withdrawing once-for-the-next-six-months and eventually to once-for-the-next-year so my lifestyle is unaffected by my day to day market success.
Plan, plan, and more sticking to the plan. How many times will I trade a month? How many times will I practice in a month? How much cash will I use each time? How many trades in a row loss will cause a “real money hold” period? What charts will I use? What stocks will I use? When do I get out of the trade “when it’s not working” and “when it’s working”? What do I consider “it’s not working”… and on and on. The more details I have documented and the more I review it… the more I tend to be less emotional on entry and exit of a trade.

Image used with Creative Commons License from Jeff Power’s on Flickr

We (the U.S. consumer) Have Not Learned Our Lesson

Bret Fisher — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 03:37:35 +0000

Just one year from a stock market crash and real estate burst that “we thought” forced us to re-learn the lesson our grandparents knew about leverage: Use it to buy assets, not liabilities. Don’t use it to buy merchandise that doesn’t make you money. I’ve closely followed Macy’s (M) for years, but I guess I missed the part about just how much of their quarterly sales are done with store credit cards! WSJ claims it’s over 50% last quarter (3Q 2009). I’d love to see a graph on this stat (% of sales on store credit) over the last 10 years. Do we really have a 6-month memory about how we spent ourselves into so much debt?

I could go on all night about how maybe we never learned the lesson; about how this could be caused by an over-reactive government that won’t let people and business fail en masse, in order to teach our society a lesson we need to re-learn,.. but I won’t for now.

It’s interesting that the article I read this in wasn’t really about the still shockingly high amount of Macy’s shoppers that are buying on store credit (all this during non-holiday months). As an American, I say YES to this federal proposal that you must prove you can pay before you borrow for clothing, furniture, and electronics.

And on that point, why can I get a retail store card without proof of income but there is no store credit at the grocery store?

(photo credit to stevendepolo under CC BY 2.0)

My Great Experiment

Bret Fisher — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 03:22:58 +0000

What if, regardless of circumstances, you could quit your job and retire within 5 years? What if you could only work 4-8 hours a week and make in a week what you used to make in a year, and do it from anywhere? What if you could leave and take a month to explore something you’ve always wanted to (travel, learn a sport, etc.) and come back with more money then you left?

Imagine spending your time doing all the things “you always wanted to do” but didn’t have the time, money, or energy to do? What if the belief that a job is the safe way and retirement at 65+ is the only way… is actually a lie?

In 2003 I started asking myself these questions, and have found the answers.

I’ve learned in the last 5 years that this is indeed possible and first has to start with believing it can happen. I mostly did this with books, some classes, and support from my Wife. Without any skills in either real estate or the stock market we are quickly coming to a turning point in our mindset and abilities that will allow us to do just that. I imagine this blog will change along with me, since I am quitting my job and phasing out my technology career. I’ve had people tell me this can’t be done, at the same time I’m doing it. I’ve had many moments I thought it was moving too slow and would never happen, or that I didn’t have the magic skills to make it work. But for the moments that it seems to take forever, I’ve had moments (like now) that a huge leap forward has taken place and now realize within a year we’ll both be living the way we started to dream 6 years ago with one simple book: Rich Dad, Poor Dad. It may not be the perfect book, but it lit a spark of hope, and after reading that book we had only one rule we weren’t willing to break: once we started to act on these dreams, we would never give up… never.

QCharts 6.0 Experiences

Bret Fisher — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 12:08:11 +0000

QCharts is my stock charting program of choice. I don’t use it for actual trading, just for technical analysis and historical research. I believe it’s the best out there in terms of flexibility and feature set. It’s defiantly not the fastest, coolest, or cheapest out there, but it gets the job done.

Initial setup: (picture here) I have a year-old $500 HP/Compaq from Best Buy. Single AMD proc, single core (a year ago on QCharts 5.x there was no multi-threading so you wanted the fastest processor, not multi-cores). Since then I’ve added:

Bumped up to 3GB of RAM
Added a GeForce 7300 GT PCIe to replace mobo video (dual monitor capable)
Added a GeForce 6200 PCI (dual monitor capable)
Plugged in 4 21″ Samsung SyncMaster 204B at 1600×1200. Turned them portrait to increase the vertical space and allow seeing all 4 in my field of vision (and fit them on the desk). Also great for web surfing.
Added 2nd Hard Drive for storing data and pagefile
Wiped 1st Hard Drive and installed Vista Business x64
Installed 6.0.2 as my main QCharts (with 5.x still as a backup, mostly for 233 chart historical research and feature comparison)

This setup aught to show you that you don’t have to spend $3-5k for a “stock computer setup”. Just get multiple video cards (preferably by the same manufacture) and plug them in. We’ve got a monitoring workstation at work with 5-6 monitors and just keep shoving in the PCI graphic cards. Vista/XP will do the rest.

Issues with this setup

Vista is MUCH slower in video refreshes, even with Aero turned off. Maybe this is NVIDIA’s driver (using 12/2007). It’s laggy, but still useable.
Not sure if it’s Vista, or the fact I’m running x64, but QCharts crashes on exit. I run it in XP SP2 compatibility mode
Running Aero not only slows it down, but crashes the video driver (likely from running two cards, or maybe the portrait mode enabled on all 4)
Vista doesn’t yet have nView Desktop Manager (due out this spring)
To using charting during US trading hours (something I don’t normally do) really needs a newer dual core CPU. With 200 ticker symbols on 6.0.2 I’m 50-100% CPU during day w/o doing anything but “watching”.