The US economy and the impact it has on China

This is just my view and should not be taken at face value. I wrote the following paragraph at the end of 2009, outside of this blog:

"I have recently consumed myself in every bit of news around the US economy and I have listened to Peter Schiff, Ron Paul and many others as well as people with different views on the current situation. The desperate attempt by people like ben bernanke to artificially stimulate the US economy is just making matters worse, as his solution is to print more money and to give it to the banks and businesses such as Freddy and Fannie, which now have 100% of their loses covered by the government. The government is getting bigger and bigger and intervening with the free markets, which I disagree with. The housing boom was brought about by too much easy credit, you only needed to put down about 5% to get a house, and people believed housing prices would just continue to rise, I mean how dumb is that. After the inevitable crash what then would have happened would be that lenders would tighten up on lending and be more cautious to lend to people who were too likely to default. But the government stepped in and said we will guarantee the loans so then people started to lend, the interest rates were at a record low and this encourages no one to save and again encourages people to take risks they wouldn't have had the government stayed out of the free markets. The government encouraged more spending, more debt in many ways, e.g cash for clunkers. The country is massively in debt and they desperately need to let companies that are failing to be productive fail, let resources be bought up and let new companies start up, which aren't owned by the government and aren't a drain on tax money. They need to allocate resources to allowing the country to be productive again."

Support becoming Resistance

Day trading really interests me and I love how a markets move for the day is largely pinned to fundamentals or news but then how there are also so many psychological factors playing a part. There are different players with different goals, e.g hedgers and speculators. Each player is unique and has access to an array of tools. Some use technical analysis which is the process of analysing past data to predict the next move. Technical analysis can be done in so many different ways which adds to the complexity of understanding how people interpret the data but this makes trading more interesting.

The perfect strategy

If you wanted to just read what I think the perfect strategy is for something like trading or poker just skip to the second to last paragraph! I find the term strategy cropping up too often and used falsely and I actually dislike the word more and more these days. If I go back to when I played Warcraft 3 on PC, I was pretty decent at this game but not until my mind was opened by a friend of mine. We ended up making a team together, I was fast on the keyboard and had been playing a while and he was a top half life player who was a great thinker. He showed me that the best strategy is the most flexible strategy, one that is ready to counter whatever your opponent does. Now I always make sure I try to adapt to the situation in everything I try to master now.

Zero sum games: gambling or not?

I realised my understanding of zero sum games is actually quite good and I thought perhaps I should share some of my own thoughts. Firstly zero sum just means that for every winner there is a loser, there is no wealth created. Investing isn't a zero sum game because companies actually create wealth. I am always interested by zero sum games because you have to out think someone and it's definitely a great feeling when you make money from it too.

Preparing for training course: Intro

This is my first post and right now I am set to start at a proprietary trading firm in April on a 4 week training course and I am aiming to get backed by them although I appreciate it is going to be a tough challenge. I am spending my time learning as much as I can whilst taking some time to relax and enjoy waking up whenever I want. You can see my background on the right, I don't want to discuss it too deeply as I don't see much need too but a few thoughts can be found below.