Open Hatch

You may find this useful as the days get warmer. Click the image for a much larger version. Here is the original Photoshop format file for you to mess with, and here’s a .pdf version for easier printing, too.

(Click the thumbnail to enlarge the image)

I know, I know, it’s going out of style..

My wife is probably right about these sites being worthless.

I find track 06 from this old Nintendo game uniquely interesting and cool.

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(download mp3, ~2.39 MB, 2:44)

Also track 26, though maybe it gets older faster (still, it’s really a crime against my hardcore Nintendo music roots to even suggest that any such music could be redundant).

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(download mp3, ~2.04 MB, 2:44)

I’d pick and choose other cool tracks to post here, but I’d be uploading half the game’s music. Or all of it.

I’m far overdue posting how to rip these tracks to mp3 files for those interested

But this wouldn’t be complete without the games’ title/screen/opening.. anthem?

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(download mp3, ~1.94 MB, 2:44)

Notwithstanding my promises here to blather at a new blog about how and where to obtain and use money-making robots (deep breath), I have sooner begun blathering at said blog about other things.

What things? How is the cure for AIDS as a wowzer? – and the stock ticker for the company that holds the cure? Huge claim, I know. But the sources and the preliminary results are solid. And the company that is doing this is a penny stock right now.

I’m actually more interested in the science and the fact that advances like this are even happening than I am in the investment opportunity. Besides, I’m fully invested elsewhere – nary to spare for this. The deal of a lifetime is always around the corner.

Now, that aside, I really didn’t mean to write magazine-style titles over at that blog. Really.

Maybe I’ve been reading too many of the wrong things. Let’s put something back onto the flight list. Sanity? Check.

I’ve been wanting something like this for some time and may have finally found it. This tool is great:

tag2find

After installation you can “tag” any file with a right-click, then left click “Quick Tag this..”. To “tag” a file means to associate one or more words or phrases with it. Then this tool lets you search for files you have tagged. If you copy or move the file, this background program automatically updates its database – it keeps track of the file for you. This is very useful if you move files around and otherwise have a hard time keeping track of them, or simply don’t like the dozen mouse clicks otherwise necessary to peruse your folder heirarchy

Better still, when you install it, it asks you where you want its tag database to be located. That way, when you inevitably must reformat the Windows hard drive and assuming you maintain the good (nay, crucial) practice of backing up your files to a separate hard drive, this database will still be available and usable.

Another implication of determining the database location is (blathering now) show

The advantage of using an external database is there is no fuss with the varying, incompatible, dysfunctional standards for tagging files themselves. The tag data is external to the file yet perfectly managed in reference to it. Even when you can tag a file in Windows, this often uses file system informational extensions which can get wiped out if you copy the file to another drive (or other media), or worse, if they are copied elsewhere, it may be when you don’t want them to be.

The program runs in the background, apparently does not produce any noticeable slowdown, has a minimalistic and great user interface, and it can integrate with the Windows shell right-click menu (which is what allows you to right-click a file to tag it).

My initial impressions of this tool are very positive – I think this will probably be a keeper.

Best of all, it’s free.

Google Desktop, I hear you say? Problems:

• Privacy – you may not be aware it can submit its search index of your personal files to a server. Superfluous lawsuit and subpoena? There went all your privacy. (Never mind that we have very little privacy by modern practices – unless extreme self-protection is your avocation.)
• Inefficiency; it is behemoth and sluggish because it indexes everything
• As a consequence of 2, it is mostly useless – when I have used it to search for email or file name text I know exists, it hasn’t found it – because it is still indexing the other 90% of useless information on my hard drive, and it hasn’t indexed what I’m looking for yet.
• No file tagging.
• I boycott Google when I can, for reasons I’ve blathered about here too often. Google it under this domain or search “google” in my blog’s (non-Google!) search tool.

Nope. tag2find wins hands down.

[Update 2010-01-31]

Just spotted this YouTube video about an upcoming “next generation” version of this tool. Watching this video, I’m completely baffled why an investor would drop funding for this. The project is apparently and unfortunately lagging for that reason. But watch this video.

They’re also planning an API that will allow external tools to interact with it, including, it seems implied, link tagging (like delicious.com) and web object tracking (such as individual photographs – and/or tags associated with them? – posted to Picasa)? If so, and from that video also, I think the next generation version will be very hot when it comes out.

Okay, those insanely good short trades on the Forex I blogged about two entries ago? These past two hours (early AM) I just did the same thing again, approaching the same amount! – shorting the same pair again!

And.. I’ll stop bragging.

But I’m on fire. I just think I best stop before I burn something down. Or maybe just make sure I have a large fire extinguisher handy.

Good night.

Things appear to be finally, undeniably set up for a major market move down (in the New York Stock Exchange), probably toward the end of today’s trading, or early tomorrow. A market can only be insanely overbought for so long.

I’ll be all too happy for this, as the sideways market has been driving me crazy to the point of simply not wanting to pay any attention anymore. Nevertheless, a few days ago I set up a moderately small short position against the Russell 2000 Index, by buying the TZA, which aims to produce triple the inverse of said Index. At the moment TZA is up a fair amount from where I bought it.

I woke up early this morning unable to sleep. I booted up my computer and started up MetaTrader, which connects to my live Forex trading account. (The Forex Robots – see my past two entries – have still been doing amazingly well for me.)

Tangent: show

I looked at the chart for the USDCAD pair (US and Canadian Dollars), and their MACD and momentum technical indicators. The MACD showed negative divergence on the 1, 15, and 30 minute charts (blah blah, I know this sounds like Star Trek or something). They all had a lot of momentum. The 5 minute chart showed positive divergence, but I thought it was lying.

I opened a moderately pricey short position on the pair (still very conservative for my entire portfolio balance).

Within minutes the pair took a steep dive (for a short position, this is good). I opened another short position. The fast diving trend continued. I opened another, the trend still continued, I closed the first trade for a profit, and I repeated this process several times until, seeing the persistence and strength of the trend, I opened another relatively fat (for me) position.

I watched the fat position the longest before closing it just recently, for nearly as much profit as all the other closed trades this morning combined.

This morning in two hours, I made roughly nine times the amount of money I’ve made working eight hours at the highest paying job I’ve ever had.

I believe I’ll take a nap.

Last summer, prompted by a Seven Habits class I took at UVU, I wrote a Personal Mission Statement, which includes this line:

I reject the idea that risk is avoidable; I value calculated risk..

My emerging success with the Forex market – mostly thanks to robots! – is a literal and happy expression of that value.

[Update February 17th 2010: I'm not sure I recommend the brokers I mention in this post anymore. I probably don't.]

Previous post: Forex Robots. This post: free proxy exchange-trading.

There is this web site that will give you cash back for every trade you place on a foreign exchange through a broker that they’ll sign you up with. One of these brokers is the broker I’m using my robots with (FXDD). They have quite narrow spreads – which basically means, you’ll be able to invest more and therefore return more.

This web site is called Cash Back Forex.

So the how to steps are these:

A) Go to this site (link), and follow steps 1, 2 and 3 at the top of the page. For your broker, choose FXDD. Why? Like I said, narrow spreads – but their minimum deposit is $250, so you can start out investing only that much. If you have $250 to burn, this is a great way to burn it, baby. To sign up with FXDD you’ll need to fill out quite a bit of information (so they know you aren’t a money-laundering terrorist), and it may take a day for your account to be approved.

B) Once you have your FXDD account set up, sign up for an account at Zulu Trade and/or AUTO FX.

Who are AUTO FX and Zulu Trade? Automated buy or sell signal providers. They allow you to select from a wide variety of professional or avocational traders, whose own trading decisions will be automatically sent to your live Forex (FXDD or other brokerage) account. When the pro decides it’s time to buy or sell, they issue the order, and the same buy or sell signal is placed (or mirrored) in your account. To get this started, you officially link your signal provider account to your brokerage (in the case of FXDD, for me that meant signing and faxing a form).

Once you have it set up, the pros run all your trades for you. And if you pick one who really knows what they’re doing (which you can verify with their profit track record), your money will grow, automatically, while you do nothing. And on top of this, since you set up your brokerage through Cash Back Forex, when your account grows enough, you’ll start getting checks cut to you of part of the commission the broker made on every trade you placed.

With a good signal provider you’ll get far better returns than a money market, mutual fund, or other kind of large, “traditional” investment.

This is very much like the robot setup introduced in my previous post, except the buy and sell commands are sent by other people instead of robots. Actually, many of the signal providers (apparently) generate their buy and sell signals with robots.

You can mix this and your own robot-automated trading in your Forex brokerage account. I’m going to.

I haven’t got my Zulu Trade signal provider sending signals to my FXDD account yet, but I’m going to try one or two signal providers with a great track record when I do. I’m going to use the providers “lowestDD” (DD meaning DrawDown – amount lost) and “Smart Forex”. What I look for in a signal provider: 1) They invest their own money using the same orders they’ll mirror to your account – literally putting their money where their mouth is 2) They have a history with the lowest possible Draw Down (losses) 3) Highest possible profit, and 4) Longest possible profitable history.

The position size (or how much money you invest) in any of the buy or sell signals mirrored to your brokerage are automatically scaled up or down to the size of your account and the preference you set. For a micro account starting with $250, you’ll want to find a quite conservatively small “lot size” (and truth be told, I need to figure out exactly what “lot size” means).

[Update Feb 17th 2010: the statement mentioned in this post is offline now, for two reasons: 1. the statement provider stinks 2. Um, I'm too much of an aggressively intervening idiot for it to be worth eyeballing anymore. I've been leaving it alone for some time now, just letting the robots do the excellent work they do on the recommended settings without my intervention - but I've also moved brokerages from FXDD (not recommended anymore) to I AM FX.]

It’s time to let this puppy out of the bag.

I’ve blogged a bit here about experiments in the stock market, which I’ve been successful at.. not losing money in. Not losing much money, anyway. Relatively. I’ve had a few astonishingly good plays (one with 100% return in 3 days), following the swing and day trading recommendations of a newsletter, which newsletter (and associated “direct line” service) has also helped me in learning options and “scalp” trading.

The problem is that I’m human, and my impatience for high returns has interfered, and I’ve tried tweaking the recommendations of the pros or trying my own thing which inevitably.. you guessed it.. blows up in my face. If I followed recommendations with conservative scrutiny to the letter, I’d be breaking far above even.

(And this seemingly incessantly sideways market that has every sign it should be a bear market has been driving me batty. The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.)

But you are wondering what the headline is about. I’m getting to that.

What I’ve learned is that when I stick with what a pro says, I make money. If I tweak it or place my own (intemperate, more aggressive high-return seeking) speculations, the odds of my failing are better.

And I’ve learned that with these robots, too.

What robots?

There are programs that monitor and respond to live, streaming market data, and which respond to the data by sending (or not sending) buy and sell commands to your trading account with a broker. You run these programs in an environment (application) that you can host on a computer connected to the internet (the buy or sell commands are sent over the internet).

These programs that execute automatic market trades are referred to as Expert Advisors, or EAs, or more simply robots, or Forex robots.

These robots have been programmed with all the ingenuity and detached observation of seasoned investment professionals who have long histories of avoiding losses (or cutting them early if they must), letting their winners run, and bringing in high returns on investment.

Or, depending on who made the robot, they can exhibit all the sloppy oversight, inordinate aggression, or simple wrong-headed-ness of an overly risk-tolerant buffoon who doesn’t know when not to enter a trade or cut a loss off early.

But among all these robots, those that work really work.

For me it’s the discovery of a lifetime. So deceptively simple, so obviously awesome.

I closely examined the claims of many of the programmers of these robots, examining their published historical and live investment account statements, and thinking: if these robots really work, they have no reason to fudge these statements to lie to me, just to get me to buy, because they’re already making a killing doing automatic trading with their own robots. The robots could really be worth the thousands of dollars they’re claiming, and a hundred or a hundred and fifty bucks for one of these robots really could be a bargain in the face of the potential the robots harness, and they’ve well earned the right to sell these robots to bring in extra cash to throw into their grossly fattening investments.

And if the robots don’t work, they’re telling me how to set up an account that will let the robots run against live market data, the very same markets and data that people trade real money on, except that I’m using pretend money to see what the robots would do with real money. If that is the case, then I can avoid all risk by seeing that it doesn’t work, and being refunded what I spent for the robot.

You can run the robots on historical data as well, emulating how the robots would perform in any period with known data (to a large degree, with admitted limitations).

I ran the robots through a lot of back-tests ranging over many years (on historical market data) and forward-tests (on live market data, with pretend money). That means exposure to a wide variety of market conditions, volatile and non-volatile, ranging, trending, bull, bear, sideways, dropping, spiking – everything.

They work! They take money, and make more of it! Sometimes a lot more of it!

A high proportion of the trades they make are winners. There are small and big losers here and there – which are far outweighed by the winners. And among the losing trades, the robots are good at cutting losses early, further limiting losses.

By far the weight of the scale goes with wins.

I’ve given these robots real money. And they’re running with it and bringing back more money, and how.

In tests and live trading I have tweaked the settings of the robots outside of what their programmers recommend, and when I do this by and large the robots blow up my money (lose it). When I leave the settings as the pros recommend them, by and large they bring back consistent positive returns.

As the title of this post says, these Robots have returned $1,884 in 5 days – only the first trading week of this year! Here is my live investment account statement to prove it. This statement updates automatically with every trade the robots place. Look at the “Profit” column. The “Closed P/L” (Profit or Loss) total below it shows the total profit (or, when applicable – and gratefully not here – loss).

These robots brought that in while I did nothing. Nothing besides stand aside, waiting on tenterhooks, because I’ve learned I just need to sit back and let the robots do their job, and wait it out, and watch the returns come in.

Starting out even on this live money account, I tweaked the robot settings in ways I obviously shouldn’t have and saw substantial losses. I was so terrified after that I was tempted to throw in the towel, but said to myself: No, I can see a direct cause and effect here of my meddling with the settings and the robots losing money. I’ll learn this lesson for the last time, put the settings back to what the pros recommend, and just sit, watch, and stop meddling.

It is after I made that choice that I’ve seen the robots fall into a longer-term pattern of bringing in more consistent and high returns. And the live statement begins near to where I made that decision, showing a start amount of zero, which of course isn’t true. It’s only showing the amounts invested and returned in each trade. In fact at this writing I have yet to climb back into the “black” above the substantial losses of my meddling with the settings. I am confident these robots will climb back above that loss and then well above and beyond it.

I have simply believed the robots will work, and been proven right. I could have been wrong. And although I don’t believe I’ll be shown wrong, it’s possible I could be. You must realize that. As you drool over my gains. And watch them seriously amass over the long term. If you aren’t watching your own returns amass by then.

I’ve averaged the returns over all the days since that decision (more than 5 days) – taking the percent gain per day, and dividing it by the number of days – right now the average is 2.33% returns per day.

If these robots continue at that pace unabated for an entire year (and my back-tests give me excellent reason to suspect they will), the return on investment will be 40,884% percent! Here is the math rundown in a spreadsheet (Open Office Calc required – Excel doesn’t know these functions), starting with $250 capital – you can start out on this with only that much. At this rate for one year, $250 turns into $102,027!

That’s not on the settings that “came out of the box”. My guess is the default settings return 1 percent or less per day. I found the web site of someone whose avocation is investment, who has found amazing success with his own custom settings, which I bought from him and am using.

How can you get your hands on these robots, and these settings? I haven’t put together my obnoxious sales letters and affiliate links to bring me commissions on sales of the robots yet That is pending..

[Update 01-13-10: Because I am an unbearably human human, yesterday I again made manual interventions I should not have, and much of the account blew up in my face again. Despite this, now that I have stepped aside and let things work by themselves, the robots resume a pattern of consistent, steady gain. Because I am leaving things alone. Like the robot-programming professionals told me to. To my very great displeasure, I again learn the wrong way that the robots can consistently defy odds a human can very seldom defy - if the humans leave the robots alone. I solemnly pledge under penalty of terror and insolvency to leave the robots and their money alone. Until they make enough money that I want to withdraw some. That will be my only, and most pleased, intervention For all this, and to hide the less beautiful part of my account history, the online statement now begins post-human-idiot-intervention-number-2, to represent consistent robot power, not debatable, fallible human power. May the Cylons teach the humans yet. Amen.]

‘Twas grace that taught my heart to grieve
And grace my heart to sing
For Him whose Death is my Rebirth;
The Everlasting Spring!

If you search, you’ll find that dozens of different versions of Amazing Grace and additional verses can be found. This verse is mine.

From here.

The green bacterial looking clusters in the final sequence before it evolves into a blur – that is one of the coolest artistic abstractions I’ve ever seen. But I think the whole sequence is breathtaking.

Here’s a shout out to the variants of my domain name I never managed to secure, openhatch.com and .org (I only secured this here .net).

Clearly the term “Gay Mechanics” in the article’s subject is a typographical error; Same Gender Attracted professional mechanics are never mentioned in the article, neither the assortment of alternately male-ended or female ended shafts any mechanic may often find himself, uh, handling, neither indeed the assortment of gruff, bear-like fellows they may find themselves among.

I know at least several gay mechanics, and I’ve learned to stop worrying and start loving them.

But oh, by dag nab, dontcha wish I’d gotten my hands on those domains now?

[If the subject in the linked article reads not "gay" but "game", it is because the poster of the article corrected the error.]

For example – in Mozilla Thunderbird, to add an RSS feed and manage reading it in a sensible, organized way, you must follow detailed steps involving figures A through P (or 1 to 16; PLUS, if you want to know that this is 16 steps (simply to measure the extent of your technical fatigue), you must count A-P on your fingers. Unless you happen to know off-hand that P is the 16th letter of the English Alphabet. I didn’t.)

[The header of the concluding section of that article says: "That Was Painless". Um, if you're used to following, say, 42-step technical processes in your everyday work, maybe, in comparison.]

This should be a three to four step process:

1. Click the RSS icon in the address bar of Firefox.

2. Select “Subscribe Using Thunderbird”, which should be available by default (if you want Thunderbird to even be in the equation – which, even if it is, Firefox doesn’t tell you in the subscription button – it assumes you just know). Since this is not available by default, you have to follow a 5 step configuration to make that available.

3. Thunderbird comes up with a window, asking “If you want to add [title of RSS feed] to your Thunderbird RSS Subscriptions, select the account and folder you’d like to add it to.” – providing drop-down menus to select the account and folder.

Theoretically, it’s possible to get it down to such a three or four step task (and that page only got me heading in the general right direction). I haven’t gotten it to work. And this is in lieu of many more hacking steps I’d really rather avoid.

I thought these two applications were kinda cuddly friends? My exploration of the idea doesn’t find any proof..

That statement is mine, and it’s a conclusion I draw (again), after reading this, from an article entitled “Reckless Myopia”:

We face two possible states of the world. One is a world in which our economic problems are largely solved, profits are on the mend, and things will soon be back to normal, except for a lot of unemployed people whose fate is, let’s face it, of no concern to Wall Street. The other is a world that has enjoyed a brief intermission prior to a terrific second act in which an even larger share of credit losses will be taken, and in which the range of policy choices will be more restricted because we’ve already issued more government liabilities than a banana republic, and will steeply debase our currency if we do it again. It is not at all clear that the recent data have removed any uncertainty as to which world we are in..

Andrew Smithers, one of the few other analysts who foresaw the credit implosion and remains a credible voice now, concurred last week in an interview with my friend Kate Welling.. “The good news so far is that the stock market got down to pretty much fair value or even, possibly, a tickle below it, at its March bottom. But now it has gone up… we probably have a market which is, roughly, 40% overpriced. In order to assess value, it is necessary [to speak financial Vulcan about two different stock market valuation methodologies].. The validity of both of these approaches can be tested and is robust under testing – and they produce results that agree. Currently, both q and CAPE are saying that the U.S. stock market is about 40% overvalued.”..

One of the fascinating aspects of the past few months is the lack of equilibrium thinking with respect to what happened to the trillions of dollars in government money that has been spent to defend the bondholders of mismanaged financial companies. Almost by definition, money given to corporations will show up most quickly as improvements in corporate earnings, and then slightly later, as executive compensation. A few pieces came across my desk last week, hailing the ability of the corporate sector to bounce back from the recent economic downturn even though revenues have continued to suffer and employment has been steeply cut. Why is this a surprise? Where else could the money have gone? Labor compensation? It is truly mind-numbing that a moment after a temporary surge of trillions of dollars, borrowed and tossed out of a helicopter (though to specific corporations and private beneficiaries), analysts would hail a subsequent improvement in corporate results as evidence of “resilience.”

Since early 2008, beginning with the provision of non-recourse funding in the Bear Stearns debacle, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury have repeatedly allocated or implicitly obligated public funds to defend the bondholders of mismanaged financial companies. This has included the outright and non-recourse purchase of nearly a trillion dollars in mortgage securities that have no explicit guarantee by the U.S. government. By purchasing these securities outright (rather than through a well-defined repurchase agreement), the Fed is effectively obligating the U.S. government to either guarantee them or to absorb any future losses.

Aside from the fraction of bailout funding that was specifically allocated by Congress through legislation, these actions represent an unconstitutional breach into enumerated spending powers that are the domain of the elected members of Congress alone. The issue here is not whether the Fed should be independent from political influence. The issue is the constitutionality of the Fed’s actions. The discretion that it has exerted over the past two years crosses the line into prerogatives reserved for Congress. That line needs to be clarified sooner rather than later.

Emphatically, the trillions of dollars spent over the past year were not in the interest of protecting bank depositors or the general public. They went to protect bank bondholders. Instead of taking appropriate losses on those bonds (which financed reckless mortgage lending), those bonds are happily priced near their face value, for the benefit of private individuals, thanks to an equivalent issuance of U.S. Treasury debt. But that’s not enough. Outside of a very narrow set of institutions that are subject to compensation limits, just watch how much of the public’s money – which benefitted several major investment banks following a very direct route – gets allocated to Wall Street bonuses in the next few weeks.

I find this simply scary.

The past few days, the Philadelphia Bank Index (which allegedly “leads” the markets) has been dramatically declining in comparison to the S&P 500 stock index, which has been making defiant yet pathetic attempts at remaining bullish. At the same time, volume is declining sharply – big money is selling out of large positions (and buying up hedges, and loading up on option puts, which profit from declines). Banks decline, prices expand, volume contracts – the whole picture is undecided – or maybe decidedly tearing apart in several directions. Something has to give – and today the S&P finally started to drop fairly quickly at closing.

I have speculations in the market turning down (even sharply). And I still think it will. Watch the TZA ticker, which goes the opposite of the S&P, times 3 (meaning UP three times as much, I’m hoping). I’m banking on it taking an upswing or spiking, to above 13.35, by Dec 19th.