The mTm site will be up through July because I owe that to the current Team members. But anytime after that the old content could be removed.

First, people don’t realize how old some of the material is. People ask for help setting up Quotetracker, because they see it in old screenshots. People ask about old indicators I don’t even remember, but which are still viewable in videos from 2007. People see a post I made about being single and want to give me dating advice. People ask for details about commercial ventures that I’m no longer working on. They think I’m still the same person, frozen in time.

Well, I am not the same! I’ve changed a lot as a trader and as a person. As a result, you can be sure that the older a post is, the more I disagree with it today. The performance, the trading style, and the personality in those old posts just don’t represent me anymore. In retrospect, I used to do some really bad trading, especially in the stock trading era. Really bad! When I browse the old material, a lot of it makes me smile, but a lot of it makes me cringe as well. It wouldn’t be so bad if beginners weren’t trying to learn from that stuff! People forget the early work was a chronicle of my market education, not a textbook.

Lastly, some people have a perpetual chip on their shoulder because I’ve monetized the site. They assume it makes me a lot of money. It doesn’t. Look, here is a trade I posted to the team area today:

This trade alone made more money than the website will all month. Writing for the site pays less than minimum wage for the time it takes. It basically covers the hosting costs and buys me a few nice dinners each year. The team area pays marginally better, but it was created for your benefit, not mine. We could discuss why it’s right to make the team members pay, but then it would take me even longer to get to the real point of the post:

I’m going to retire the MoveTheMarkets domain soon. I’ll keep blogging from time to time, but I’ll use a simple blogspot site with no ads and no services offered. A clean slate, and totally non-commercial. It will be just me, trading my own accounts and talking about my other interests as well. I’ll move over a few articles that I think still reflect where I am today, but if you have any favorite articles or videos you may want to make a copy of them before I take the site down.

The market does not fail to do anything. Ever! You were the one that thought it was breaking out and you were wrong. It happens, get over it. And get in the right mindset: you are trying to predict the natural evolution of price, and you won’t always get it right. Getting it right more often is a good idea if you want better returns. Telling the market it was the one that ‘failed’ is just pissing in the wind.

Get off this particular merry-go-round. Forget about “Why” and stick with “Is.” Not everything happens for a reason.

Look at spider-webs. Do you think web-weaving spiders sit there feeling sorry for themselves for being so hungry, and then hatch a plan to spin a web and snare some food? No way… they spin webs because that’s what they naturally do. It just so happens that it catches their food. If their webs did not catch food, they would have died out and today no one would have any idea that web-weaving spiders ever existed. No doubt countless variants of these spiders have sprung up in nature, who we’ve never heard of, and who were completely inept at catching food and didn’t last.

That’s how a complex system full of relatively simple agents works… there doesn’t have to be any ‘why’ about it. The parts just do what they do and the complicated yet stable interrelationships just seem to emerge out of nowhere. So why do spiders spin webs? Because they are spiders, and that’s what they do. Why do losing traders’ stops tend to get taken out? Because they are losing traders, and that’s where they put their stops. Leave it at that.

We seem to ask why because we like to think in terms of cause and effect. But that’s an outgrowth of a logical kind of thinking that is artificial and clean compared to the real world. Abstractions and logic are useful, but they are not reality. In the real world, there are no trends or ‘double top’ formations; there is only the natural development of price unfolding over time. If we shove reality into a box labelled ‘double top,’ then we are confused (even upset!) if price continues up. We say it failed and want to know why.

That’s a fundamental misconception though, because the market never agreed to play along with your abstract notion of its price pattern. The market can’t fail to play out a double-top scenario any more than a spider can fail to catch food with a web, because in both cases they aren’t even trying to do those things. They just do what they do, and we humans attach all kinds of logical baggage to it. The stretch of concrete outside my house is only a road because that’s the way I think of it. Outside of my mind, it’s just concrete, sitting there.

So forget about all that why and how stuff. Just look at your screen, and absorb what is. Strive to develop a natural style that moves in-step with shifts in reality, just as you naturally adjust your balance to match your environment as you walk. In this light, it’s clear how wise the old trader in Reminiscences was. When everyone is trying to figure out something smart to do, he’d always just comment: “It’s a bull market, you know.” Even that is an abstract categorization, but at least it’s not a very restrictive one.

Now at some point, you might think: “A natural style? What comes naturally to me is greed and fear. If I just do what I naturally do, I’ll be creamed!” Good point. Sounds like you are going to have to change some things about yourself, then, doesn’t it? Many would prefer it if a magic indicator or a solid trading plan could somehow bridge the gap between their goals and reality. Imagine a spider with a “fly-catching for dummies” book to see how fundamentally unimportant those things are. In the end, to trade like a master trader, you are going to have to become a master trader. On the other side, you will no longer be who you were. This is the transcendent path of the true Market Warrior.

A while back I closed the team so that no more people could sign up. Now, I’m about to open it back up so that more people can join if they want. The plan was to do that as soon as I got back from vacation, but the truth is I like the team we’ve got as-is. It’s a great group, and we have better participation now than we’ve ever had. So, I haven’t been in a hurry to open it back up, but a few people have expressed interest so I guess it’s time!

Speaking of the team area, we’ve started a thread that is really digging deep into the nature of skills, and how they are mastered. Like, philosophy and brain-mechanics deep. That’s my favorite kind of thread, not only because the conversation is so broad, but also because I really like to see trading from a personal development perspective. So many people look at it as an exercise in combining indicators, but to me the right updates to your charts will happen naturally as an extension of the updates you make in yourself. This also has to do with my push to be more spontaneous in my entry selections, as well.

So anyway, I’m excited about how that is going.

I hope the last couple months have treated you well, and if things go to plan I’ll be posting more often soon.

I’ll be watching closely to see what people say on the manual trading front. Once it seems reasonably safe, and with my broker’s phone number in hand, I’ll give trading exclusively through Multicharts a shot.

And though the source is uglier than some newer languages, the resulting program is tiny and FAST!