The stochastics action looked clean and the short term price action looked ripe for some movement up. There was some previous resistance (as you can see from the chart) at the take profit levels and hence my rationale for closing.

I have been on a few courses also and it’s about finding the time (I only have evenings to play with due to my 9-to-5 job). It would be good if I were at the stage where I could just trade but alas, I’m not at that stage as yet.

This blog generates money however through sponsorship and advertising and actually covers my trading losses (except for the monies that the trading academy are screwing me for).

Anyway, I did trade today, a short on the DOW at 11389 and got +18.

I have recently finished the book “The 4-Hour Work Week: Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich” and what a great little book. We live in times where the world is changing so rapidly and Tim has managed to take advantages of the opportunities available and enrich his life.

He talks about the New Rich.. these are those who have managed to get rich by exploiting our world today. These are people like guys who set up Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the guy who set up Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg etc. Most of the New Rich are those who have exploited the internet or found ways to use the internet to help their existing bricks and mortar businesses.

The Old Rich are those who have made money the old traditional way such as property magnates, big corporation bigwigs etc…

Whilst the main crux of the book is about outsourcing your life and mini retirements…. it’s the outsourcing your life parts which were fantastic and hold immense worth if you value your time in our information loaded lives. The mini retirements were more of a lifestyle once you’ve managed to outsource your life.

Outsourcing your life, in a nutshell, means finding people to do the boring administrative and tedious things you hate to do. Obviously, you can’t outsource things like taking your partner out for dinner (she/he may run away with the other person) but, in the context of running a business, you could get people to do the admin work such as typing, research on the internet, data entry etc. There are heaps of people in places like India, China, Phillipines who could do this for you at a fraction of the cost of employing someone in Europe or the US… best of all, you can hire them for a finite job (project), pay them and be done with it. If you are a small business owner, this could be a fantastic way to expand your business which is essentially what Tim Ferriss did. He hired virtual assistants to run the mundane tasks of his business and it go to a point where his virtual assistants could also make decisions on his behalf so that he could go travelling (his mini retirements).

I have been trying the virtual assistant idea myself and I can see the merit in it. From my blog, you’ll note that I am interested in a lot of stuff (mostly financial trading) and I frequently wished I had enough time (and energy) to do everything that I want to do. I hold a 9-to-5 job which I thoroughly enjoy, I am trading the financial markets (not very well), I make websites for small businesses and run a few blogs and a few other things here and there.

Anyway, I am currently using Odesk to outsource work. I have only run 1 task so far to test and see how the system works and I am extremely pleased with it! I wanted someone to do some research for me on the web and collate it all into a document. I posted the details of the job and a price I was prepared to pay for it and then watched people applying for it. There were loads of people wanting to do it and the virtual assistant I used (who was also the first person to apply) did a marvellous job and in record time. If you’re time constrained and need a hand, I throughly recommend having a look!

Links:
Odesk
4 Hour Work Week

Today, one of his entries was a short below 107.80 and I took it! I rode the price action 30 points!! Hoorah! The market did go a lot lower however but a profit is a profit!

If you want to join or sign up for his free trial, visit http://www.rainbowforex.com/ 

When it bottomed, I was sitting on 65 odd points… anyway, I don’t know where the market is going right now but my indicators aren’t going the way I want them to be hence my close out.

This site has all sorts of data which show all sorts of fascinating and interesting things to do with the stock markets. The spreadsheets are great, you can use them to do all sorts of stuff… you can do things like download financial data from Yahoo and draw all sorts of graphs, run simulations and generally tweak to your hearts content. I got lost in this site for hours downloading and playing around with all the fascinating things.. running models and generating buy/sell signals from calculations. The site is a great find for anyone who loves to tinker with Excel and investing and best of all, the owner of this site has made everything FREE!!! Fantastic!

I woke up this morning to find that my trade had been triggered and that I was already 20 pips up. By the time I got to work, my trade was about 70 pips up. There was some resistance around 212.00 so I took profit when it eased off (you never know, it may tank from here) at 211.85 for +80.

However, if I had left it, it would have made 100 pips. If I left a trailing stop in it’s place then I could have been 200 points up at one stage…

Well, this is a trading system and each time you tweak it, you may get better or worse results… the best thing is to just stick with the system as it should make money overall.

If I had done this last week, ie did a trailing stop rather than the 100 pip limit, I would have lost. This trade did make 100 pips last week also but it soon reversed and if you had trailed it, you would have lost.

So, my first Simon Grinter trade and it worked well… to read my review of his seminar, visit:

http://www.makemesomemoney.co.uk/2008/06/10/simon-grinters-forex-seminar/

To test drive his alerts or sign up on his seminar, visit:

http://www.rainbowforex.com/ 

Shortly after my stop was taken out, I went long as it broke the upper end of the triangle. It was +1 up before it fell and took me out again.

Then when the price action fell back into the realms of the triangle, I went short and once again got caught out.

I have ended up with a -9 point loss today!! Ouch!

Trading the S&P is tough and I have so much better luck with Forex.. perhaps it’s time to concentrate on the Forex markets completely and forget the S&P….

http://www.s3scores.blogspot.com/

Simon teaches a few of his systems and together they provide you with a good arsenal of strategies to trade with. However, one thing which you need to be aware is that although the systems are great, the one thing that no one can teach you is trading psychology… there is a good discussion on trading psychology but this is something which you need to develop yourself and this does take time.

Simon currently offers a seminar to learn his methods and/or a chat room where he gives out live trades.  

I logged on into the chat room today and he gave a live trade, a short of the EURJPY and it made target. However, I work a 9-to-5 job so have no speakers and didn’t hear what he was talking about. However, someone else was kind enough to relay to me what was going on.

I recommend having a look at Simon’s methods. He offers a 14 day free trial of his chat room so you can see follow his trades. If you’re happy you can continue with the chat room or even sign up to his seminar to learn the methods and get life time access to the chat room. If after 14 days you’re not impressed, you can cancel and lose nothing. In addition, Simon offers a guarantee on his seminar, if you don’t make 20% on your account after 60 days then he will give you a full refund!

To sign up for the free trial, visit http://www.rainbowforex.com/ and put in your details. You can download some free ebooks from here, sign up for the chat room or seminar from here.