Hi,

Before I forget, I joined Bill Myers's member's site today and I really like it.

You wrote:
> There's also teaching - either a class, or
> one-on-one tutoring would be profitable too.
> My impression is that there's a lot of
> interest in technical analysis at the
> moment, which is essentially what your
> expertise is in, right?

Thanks for the excellent ideas!

Attached you'll see a screen-cap of September 21, 1995. The bars are 5-minute bars of the SP 500 futures, which was in the 500s at the time. Volatility was extremely low by today's standards. Also shown are two moving averages and a Bollinger Bands.

Looking at this picture we didn't do a very good job of trading. Early in the day we imagined two trades that weren't really there (we were trading congestion like it was a trend) and when it did start moving we couldn't figure out how to get in for a long time. When it started moving up we did a good buy. Then we did a trade way too late in the day. All these mistakes probably help explain why I didn't make money as a trader. (OTOH, it's harder than it may look.)

I was daytrading with an Austin trader at the time. After every day's trading I'd take all the trade forms and enter about 30 fields of data per trade into an Access database. I even took screen shots of our TradeStation screen, and mark them up with our trade entries, as you can see below. Then I'd add the screen capture to the database. This database only covered part of my career as a trader, and yet at the end it held the records of 756 daytrades. To this day I've never posed questions to this database looking for winning combinations of signals and technical indicators. For all I know the much-sought-after Holy Grail of trading lies hidden in my database. (I don't know why I never sifted through this database--maybe I should....) :-)

So a day of daytrading consists of sitting in front of a screen that looks sort of like the picture below, watching as the bars form and waiting for a setup to form. Then grabbing the phone and taking decisive action! Daytrading must use the same skills as our hunter ancestors employed who spent hours in a tree, waiting for a pig to wander below so they could spring on it.

Anyway, I really really want to get back into the daytrading business, and I'm sure I will somehow.

Hope this was useful or interesting!

Best,

- Boyd