… and here’s one from just outside the hotel:

They are from a low-quality camera-phone, but you get the idea.

Notice the total lack of other people in these shots, which was probably my favorite aspect. Going in November helped, I’m sure, but also the hotel is mostly surrounded by residential areas. Not a whole lot of tourists around.

Fine food, beautiful scenery, lots of rest, and lots of champagne did me good! Posting should pick up again next week.

I haven’t talked about it much, because there hasn’t been much to say. Nearly all the time I could free up went straight to EOTPro instead of automated trading research.  It’s no surprise why… I remember when we had 17 members total.  Now we have 17 members named Dave!

EOTPro is still growing, and working on expanding in new and exciting directions.  That means even more demands on my time and attention.  About a month ago I asked myself again if I should stop trading altogether so that I could devote more energy to the project. This made me a little uncomfortable.

So I quit.

Okay, it’s a bit more complicated than that, but the main reasons are:

• I want time to focus on my own trading, which hasn’t improved much over the last year (the first year I can say that since I’ve started)
• I’m really enjoying the new collaboration team I’ve started.   I think we are starting to see the benefits already, and it’s very early in the game.
• I was seriously influenced by the book, ‘Free.’   I don’t really want to be in a business model supported by locked down information anymore.  So I’m releasing all of my indicators through the collaboration team now, in free and open source.

I love the EOTPro folks, and wish them well. If you ever find yourself looking for a live trading room, I don’t know of anything better. If you were following my work through EOTPro and want to follow it into the future in open code for a lot less money, check out the Team (and the intro and questions posts). Of course some things will still be released totally free through the blog as well.

I’ve spent a looooong time thinking about this, and finally reached a firm decision while on vacation. It was a lot of money to walk away from, but in the end I always choose quality of life over money. I highly recommend that to everyone!

I hope tomorrow is more interesting.

It’s only by asking these kinds of questions, and working out our personal answers, that we become better traders.

I’m using bigcharts for this chart because I’m on vacation and away from my trading workstation for the most part (click chart to enlarge):

The three cyan lines are exactly the same size, measured from the initial drop into the flag/pennant consolidation outlined in blue. The last drop has two different measured targets (cyan and purple) confirming the market will take a breather in the same general area.

It pays to learn the classic chart patterns. Literally!

Lest you think this can only be done in hindsight, here’s a 6J trade I posted in the MtM Team area today, all based on classic chart patterns and targets:

This one was messy (real trades tend to be!), but you can see where ninja marked my exit right in the vicinity of two different measured targets. The icing on the cake is: so far, I got out at the bottom tick of the move. sweet!

This Week

Only tech gained any ground…

Month to Date

Energy stocks still in the driver’s seat, this month.

Year to Date

• Will MtM become a tease for your paid service? No way!  You know, a lot of people do that and it drives me nuts.  You won’t come to MtM and see a bunch of “here’s what you could be getting behind the pay-wall” posts.  And besides, I’m not exactly trying to get rich $29 at a time… I want to keep the group small.
• Isn’t your free blog supposedly educational already? Yeah, and I also give lots of  free seminars with EOTPro.  But here’s the big difference: all that other stuff is me talking at you and hoping you take away something useful.  As part of the MtM-Team, you will learn by doing.
  
  Look, a lot of people fall into this trap: they don’t get anything done because they are too busy reading books on how to manage their time.  You see?  People want to know how I become knowledgeable on topics, and the answer is I actually do stuff!  So, that’s the kind of ethic I want to instill.  I want there to be a real focus on actually doing chart analysis and posting it for others to review.  I want to clearly distinguish between real-time analysis and after-the-fact, because it’s totally different.
• Will you be calling trades/will there be a live room? One part of the concept is real-time chart analysis.  Depending on how things go (I don’t have all the answers) we may move some of that into a chat or shoutbox of some kind.  But, I don’t intend to start a trading room where people are there to follow me (or anyone else).  See the previous answer about learning by doing.  And besides, EOTPro is already the finest example of a live trading room that I know of… and I’m already participating over there so there’s no need to compete with myself!
• You say want a small group.  How small is ’small’? I don’t know yet… we’ll have to feel that out as we go.  I’d guess if we have 20 or 30 active contributors daily, that will start to feel like too much.  But, maybe we can handle lots more, and maybe we can’t even handle that many.  We’ll just have to see.  I imagine, despite my goals, a fair number of people will mostly lurk, and so they won’t really count in terms of ‘big vs. small.’
• How did you become so amazing and attractive? (ok, no one asked that)

Any more questions?

What Is It?

I want to put together a small, private group, dedicated to technical analysis research and study. I want there to be a real emphasis on real-time chart reading, so that we actually try to use the stuff we’re working on. In addition, I will share open code of indicators I am working on (I’ve even started negotiations with EOTPro to open up some of their indicators over time).

The group will be small, so that we can keep things productive and respectful. As soon as the group starts to feel too big, I’m going to cut off new registrations. The group will be private, so that we can freely share our insights without telling the whole world. The group will be cheap to join ($29/mo), so that even beginners will have no trouble participating.

You know I’m used to charging $233/mo for closed-source, leased indicators… so letting people choose a price all the way down to $29 for open sourced indicators plus a team to collaborate with is a bit of a leap of faith! But, I think it will be a win for all of us in the end.

You can learn more about the kinds of activities I have planned on the MtM Team page. Like all new ideas, I haven’t tried to set anything in stone… I just want to see if the idea takes off and where it evolves.

Why Do This?

Over the years, I’ve gotten a lot of requests for private mentoring. I usually turn them down due to time constraints, but when I do take an interest, not one prospect has been willing to pay my normal fees. Obviously, a lot of people desperate for mentoring are also not in a very good financial situation.

The MtM Team is my answer… instead of expensive one-on-one mentoring, I want to build a small group of people enthusiastic about technical analysis. I can do this on a very cheap basis, and hopefully we can all help each other. It’s an experiment… we’ll see!

static $guest_replacements = array(
‘url’ => array(’{URL}’ => ‘http://www.movethemarkets.com’, ‘{DESCRIPTION}’ => ‘(No links for Guests)’),
‘email’ => array(’{EMAIL}’ => ‘nobody@noplace’, ‘{DESCRIPTION}’ => ‘(No emails for Guests)’)
);

… then later in that function, at the line where it says:

if (!empty($replacements[$tpl_name]))

…leave that line in, but change what that if-block does to something like this:

if( (empty($user->data['is_registered']) ||
!empty($user->data['is_bot'])) &&
!empty($guest_replacements[$tpl_name]) )
{
$tpl = strtr($tpl, $guest_replacements[$tpl_name]);
}
else {
$tpl = strtr($tpl, $replacements[$tpl_name]);
}

Now guests and bots will see your non-link, while registered users will see the full post!

global $user;
if(empty($user->data['is_registered']) ||
!empty($user->data['is_bot']))
{ $code = “You must be logged in to see code blocks.”; }

I wanted to do this for url links as well, but it wasn’t as obvious where one would put a similar piece of code…