Author: Jay

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Tarzan v1.0

A little over a year ago, I began using Collective2 as one of the tools in my toolbox to develop a trading system. It took some time, but I gradually developed a solid track record and was ultimately listed with the top 20 or 30 systems available. This past February, however, I stopped supporting my system for two reasons: 1) I began trading it myself in earnest and started feeling more secretive; and 2) nobody was subscribing to it anyways.

At the time, I was flummoxed as to why nobody would subscribe to my system. The other top performing systems had many subscribers, with some of them pulling in over $10k a month in subscription fees. So what was wrong with mine? I now believe it is because the style of trading to which I am attracted looks stupid to others. I opened positions at market open and closed them at market close. I wasn’t twitchy enough for day traders and I broke every rule of the swing traders by closing out positions “prematurely” and had way too many trades. I got lots of questions like, “Where are the stop losses” and I’d answer that I didn’t use them because I couldn’t prove they added value… but that’s not what folks wanted to hear.

I’ve continued to work on my system and utilize it for myself. There’s been some ups and downs, but that’s not really what this post is about. I’ve missed Collective2, as it was one of the only public forums I had with my trading, and I found the interaction enjoyable. So I recently decided to give it another go by giving myself a very challenging (for me) goal. I didn’t focus on maximizing returns as I had with my previous system. Rather, I tried to design a system around a few key principles that I thought would make people happy.

Oddly enough, most traders (as far as I can tell… and numerous books agree with this observation) tend to focus on what makes them happy in the activity of trading rather than on making money. So I designed a system with the swing trader in mind:

1) All trades entered in the evening. Enter and exit positions on market open. Allows the system to be traded by those working full-time jobs.

2) Minimize the total number of trades while also minimizing the risk. I thought seven positions (both long and short) held at a time struck the right balance.

3) In general, let the profits run and cut the losses short.

4) Trades average 2 to 10 days. Here I was trying to meet the expectations of the trader looking for a bit of excitement without offending their sensibilities by dipping into the day-trader playbook.

Anyway, version 1 of Tarzan is now up and running. I still need to bring the max drawdown lower (it hits a 30% drawdown during 2002 in my backtesting), but I wanted to start developing a track record with it so I went ahead and put it on C2. As I alluded to above, classic swing systems are very difficult for me, so this was quite an achievement… or it will be, if it works. We shall see.

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F**tbo**d

For those of you using WordPress, you are probably as grateful as I am for Akismet, a terrific comment spam filter built into the application. Most comment spam just gets swept away, with only a very few being sent up for moderation due to some trouble detecting the true nature of the comment.

Now here is the bizarro-world hole in Akismet that I have discovered these past few months. Probably 99% of the comment spam that got passed along for moderation instead of being automatically removed by Akismet involved one post: Nicolas versus the f**tbo**d. I finally got sick of it and turned off comments on that post.

And where did the comment spam immediately begin slipping through again? You guessed it: New H**dbo**d for Abigail’s Bed. What the heck?!? I get comment spam all over the site, but somehow entries with a f**tbo**d or h**dbo**d just slip right through. I’m shutting down the comments on the h**dbo**d post as well, a simple enough solution, but this is just weird.

Now you know why I used ** throughout this post. Didn’t want to offer the comment spam another hole in Akismet.

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My dad’s novel

Exciting news! My father, John Horne, has put his novel out there for other folks to enjoy. I’ll add the following link to our sidebar, and I encourage you to do likewise. The code is below the picture. Or, if you’d like to do me a favor, you can copy the image to your own server and change the image source accordingly.

<a href=”http://www.hornes.org/john”><img src=”http://www.hornes.org/john/AWH.jpg” /></a>

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Jonathan is home

There have been a few twists and turns since my last post. Yesterday morning, it seemed like Jonathan was doing very well and would likely be headed home today. Then he spiked a high fever in the afternoon and those hopes dwindled. We had a rough night and then an early morning visit from vampires, er, I mean the nurse who draws blood for further lab work.

When the doctor came by a couple hours later, Jonathan was still struggling with fever and discouraged by the blood letting.  Interestingly, the doctor reported that all lab reports were looking good and moving in the right direction. And this without any new doses of antibiotic (which they withheld to test the hypothesis that it was viral).

So, it appears Jonathan is afflicted with a mystery virus that piggy-backed the pneumonia from a couple weeks ago. Mono is one of the suspects. But whatever the culprit, there wasn’t much to do other than ride it out, so were given the okay to head home. There are a few more results that should be coming in on Monday, so we may yet discover the actual culprit, but it is good to be home.

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Jonathan’s hospital stay

First, we appreciate everyone’s thoughts, prayers, offers of help, and other expressions of love that have poured in over the past couple days.

Jonathan and I arrived at Children’s Medical Center yesterday afternoon and were treated to the least tortuous, least degrading, easiest admittance process I have ever experienced (and I’ve experienced about 20 of them). Interestingly, the gentleman signing us in was apparently in training for Mr. Universe or something, and his biceps were probably bigger than my thighs. But I digress.

Jonathan was doing very well, particularly given he was running a 103 degree fever. Once we were settled in a room (and a nice room at that, think LDR), we had a nice long consultation with our hospitalist. She was pleasant and competent, traits shared with pretty much everyone at Children’s. She then ordered a battery of tests, and Jonathan made me proud as he kept his composure while they poked, prodded, measured, x-rayed, and bled him through the evening. Along the way he enjoyed a dinner of french toast and bacon, cried after spilling his hot chocolate (and not from the hot liquid all over himself, but because he was enjoying it), took in a view of Pete’s Dragon, and generally did very well. Tricia dropped by late in the evening for a nice visit that coincided with the administration of the antibiotic via the IV installed earlier, and then Jonathan settled in for some sleep. I settled in for “sleep”, as I was on this couch-bed thing that was roughly equal to a balance beam surrounded by some squishy couch material.

The night went reasonably well, though there were some rough patches as Jonathan broke his fever. This morning he had no fever, which was fantastic, but didn’t last. The hospitalist came by again, with the surprising report that the x-ray hadn’t really shown any pneumonia. So next up was a CAT scan and then a rousing game of Battleship, followed by the return of the fever and some lunch.

So we have test results drifting in, but no real resolution yet. The hospital stay has been very pleasant, but we would like to be home. And I suppose that’s a good thing.

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I wear my sunglasses at night

The latest from Nicolas, this one on the long range weather forecast.

Nicolas: Dad, guess what.

Jay: What’s that?

Nicolas: The other week (note: that means “next week” in Nicolas-speak), it’s going to be sunny the whole week. The whole week. Even at night, it’s going to be sunny.