UltraCrepidate

• Managed to complete my 30 min cardio workout at 20 reps each. #
• It's hard to focus on proggraming when all u can think about is that hot girl u danced with last night. #
• All salsa'd out. #
• My financial predictions are less than 60% accurate recently. You should stop listening to what I have to say. #
• Caught Lethe in mid airans thwarted her attack against my leg. ME 1: CAT 0 #
• I thought I can relax during thanksgiving. Who'd have thought that Dubai will pull a debt default. I thought Arabs don't do such things. #
• 2048. Looks like I will live to see China surpass the US. #
• For some odd reason. I keep on getting hits from Bungie on my thesis about Binary Positional mathematics: http://tinyurl.com/ydp2pj7 #
• http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=apTuckYhnYYU&pos=11 Geek = vulnerable against pussy #
• Jamie Dimon for Treasury Secretary is like putting Wayne Gretzsky as CEO of NHL. #
• Joel: Congrats on Assassin's Creed 2. Nice solid numbers. #
• The day when the Chinese government allows its people to invest outside of the country. BUY real estates. #

Most of my discussions about money with people goes like this:

“blah blah blah and this is how I was able to consistently earn money for the past 5 years”

“Wow you are very knowledgeable about investing, are you a financial advisor?”

“No, I just trade a lot”

~silence

You can almost see the respect drain out of them. This happened enough that I just want to get certified for the sake of saying yes with conviction at one point and find out how people would react. What is disconcerting to me though is how people rely on a piece of paper… a title to chose the advice they’d listen to on matters of money.

For me, I have lost faith in financial advisors long ago. Rather, the moment I found out that they are compensated based on a fee commission structure and their job security has nothing to do with how well their client’s portfolio ended up being, but rather, the amount of transactions. Most of the banking industry’s compensation structure are not tied to the performance of the money they manage. Get this into your head now.

Nowadays, when I encounter someone knowledgeable, I ask for their track record instead. Something so obvious, yet nobody asks for. 5 years of experience is the minimum passable grade with 10 years an ok grade. One level up if you are able to consistently make money for those years. If everyone used this as their guide, there’d be a lot less angst in the world right now. Then again, we’d just be creating another bubble if everyone made too much money.

I should be thankful for these financial advisor’s recommendations. Without them, I wouldn’t have been able to get ahead.

• Perhaps one of the biggest surprise to come for ATVI will be its wii port of MW: Reflex. #
• 20 minutes of cardio and I am out of breath. Can't believe how out of shape I am. #
• @natashaduchene funny thing is. I didn't even know I was stressed until the doctor pointed out a few things. in reply to natashaduchene #
• The more charismatic a person is. The more you need to be on guard in business. #
• It's itchy as heck. #
• US senate: If you fuck with the fed's independence expect the next bubble to permanently knock the US out of commission. #
• LOL. Wide awake because of the drugs. #
• This crisis brought into spotlight, the incompetence of policy makers in the different business sectors that constitute their country. #
• You can stop listening to Meredith Whitney now. #
• "Anybody who goes through these things will never, ever be scared of anything in business again."~CEO of MMM #
• Desperately need to crunch some number: Inflation adjusted housing price increase vs inflation adjusted wage increase over 50 years #
• Getting ready to tackle computer AI. But first, build up some junk food reserves. #
• Wow, can't believe that I completed my world spawner in two days. One of which was in the hospital while waiting. #
• Last night was so painful that I barely slept. #
• SO it was shingles. Cause: Psychological stress. In great pain and on antibacterial. #
• It's almost disgusting that COD MW2 sold 9.4 million copies in week 1. #
• Obama, please stop fucking with the economy. #

The cost of learning

The trading month of November closed today for me. My schedules follows options expiration day every month and the December trading month will begin next week.

I hesitated a lot before liquidating all my holdings and closing the books. The reasons mainly circles around a few bets that I’ve taken which veered more towards a long term bet. Subconsciously, I have slipped a few bets based on fundamentals into my day trading account. The cost of closing these bets is also significant in itself. I have started to doubt the benefits of my strategy. I will have to think of a way to take profit off while avoiding the complete liquidation of my assets at the end of each trading month. For now, this will continue since I am simply trying to find out if I can make profits for 3 months straight. But it really hurts my Asian pride to be paying so much in fees.

Performance analysis

Starting balance: $3000.00
Closing balance: $5519.33
Increase from opening balance: $2519.33  (83.97%)
Cost of capital: $636.17  (21.20%)

Strategy

I tried out numerous different strategies this month, including a straddle using put options in both FAS and FAZ and a saving grace straddle with a call LEAP on MBI and a November put. MBI is a stock that has fallen past its historic low. So I gathered that the downside isn’t too big. Both turned out to be terrible short term plays. For weekly day trading, it is still best to stick to TA based on S&P as well as the dollar correlation.

The best play this month is still ATM straddles on earnings in sleeper where volatility weren’t expected.

Reflections

As my health deteriorates and my focus on work intensifies, the trading part deteriorated significantly as I stopped gathering information and drawing TA graphs to understand the market, I started relying on my instinct. Instinct means FA and long term so I erred when day trading.

If anything, next month will be a slow month. I am expecting the sector cycling to get back to the Financials followed by tech, then carbon again. The big things to watch for will be the black Friday sales and any sudden credit deterioration in the financial sector. December is the time of year where mutual fund all decide whether or not they are buying or selling certain stocks so that their books will look good to their investors. So potentially, the big names will benefit as the mutual funds add those names to the list.

They were surprised that I last this long before coming in for a checkup. According to them, this is a very painful condition to be in. From my point of view, I only wanted to find out if there is a way for me to stop getting distracted by the inconvenient feeling that began 5 days ago.

Shingles is the resurfacing of chicken pox what lies dormant in a person’s nervous system. The method of storage is unknown and the method of reactivation is unknown. Apparently, something triggers the nervous system to start making the very virus that causes the pain. Yes, the liquid that oozes out of the sores are actual varicella virus and contagious, but unless you touch it with a part of your skin that has open wounds, you won’t catch it. Or if you somehow rub your open wound all over my pants.

It’s painful all right since the virus uses the nerves to travel to the surface of the skin and creates sores at the numerous nerve ending clusters. To those of you who never had it. It’s like getting stabbed randomly and repeatedly by the tip of a knife.

Supposedly, at around 50, when your immune system gets weakened, it has the most chance of surfacing. Otherwise on a healthy person like me who’ve never experience the fever that precedes the viral outbreak, the only unofficial explanation is by some nervous shock induced by psychological stress.

Consider that I have been working full time to come home and either day trade or write my game till well into the night,  while, at the same time, dancing salsa about 3 hours/week. I would say that psychological stress is the most probable cause. I am just angry that I can’t put my body on overdrive as much as I wanted to.  Not if I want another episode of shingles for a month and risk having phantom knives stabbing me for the rest of my life. Seems like I have to slow down, meaning no more programming at the doctor’s waiting room in pain while the babies around cried their crescendos.

For the right prices, I would risk it, but at the moment, nothing is worth that much yet. It is my life’s philosophy to step into my coffin with a body that’s completely ruined, but I also understand that I can only ruin the body parts once. Choose wisely.

• BUY microsoft stock. Project Natal is going to kick everyone's arses. Advice from a gamer with 25 years gaming experience. #
• Once I decided to do something. Shit started happening that made me hesitate. Should I charge ahead? Or settle for the comforts promised? #
• Been laughing non stop for the past 2 hours after discovering bash.org #
• News corp blocking google. It's going to be one of those FAIL stories we reminisce in the future. #
• Really Miss Z. But the most surprising of all of this is that I can't imaging you playing farmville. #
• Uhhh… Why is facebook blocking links? #
• Funny, my skin is allergic to the pickle juice, but I can eat it without needing an anaphylactic shot. #
• New blog post: Zania dev journal day 13 http://bit.ly/3p5mJ8 #
• Can't wait. So excited. And tired and burnt out. The roughness is contagious. #
• I like how China is getting more important. Evident by Obama's Chinese visit. I just hope it'll translate to our cultural image one day. #
• My AMD is up 22% in a day. Been waiting for this Intel settlement for a year. Orgasm. #
• @LivelyIvy Congrats. Showing my support for fellow indie developer. #
• Yes, mind blowing. But I am glad I got it right. #
• Heh, COD:MW2 sells 8.8 million copies on day 1. If you haven't bought ATVI stocks. Now is a good time. #
• New blog post: Investors and the economy http://bit.ly/nIUMl #
• Heh, so basically Modern Warfare 2 has the whole thanksgiving shopping week to itself. WIN. #
• You heard it from me first. Electronic Arts (ERTS) is headed towards bankruptcy. No insider information. Just pure Fundamental Analysis. #
• I should start charging people to help them call up some Chinese shop and schedule an appointment for them for repairs. #
• Playing with illustrator. Working on graphics and animations. #

Life and trade optimization

Yeah, I know, I didn’t update last week. It’s not because I lost big or anything. I just got too busy and didn’t get to trade much. Trading, unlike what I used to think, requires more research than a full time job. I decided that I shouldn’t make a trade, unless I’ve done enough research for a particular stock. As can be seen from my last statement update,  10% of my profits got eaten away by commissions to my broker. The solution that I applied is simply to trade less and ride the swing for a longer period of time.

On top of that, because I day trade now, the concept of money and time is even more distorted than it used to. I am basically losing and gaining thousands of dollars daily, while living a very frugal life where I barter for anything that cost more than $50. I started to realize that most of the cost cutting that I’ve been doing isn’t really worth my time. The enjoyment of life is slowly creeping to the #1 spot in my life’s goal. Which is why I took that Metallica trip and had to basically abandoned trading for 3 days because of the aftermath.

Performance analysis

Starting balance: $5149.48

Closing balance: $6368.08

Trade carrying over to next week: $4814.5 (75.60%)

Derivative risk: $21,000(329.79%)

Increase from opening balance: $1218.60  (23.66%)

Cost of capital: $241.4  (19.80%)

Earnings excluding one time lucky shot: $0

Successful bets: Lost track

Failed bets:  Lost track

Carryover bets: Lost track

Strategy

I tried a strange straddle technique by buying one put option on the FAS and another one on the FAZ. Figuring that since these two both decay, it is best to buy the put options. Also, because they are way cheaper than the calls. I am still waiting for it to play out, if the financials experience a big rally or big drop, I’ll profit greatly.

Reflections

I slipped and missed out on a few earnings release that should’ve reaped some great benefits for me. At the same time, I am abandoning the straddle strategies that I’ve been using for earnings release. Upon some initial estimations, I realized that for a straddle to earn anything, the underlying stock needs to have a wild swing of at least 10%. A great feat if you’ve seen enough of the market. At most, it’s a 5% swing for stocks that are large cap and even when it’s a small cap, the volatility is usually already discounted into the options price. You lose either way.

On another note, writing options is making my books look terrible. The risk of having everything exercised will require me to pony up $21000. Which is an astronomical number compared to the actual underlying cash. This is part of the reason why we have a financial crisis at the moment. The problem is not that I’ll lose big, but rather, when people exercise the options, I need to have that amount of cash on hand. Which, means liquidating a lot of assets just to have cash on hand, exacerbating the problem.

After much thought, I’ve decided to stop writing options because the risk/reward is not worth the small amount of income it generates. So far, for small transactions, the best risk/reward is still in the direct buying of a call or a put option.

In my opinion and this is my opinion only from observation. Critics love big failures. The down fall of the the free world brought about a flock of critics who spend their time writing articles to point out the faults of every firm that’s out there. I personally believe that it is the action of a coward. People who criticizes and bath in the glory of their prescience on how bad things are because of those “in the wrong”. Those who, instead of acting to save, acted to destroy. Through what they thought as innoncent words.

Yes, in writing this, I am also attacking, but I am only attacking because we have recovered. To tell you the truth, the only people who can survive what we survived are those who has everything that they have in hard earned cash, but even that is debatable due to inflation. Perhaps gold is a better bet, but then you also have to spend money to rent a vault somewhere.

Critics love pointing out a fact and use it to prove a weakness and how badly managed something is without looking at the details of the circumstances. As if the only actor on stage is the one that they are criticizing without bringing into focus the other players in the market.

Why were all firms being destroyed? Because they don’t have cash. Why can’t they raise cash? Because it shows weakness. Why is that a bad thing? Because once they do, shorters circle over the sky and short you to bankruptcy. I was fully invested during the crash and I went into it with my eyes wide open. The people that are the most despicable and added no value to rescue the system are the media.

Which I have a lot to say about in my next opinion piece.

It’s been a while since I last updated on the progress. Well, things has been hectic. You should probably head to the flash file itself to see. Make sure you click on the stage that opens up so that it’ll start capturing your keyboard events.

Use arrows or wasd to maneuver and space to shoot.

Bug fixes

I fully fixed the physics of bullets so that angular rotation of player ship as well as the ship’s momentum affects the bullet’s trajectory. On top of that, I fixed some trigonometry errors in my formula to calculate where the nuzzle of the ship is. While a long ship is rotating, the angular force on the bullet is greater as the nuzzles are farther away from the center of the body.

Additions

It’s beginning to take too much time to single step through the code to debug physics or some new mechanism. So I added an administrative debug interface as an overlay. It explains why the HUD is so messy right now. The released version will have it cleaned up, but I don’t have time to design the release HUD at this stage.

The major milestone reached in this build lies in the implementation of player save files as well as a working inventory system. These are done through remote loading of xml file. And yes, I had to code a xml parser for that. Eventually migrate to PHP calls to mysql databases. Again, too ambitious at this stage.

Architecture

I spent many an hour with my head in my palm chasing after chains of thoughts in the dark. Figuring out how to connect the code’s architecture through Aggregator and Singleton class. The class structure for aggregator is very alien from what I’ve learned up till this point in life. So it was equivalent of a mind fuck in exploring how to do it. All this because I want to be able to scale this up if I want to in the future. It is both a satisfying and frustrating experience because I just want to get a product out first and here I am stuck working on something that end users won’t see at all, nor appreciate.

Art

I drew a few ship designs on paper and realized the vector art through adobe illustrator. If you have seen the demo before, you’ll notice that the player ship’s style has changed dramatically. I still had some problem porting the separate parts to Flash, but the basis of the work flow has been established. The rest is just details which will be left till before the first release. As mentioned before, I will be using pure black for foreground objects in order to improve performance. Something that is very important in flash because of how cpu intensive it is.

I find it amazing that people refers to traders and investors as if they are a group of people who deserves what they get from the risk they agreed on taking. Not knowing how interconnected everyone is to the behavior of stock market. “Yes, let’s wipe out the investors of certain big name company. We should let those too big to fail firms fail and wipe out the shareholders.”

Are you fucking thinking at all?

If there is one thing you need to know about investors is that 100% of the population is invested. You just don’t know that. In some Asian countries, where people are more emotional and the regulations are more lax (especially where I was born), you see 120% population investment. Yes that’s right, through fake heads and borrowed money.

But back to the case in point. How? I’ve never touched a bank before. Sure perhaps I am exaggerating a bit, there are those special case hippies who’ve managed to stay out of the society’s structure, but even they are impacted more or less by the investment community.

The everyday guy

An average Joe is invested in the market thorugh the pension fund that they contribute to with their paycheck. The pension funds of nowadays no longer engages in the safe and secure investment routine that guarantees a small and secure interest income. Instead, they are tagged as sophiscated institutional investors who “should know better”.  After all, they are managed by executives who are paid 10s of millions of dollars each ear to screw up. The prime example being Canada’s pension plan losing $30 Billion this year. That’s about 1/4th of their capital. Mostly from investing in risky assets because they are sophisticated.

The reason for their engagement in risk is simple. The outlay of their fund will be bigger than the inflow of capital by 2018 for most western societies and the fund should be empty at around 2048 based on current projections. This is the result of the baby boomer retirement which reduces the ratio of working poplation per retired population. Thus, less people contributing than withdrawing.

The well off

Most of you belong in this category, you got left over money, you invested in mutual funds. You got burned. While the market picked up from the crash, your mutual fund is still 50% underwater. Those fund managers cares only about the fees they get from you, they don’t really look out for your wealth. Why would they if their money is not invested in the said fund and if they can charge 2% for managing it, basically shifting the portfolio around about 4 times a year.

The rest

I guess I don’t have to convince you since you are already in the market investing.

So big names are famous and pension/mutual funds loves having them in their portfolio. It shows prestige and good judgment. Most sane funds have the big names because that’s what YOU, the average chump, wants to invest in. Guess what happens when you call your government to wipe out the big names in a bout of  righteousness? YOU take a loss. You just won’t know it until 3 months later when your statements gets updated. Or a year later when the government does a review of the pension funds.

Karma is a bitch.

• Stay hungry stay foolish. Oh how I've forgotten this principle over the years. #
• OMG LOL. Bill gates said: Improving your odds doesn't guarantee success. #
• Listening to Steve Job's speech to get some courage. #
• Too much happening. Body can't keep up. #
• Really hate days like this, where everything is waiting for FOMC's 2:15PM news. #
• @natashaduchene so jealous you get to go to russia. You'll have to teach the ropes on low budget travelling one day. #
• Ottawa, road trop, metsllica, junk food=going to drop like a stone in my bed. #
• At Metallica concert. #
• Timbits, Coffee, sitting in front of my computer coding. Reminds me of university. #

I am always intrigued at the audacity of some of the ladies in my class when they tell me that I am leading them wrong and that I need to do it in a certain different way. I mean HOW COULD THEY? Don’t they know that it’s their fault? Of course, that thought only flashes by for an instant before being overtaken by bemusement. This must be what an elephant feels when a cat is trying to attack its foot.

The idea leads me to an interesting conclusion which I didn’t see before. Maybe there isn’t a “universal lead”. For years, I’ve chased after the holy grail of the men’s role in dancing and that is to be able to lead everyone while believing that if only I can perfect my lead, if only I can perfect it to what a perfect lead is, then I can do it. Herein lies my mistake, in which I believed the existence of an ideal.

So perhaps I need to adjust my lead and find what the perfect lead is for each lady, in the process becoming many different perfect lead myself. But if this is the truth, then there must be a perfect follower for the natural tendencies in which I normally lead.

Finally got my backdrop/movie screen setup correctly after adding some modification to my wall. Now I just have to figure out a way to iron the muslin backdrop vertically. Next up is the sound system and I think I am done in terms of adding things to my condo.

Because I have plenty of time to think while working on the basics and my awareness of our bodies intensifies to compensate for the dance partner’s inexperience, I started to notice all these awesome things that I am doing which I wasn’t aware of before.

The most amazing feat of my subconscious is the awareness of people, where they are and what move they are about to do. A consequence of dancing waltz where floorcraft is essential in order to avoid people while keeping the whole routine going smoothly. Avoiding obstacles in your path as if your routine were planned with the obstacles in mind.

I believe that several years of dancing, looking all around and bumping into people in crowded dance floors managed to burn this ability into a subconscious routine that I don’t have to think about. Leaving my mind free to take care of other tasks. I don’t know how else to explain this to non dancers, let’s just say that if I need to take a step back and somebody is about to pass behind me in a perpendicular path, I know without looking that I have to take a smaller step and I trust in this “knowing” without questioning it.

The funny thing is, put me in a soccer field where the same skill can benefit me greatly and it doesn’t work. As if the very feeling of wood underneath the leather soles of my shoe activates the ability.

• Saved up enough grocery store gift cards to last me for 6 months now. #
• God decided to take a dump on my life this week. #
• Salsaing. Is that a word? #
• SIA kind of reminds me of Nadia's singing style #
• Current musical addiction: SIA for her imperfect voice. http://bit.ly/1ClSGE #
• Working with German engineers. Impressed. #
• Sending orders faster than the web interface can handle. #
• Is everyone else selected for this new twitter beta thing? #
• Can't believe that I called Goldman Sach's on their bullshit and was right. #
• So, a positive GDP end of recession coming soon. #
• Oh oh. Somebody better come out with some good news soon. #
• Another day of coding well past midnight. #
• I really love VISA CEO's style of answering investor questions: "No, because that's the most appropriate and accurate statement" #
• I am really impressed by Jamie Dimon. #
• LOL deleting 10 emails from my work PC took 30 seconds. I wonder how many 30 seconds I wasted waiting for these type of things. #
• Need to find how to short Chinese real estate market. Preferably through options. #
• If you are cautious. A BAC straddle works too. #
• If you got some money to throw away. BAC is at a good buying point right now. #
• I have to admit. Finding the right co-founder is as hard as finding the right dance partner. #
• The Obama administration have started passing laws that are detrimental to the economy. We are entering the second half of depression. #
• On average, food prices increased by 15~20% from last year. Either by ninja size reduction, size price appreciation or cheaper additives. #