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".

Drawing Emotion: A Defense Contract for Big Pharma

Drawing Emotion: A Defense Contract for Big Pharma

A Defense Contract for Big Pharma

A recent report by the State Department said that the current counter-narcotics operations in Afghanistan could not work in its current implementation. A number of fundamental goals have not been established as a framework, and the program also lacks officials who are on the ground and can enforce the provisions locally in Afghanistan. Given the limited success of American strategies with regard to the Drug War in countries such as Columbia and Mexico, I believe that nothing less than an intelligent, simple, and unique production-side solution will work.

Of course, I will have to revisit this theory in the near future to provide much needed details, but for now I will propose the general idea. A country's "Comparative Advantage" is a central idea in Macroeconomics; one could argue that in the 19th century America had a comparative advantage in manufacturing, a number of tropical climate countries have one in growing coffee, and many others have a comparative advantage in technology today. Given the large amounts of Afghan Opium that is processed into Heroin, and sent a large number of countries the world over (such as Russia, Greece, Eastern Europe, Thailand, and Western Europe), and despite laws making this extremely illegal, Afghan Farmers continue to thrive. They have a comparative advantage in the farming of opium.

The previous American Administration had made attempts to get farmers in Afghanistan to switch to alternative crops. This policy did not work, and even for those farmers who are not interested in producing opium, are often cajoled into growing it with little compensation. As an educated guess, I believe it is safe to assume the majority of funds raised by the Taliban come from processing the Opium into Heroin, and then trafficking it abroad. But, even if the world was free from the scourge of Heroin, Opium is necessary for the production of legal pharmaceuticals. I do not know where big pharmaceutical companies get their supplies, but I believe that we can assume that simple subsidies could be given to them in order to create new buyers for Afghan farmers' opium.

My solution proposes just that: have Big Pharma buy all the opium that would otherwise go to illicit street drugs, and use (if not all) some to create legitimate, regulated pharmaceuticals. This would be beneficial in a number of ways. Firstly, the Taliban would no longer have the supplies necessary to carry on in the drug trade. Secondly, assuming all afghan opium is simply destroyed and not used, the cost of buying it all would be substantially less than the cost of traditional counter-narcotics operations by the Military, Police, and organizations such as the DEA. Lastly, these latter organizations could provide the security that would be necessary to get large pharmaceutical companies into such a hostile environment.

If the success of our military operations depend on winning this Afghan Counter-Narcotics effort, America must think outside the box. For a country built on innovative and entrepreneurial ideas, then we should harness that spirit, utilize market forces, and deal a serious blow to the finances of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.

Oh god not counterfeit handbags!

In Beijing thousands of vendors from street markets are shouting at Trademark lawyers, "Petty bourgeois bastard." When will companies realize complete exclusion of others from markets means that millions go hungry. "Oh, we're losing profits," they say. Yet if anyone purchasing those handbags could afford the real thing they wouldn't be buying knock offs. What about the positive externalities created by forgeries supporting the poor? what ignorance pervades the world.

Anne Coulter: Fuel for the Fire

I just participated in my first book burning... I know, I know. Book burning is bad; too many memories of Hitler dredged up by those types of actions, generally speaking. But no, this is different. It's cold, we don't wanna use anything useful for kindling, so we look around and a friend says to me, "I'm gonna make fun of you every time I come over for having Anne Coulter on your bookshelf." The funny thing is in 2004 I bought a whole bunch of books from the whole political spectrum, so I gave her a chance. Not only is she a royal bitch, but everything she says has only one purpose: to perpetuate the ignorance and narrow-mindedness of like-minded folks who have no other purpose in life but to perpetuate the very greed and stupidity that has resulted in the horrible situation in which our great country now finds itself. Thanks for helping me catch my logs on fire Anne. If I had known you were this useful I would have done this a long time ago. Burn baby, burn; yeah, that's it. Burn.

With Renewed Vigor

My past attempts to create a blog have failed almost completely. While I've managed to keep some semblance of a daily journal, there are many topics that I've failed to write about. I need a place to rant and rave, say things I might not necessarily mean, and generally take the Freedom of Speech as far as I can by saying things that should be said, but generally are not.

At the moment I am in my last semester of a 6.5 year college career; things are hectic, classes are hectic, I'm getting married, I'm doing my best to organize a Student Rights Week, etc. Yet I still need to find time to say things such as:

• Michael Phelps is my hero; the man won 12 gold medals in the Olympics and still gets high. The only reason people are mad at him is weed is illegal, and the government has spent ridiculous amounts of money on b.s. advertising, a.k.a Office of National Drug Control Policy's "Above the Influence" ads in Comic Books. For instance, one ad says in big letters, "BECOME A TV REMOTE CONTROL OPERATOR!" and then, "Hey, not trying to be your mom, but there aren't many jobs out there for potheads." Oh?Really? Could someone be full a' shit? Let's focus on something actually important people. Also, when I'm reading comic books do they really think I'll heed any such recomendations?

In conclusion, I agree with Thomas Jefferson. "I have sworn to God, upon an alter of truth, eternal hostility, towards tyranny over the mind of man."