What I'm Working On

In addition to my daily homework on the market and my positions and watchlist I try to make some time to continue reading books that may help me improved. I've been a bit 'stuck' on Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom for some time. It's academic and a bit dry - though I think it's a worthwhile read.

To greatly oversimplify the content, the book is aimed at helping investors develop as mechanical a system for trading as possible. In fact, many of the topics are directed at program trading (automatic computer trading), though the principles of disciplined trading apply just the same to an individual trading manually.

While I do not necessarily intend to program trade, I would like to take what I can from this book and apply it to my trading with the goal of becoming more disciplined. Additionally, I may have found a nice convergence between a skill I need to develop for my career (I'm a developer for an Identity Management application) and my trading career. I need to learn a software language to further my career. I'm going to be learning JAVA as this is the language most commonly used in my area.

I can put this to use as well in my trading, as I recently had an idea spring out of a frustration I have with IBD's Custom Screen Wizard. What is lacking from this application is any method to gather or store (in a time efficient manner) the information from the screens. As important to me as the current data is, I find historical data equally important. I would like to graph and trend the information on stocks like the price when the enter my screen, how long they stay on it, and the price when they drop off of it. I could do this by exporting the data into spreadsheets every day, but that would take too much time.

What I plan to do is write an application that will automatically execute my screens each weeknight and load the data into a database. I'll then come up with ways to manage and display this data so that over time I should be able to draw some mathematical conclusions about the potential for a stock when it makes one of my screens. Eventually I would hope that I can translate this into a mechanical trading system. For now though I've got a lot of work to do learning a new programming language.

I also ordered another book I want to read - Jack Schwager's Market Wizards. I need some inspiration. I think I'm doing well now but I want to read about some people who've made it - sometimes it's hard not to get discouraged after a string of failures, and I find these stories help get my positive outlook back.