Abolish the Senate!!!

How many people know that Thomas Jefferson was opposed to the idea of a Senate. His underlying reasoning was that it is inherently an anti-majoritarian institution. Not only that, but it does not work in the way that it is supposed: it was meant to offset the population discrepancies of larger states over smaller ones. Today, however, some of the most dense population concentrations are in smaller states. But the biggest problem with the Senate, apart from the fact that no ordinary citizen has access to their Senator, but that the power each Senator wields is commensurate with the ability to shut down the entire business of the legislature. An expanded house is a much better and more democratic position.

As i sit, awaiting the markets to find direction, I am listening to Senator Levin of Michigan. He appears to be well-prepared, yet it seems his greatest source of information comes from a recently published book "the Great Short". Moreover, though Goldman deserves no sympathy, as he castigates these executives, he forgets to lay any blame relating to the sub-prime markets with the Government! Both parties are responsible for this nonsense belief that underlying the American Dream is access to ownership of housing to the masses! Let alone the fact that recently banks and Wall Street have been the populist scapegoats of late, but why have they not subpoened the Ratings Agencies complicit in all this mess???

Mr. Levin is assuming he is fully informed and educated on a matter far beyond his understanding. Last night he proposed and end to short sales!!!! Undoubtedly there are bad points to this practice, but as with any sword, there are two edges. Had there been more short sellers on the housing market, such a massive bubble may not have formed. The ignorance of the Senate, and this particular speaker, is disgusting. I am fed up with this petty institution. I am sick of the pork, the bickering, the idiocy... how did these people get elected? They have no right to assume the moral high ground considering their complicity of ignorance in their faith of a dead American Dream.

Dow 11,000: Slightly Anticlimatic

Last Friday the Dow 30 hit 11,000 in the last few trading minutes of the week. At today's closing bell, the Dow closed at 11,005.97 and the S&P 500 was on the cusp of 1200. These levels are by all accounts monumental, given the deep wounds and visible scars that have been left by the Great Recession and the Financial Crisis.

For all of last week, the event kept replaying itself over and over in my mind. Would I be in some kick-ass trade? Riding through Resistance as if I were the soldier dropping the nuke in "Dr. Strangelove"? Each day I kept thinking about the event as the pundits kept reminding me, "Will today be the day we finally break through 11,000?" As it turned out, because my Boss has told us horror stories, and as a rule I do not trade during the last 20 minutes, I completely missed it. Not only did I miss it, but being a Friday afternoon, I turned my trading monitor off and didn't find out about it until my Weekend Copy of the Wall Street Journal arrived in the mail.

Instead of some massive and unlikely rally, the reality is that there are a lot of factors holding the markets back. Some have even dubbed this a "Snail Rally," apparently due to the complete absence of the Retail Investors. Many folks are worried, given the beating these same equity markets doled out a little less than two years ago, but the beginning of Earnings season is also weighing in on the matter. Are investors waiting for Earnings? If a large number of companies report consistently positive earnings, will this cause the rally I so desperately want to participate in?

Undoubtedly this is a difficult environment to learn my craft in: extremely low volume and a very low reading on the "Fear Gauge" (a much cooler name than VIX). In a trading environment like today's, the general goal is to do mostly "Test" trades; even these were difficult to execute today. Given that I am becoming a Technical Analyst, I have no business making predictions, but let's all hope that an even larger rally is right around the corner.

I love Trading Stocks, but I despise Tiger

So there I was, sitting in my recliner, straining my neck to the left (so as to see my dual-monitor set-up), and doing my best to not lose the house. (By chance anyone reads this and wonders why the hell I'm working from a recliner, its because of hip surgery a week and a couple of days ago.) I was doing fairly well today, considering I was up until 2 a.m. trying to get my Internet working.

I have this problem, where I'm tired, and things get moved around, and I just have to go ahead and fix things up exactly right. Well, to my utter chagrin, I screwed up my router and gave up and went to bed when I started getting so upset I was crying. I mean, Come ON! I took a networking class last fall!

I get up four hours later and call the professionals. It gets fixed, but not completely; fixed more like it was done with a shoe string and bubble-gum. So, now its almost 8 o' clock, and I really have to get attuned to the news, review the previous session's key levels, and get it done in time to not quite have it all absorbed in my brain as it needs to be.

The battle begins, I make a few good trades, I screw up a few good trades, and by lunch time I'm half pleased because I've halved my losses. I'm starting to learn it, and even though I'm still behind, the process and the art is starting to sink in. I eat a hot dog, and trade my way back to even in U.S. Steel. This was a stock my boss introduced us to the other week when he spoon-fed me a trade, and I don't think he meant for me to fall in love with it, but anyhow.... I traded myself back to even. Then things got really boring.

The world stopped so Tiger could talk about how sorry he was, and how he screwed up, and blah blah blah. This is CNBC I'm watching for Baruch's sake! Not Headline News! Congratulations CNBC, you have turned yourselves into a tabloid. And, given the complete lack of direction in the markets around that time, it would seem they turned the good folks on the floor of the NYSE into tabloid idiots, as if they were standing in line to pay for groceries.

And the man droned on, and on, and on.... I really don't care! I don't watch golf, or any other conventional sports for that matter. Give me No Holds Barred or Olympic Judo or something, and I'm down. But I'm sick of this, and I hope that one positive thing comes out of this. Tiger, I'm imploring you, please get this stage of your life over so the rest of us can quit hearing about it!

Trading picked up afterwards, and it must be that negative karma I'd just spilled all over myself, because as I was cycling through stocks looking for a trade, I missed a 30 cent run in US Steel. Last time I blamed the Cat, this time I'm blaming Tiger.

Some Thoughts on my First Weeks of Work

So I began working Monday, a week ago; after a month and a half of training we were thrown into the fire. Let me back up a bit, explain what it is that I am doing, how it got going, and some of the interesting experiences I've had.

After graduating college in May of '09 I was absolutely elated to be finished. I thought to myself, "Now I can actually get paid for the work I do." Nevermind the fact that part of the reason I was always behind was that I got distracted reading whatever looked interesting on the shelves beside my lonely study cubbies. So I went to work for my father, a lawyer, as an assistant and sometimes IT person. The majority of the work, however, was answering phones. Man I hated being a receptionist. I was too ADD to be really good at it, I lack the patience necessary to deal kindly with folks who need lawyers in their lives, and I got pissed off whenever the phone rang and interrupted whatever it was I happened to be studying at the time.

A few months passed by and I began to become melancholy from not being able to find a job. I started looking, a few jobs a day at first, and then after several months, all I did was hunt for jobs.

I am happy that I studied a broad range of subjects, especially Philosophy and the Social Sciences, but it was my Financial Economics degree that I wanted to put to use. I focused on applying for anything that was even remotely related to finance, banking, or economics. Nothing. Then one day my fiancee` suggested I try Craig's List, because "they are posting jobs that they need to fill right now."

I had immediate success. I got an interview in Wilmington, which I eventually turned down (for a ridiculous Instant Message Miscommunication). I also got an interview with a Proprietary Stock Trading Firm. After the second interview, and after learning a little about what it would involve, I knew I was hungry to get into it. Later that week, I logged in to the online training room, and began the month long process.

Skip forward a month and a half, and hear I am, I've got my computer set up and I've been trading for a little more than a week. At first, my fingers were fat and sticky with sweat, hitting the wrong keys, getting nervous and switching positions, and just basically getting my butt handed to me. But each day I've been getting a little better.

I remember my first short, my boss was screaming at me through an IM, and I panicked and sold out too early. "WTF?" was the response in the IM. So I pile back in, get yelled at again (b/c now its time to exit the trade), and accidentally hit one of my "take" keys twice and short it right as the market moves upward. And as my boss put it, who's a real sharp dude, "You were there! You were going to make your first winning trade, make some real f****n coin, and you reached down and grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory!" I don't think my heart quit beating for an hour.

In my mind, I'm making steady progress. You would think day trading is all about thinking, and to some extent it is, but it's actually much more about intuition and knowing how to react decisively. It's more akin to an expensive Chess game than, say, a timed crossword puzzle. So, of course I'm still making mistakes; but I've learned to be calm, to try and control emotion, and hold on to winning trades for as long as one possibly can without screaming at the top of his lungs.

The screw up today, the one I really wanted to write about, wasn't my fault. Sure, I screwed up afterward on my own accord, but this one just halved my winnings for the day. I had to have a procedure on my leg, from an old martial arts injury, and so I have my trading monitors positioned to my right, and I'm leaning back in to a recliner (so I can keep my foot elevated). Now, one of my cats, a young, friendly, 12 pound Orange Tom Cat, runs inside when my landlord comes in the house to fix something. And he just wants to be petted, or to sit on my lap like he usually does. Unlike other times, when I'm just chilling watching TV or something, I'm not actively trading a volatile stock with my keyboard in my lap and the F-Keys set to buy and sell large positions of stocks. So I try to deflect him once, but he won't be denied that easily, and he jumps right my knee and on F6! I knock him off, try to cover my position that I thought I just missed, and breathed a sigh of relief that I wasn't ruined.

Then I noticed my Profit/Loss ratio doesn't look as good as it should.... I still had a huge position I had not even known I put on! Lost just about everything I had made that day! I was able to come back a little, but I was so mad at the little kitty! But I won't be able to stay mad long, poor Sunny didn't know what the heck I was doing, he just wanted to say "hi".