Investor Superconverence '08

There's an upcoming Investors' Superconference in Oct 08. For an early bird price of $399 for 2 days worth of talks by some pretty renown people, I think its a pretty good deal. Note that I'm not receiving any benefits for writing about this event... I just think that based on the speakers, its a pretty interesting talk.

I've listed the 5 speakers below for easy reference. Actually, looking at their expertise and the topics covered, I wonder why they didn't call it a traders' superconference instead...

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Speakers for Investor Superconference '08
Ron Ianieri
Chief Market Strategist, Options Unversity
Trainer of Today’s Top Wall Street Floor Traders & Regularly seen on CNBC Asia, Fox Business News, Bloomberg Asia

John Person
President of Nationalfutures.com
Master of Candlesticks, Pivot Point Pioneer and Best Selling Author

David “Firstwave” Elliott
Technical Analysis Wizard
Twice Voted World’s #1 Market Timer!

Tom Sosnoff
Founder, thinkorswim
20 years Market Maker on CBOE and featured in publications like Wall Street Journal and Barron’s

Price Headley
Founder, Bigtrends.com
Top 10 Stock Market Timer, Best Selling Author featured on CNBC, Fox News and Bloomberg Television

Fickle-Minded Markets

You know by now that I'm hardly trade based on Fundamental News or Expectations. But I do look at news to

1. Keep updated on the economy
2. Identify market psychology/sentiment
3. Identify possible market-moving news

Ok... The 3rd one does sound like I trade the news, so it needs alittle elaboration. Basically, markets love to wait for news to move, many times in a direction that it intends to move anyway - this includes both reversals and continuation. What does this mean? If I got a really good technical set-up, with good risk-reward ratios and a proper stop-loss, I'd likely keep my trades and expect the news to move my trades in my direction. :)

Back to the topic of news, this post also serves as a reminder to myself. Just some weeks back, people thought that US Markets had bottomed out and the worst was behind. Several tropical storms, like Gustas and Ike, threatening to impact oil production and cause further dollar weakness. But the dollar continued to rally, and oil continued to drop as the storms one by one passed without any long-term significant impact on oil production. Naturally, factors impacting oil prices are many and goes beyond just oil-production, but that's another topic in itself.

So the dollar rallied, markets became hawkish, and here's what I think was interesting - People were starting to expect the Fed to hike rates! Personally, I agree with what Buffet and Sorros and expressed sometime during this entire Sub-prime saga - The housing market is weak and may continue to weaken, and this is likely to continue for quite sometime still.

But look at how quickly the market turns! Just a couple of weeks back, people were expecting rate-hikes, and how people are looking at possible rate-cuts.

People might say - "Hey! No one expected Lehman to file for bankrupcy, and why did the Fed suddenly stop bailing out companies now? This is an unexpected development!" So suddenly, expectations have switched.

That's one reason why I remind myself not to be too caught up with the crowd psychology, and while news is important to know, it really should never be the key/only deciding factor for your trades.

Alright... just ranting. The markets never cease to amaze me.

[P.S. The article above was written based on memory, for actual opinions expressed by Buffet and Sorros, do a google search. =) ]

News Sharing

While I'm a technical trader, there is still a need to keep updated on the current affairs which would affect the market, or at least market sentiments. To do so, I subscribe to various news feeds via Google Reader.

I've just realised that Blogger now allows me to share interesting news bits that I read on Google Reader, and I've just added the widget to do so. Look to the right side, and there's a segment that says "Alex's shared items", and those are news items that I think are interesting bits to be shared. Hope you enjoy this new feature!

Chartered Market Technician (CMT)

While studying for my Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) exam, I came across a new (new to me at least) designation called the Chartered Market Technician (CMT). I thought I had previously written about it, but it appears I hadn't.

The CMT is mainly for technical traders and shows that a market technician has both broad-base and in-depth knowledge on technical aspects of the markets. It is something that I will consider going for in future, but since I'm already working on my CFA I'll leave it for another time. Somehow though, I think the CMT exam is somewhat easier to tackle if you have a keen interest in technicals and have already been reading books on the subject extensively. If you take a look at the recommended readings, you will find that these are common TA books in the markets.

Well, anyone interested to give it a shot? :)

More info via the Market Technicians Association website.

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My Forex Performance

Just in case people think I had been just putting out charts and analysis without being in the trenches myself... here's a pip of my performance thus far.

The performance looks postive for the past 4 months, the main blemish is when I lost control around January period where the sub-prime become full blown and markets were really hard to read. That markets were hard to read wasn't the real reason for that decline. It was a lack of emotional control, and the need to recoup losses made me lose grip on money management and taking more risk with larger positions than I should.

(P.S. The Scribd application I'm using below is really cool! You should check it out.)

FX Money Mgt (Performance) v2 - Upload a Document to Scribd

Read this document on Scribd: FX Money Mgt (Performance) v2

INVEST Fair '08

INVEST Fair 2008 is being held at Suntec on 16-17 Aug, and there are a few talks that Forex traders (or Forex Traders-to-be) may be interested in.

Saturday

• Trading Psychology with Technical Analysis (Conrad Alvin Lim, Master Trainer, Investment Strategist, Adam Khoo Learning Technologies Group Pte. Ltd.)
• Forex Seminar (Kishore M., Chief Executive Officer, PowerUp Capital Network Pte. Ltd. )
• Indicator Trading (Discretionary) vs System Trading (Ee Chee Koon, Chief Operating Officer, Asia Charts Pte. Ltd.)
• How to be an excellent market timer for stock, forex and futures (Binni Ong, Chief Trainer, Terraseeds Market Technician Pte. Ltd)

And many others.... I'm too lazy to copy and paste everything here... so do check out the website here.