Post 900: On Accomplishment

As you'll know if you've read this blog or my other one, I'm in a Time Crunch. I put that in capital letters because it is the daddy of all time crunches. It's so much of a crunch that I can't see my way clear to do any writing. In an odd half hour here and there I do some research for a future project, the type of research that can be done in 30 minutes chunks of time. And to some extent I'm keeping up with my blogs. Beyond that, I don't foresee any writing for the next four months.

Yet, I have to say, I'm not without accomplishments during this time. This is my 900th post on this blog. That's not bad. I started it in late 2007, just under seven years ago, so that's an average of around 115 posts a year. I'm pleased with that accomplishment. Someday I hope someone will be interested in reading them all, seeing what the last seven years of my life have been like, and perhaps be impressed. Or, maybe not.

Another accomplishment of late has been better productivity in my engineering career. Most of the things I do are self-starting type stuff, and I've had trouble starting things. Recently though I've started several things. I have in-house classes planned clear up to December 2015. In the next four months I'll be teaching classes I've never taught before, which means I'll have to prepare notes, study the material, plan a presentation, and build a PowerPoint file for each. Three more things to put into my resume.

The main cause of the Time Crunch has also resulted in accomplishment. Lynda and I are in a stock trading education program. Part of that is having a mentor, having conference calls with him, and doing a bunch of homework. I'm pleased to say I've been keeping up with the homework, even out-pacing my wife with it. It's enjoyable to a degree. Whether or not it will make us more successful trading stocks I don't know, but I think it will. It's a quality program, unlike so many I've evaluated over the years. At least it's keeping me busy, and accomplishing things.

And today, I had a minor accomplishment: I paid the bills. We stayed home from church today. I'm nursing a mild cold, and Lynda was nursing a moderately severe headache. After morning devotions I grabbed accumulated mail from the kitchen table, went through it all, and paid all bills that were due, one not due till Nov 13. I sorted through things and discarded a bunch of junk mail. I have a few more things to go through, but overall I'm pleased with what I got done.

So three cheers for accomplishment. Of course, I'd rather these accomplishments be writing related, but perhaps that will come again in time.

Weekends Are For Rest?

That's what we're told, right? Weekends are for rest, and leisure. For the Christian (devout or cultural), Sunday is meant to be a day of rest. We sometimes substitute a day of leisure for a day of rest. Of course, a person who works all week with their mind might find the mind most rested by partaking in rigorous physical activity. A person who works all week at a physical job might need to rest their body and engage their mind during the weekend.

Well, how can I report on the stewardship of my weekend? I'm not sure it was all that restful. On Saturday I was up reasonably early. The first hour is somewhat of a blur. I went to The Dungeon, but don't remember accomplishing very much. After that it was a combination of clean-up in the house and stock trading work. It was a rainy day, and outside work was impossible. Lynda and I watched two stock trading webinars, one in the late morning and one in the late afternoon. This is part of our assignment on the new stock trading education program we are in. We had much more than that to do, but that was what we could accomplish. We also had to work on setting up an account with the brokerage arm of the educational service we're in. This took much longer than expected, but we got it done. However, something still seemed wrong, as we couldn't access the many features we were supposed to. Time required that we put this off. Plus, we figured it would mean a call to their tech service, which isn't open on the weekends.

Another major task was to clean the kitchen table. This becomes a dumping ground for all kinds of things: mail until it's gone through; mail we don't know what to do with; Lynda's mom's papers waiting to be filed; piles of receipts waiting to be filed; sometimes food items or dishes from a meal eaten there; and countless other things. I had said Friday that we really needed to clean that. So Saturday morning I decided I'd do my part. I went through all the mail, and was able to get rid of most of it. I went through Esther's papers and discarded or neatly piled those still needing attention. Lynda went through her stuff as well. I won't say it's perfect, but it is definitely much cleaner than it was. Less than an hour of additional work and we could use it for a family meal.

Next, since Lynda was planning to leave for Oklahoma City on Sunday (for a while it might have been Saturday, but lack of progress toward that goal made Sunday the day), preparations for that was part of our Saturday work. That, and other cleaning needed around the house.

Around 2:00 p.m. I made our weekly Wal-Mart grocery and prescription run. That took an hour, plus more including putting things away. That evening Lynda had a meal in mind to fix, different than the one I was planning on, but a good one. I helped her with it and we had a nice combo dish for the meal. Meanwhile I had to begin preparing to teach Life Group on Sunday. I had 40 pages (27 catch-up; 13 this week) to read in the book we're studying, and then a lesson to prepare from it. I read it, and found that this week's chapter fed into a lesson that took less time to prepare than average. That brought us through the evening, and off to bed.

Sunday was busy with prep for church and Life Group, church, teaching Life Group, and helping Lynda find things, pack, load, and get on the road. She did so at 2:45 p.m., at which time I went to The Dungeon. I first pulled up the brokerage account. They asked me to provide a little more information for my profile. Once I did that, and tried to access all those features, I was able to. One task down! I took an hour to learn their platform, and to customize it for comfort of the eyes and for some things our mentor wants us to have on it. Then it was time for stock chart study. I had about 100 charts to try to get through by 8:00 p.m. Monday evening. I worked diligently at it for a while, though being unfamiliar with this new system of evaluating stock charts, I reviewed them in both the new system and the one I've been using. A couple of hours and I had 33 charts reviewed, and my mind was mush. Clearly I wasn't going to finish that evening. Also, Sunday was my day to blog here, but I wasn't going to be able to do that either.

So I said the heck with it. I needed to take the rest of the evening off. Rather than pull out the good food from the night before, I ate junk and watched Sunday night football. Not content with just watching, I pulled out the Nook, and between plays I resumed my research into the letters of Thomas Carlyle, identifying on a list whether they have references to the compositions he was working on. I did that between plays, so obviously it wasn't done very efficiently. But I managed to get through a couple of dozen letters.

Then, at 10:30 p.m. or so Lynda called from OKC, wanting to discuss some things about this new trading program and what our mentor expects. We talked through that, though it required me to return to The Dungeon and pull up certain things. We spent half an hour or so on that, then it was back upstairs to see forecasts of the severe weather expected in the night, and off to bed.

To sum it up: My body doesn't feel properly rested due to lack of an exertion outlet due to the rain, and my mind doesn't feel properly rested due to few opportunities to disengage it over the weekend. However, I was refreshed by the excellent worship and study with God's people, and with the reading in our study book. Looking ahead, may next weekend provide proper rest and rejuvenation for body and mind, added to that for soul and spirit.

Expectations: Some met, some Waiting

On Monday I wrote that this would be a week of expectations. Many things of somewhat momentous consequence in my life all seemingly coming together. It's now Wednesday, and I thought I'd give an interim report.

The stock trade I wrote about was for a down market. With the market plummeting yesterday, I made money and closed the trade not too far from optimum. This is my first trade since coming back to stock trading after a two year hiatus. Of course, my friend Gary is right when he commented that a single trade doesn't mean a whole lot, and that stock trading (as opposed to investing) is more chance than skill. Those that employ this full time would disagree. In fact, on my personal trade development sheet, I wrote where I thought the downtrend was most likely stop. It was right where it did stop yesterday. Time to reassess now, see where investor sentiment takes us (a pause on the way down or a rebound) and plan the next trade.

My flood study, of two tributaries to Blossom Way Creek in Rogers, Arkansas, goes slower than hoped. CAD help is the problem, as horses switched in midstream and I have received nothing to key-in yet. Hopefully this afternoon or the first thing tomorrow morning I can work in earnest. Completing the keying-in this week is in jeopardy. But I've used the time wisely in studying in the handbooks a new aspect of floodplain analysis that applies to this project, so that's good.

No word on those three proposals for conference papers, yet. Today was the published deadline for submitters to hear back. Down to four business hours (five; they are on mountain time).
Edited to Add: The e-mails came through a half-hour ago. All three abstracts were accepted! Two are for 1-hour workshops, and one is for a 1/2 day training class. More about these in future posts. I should say that acceptance is conditional--upon my meeting certain deadlines for increasingly more detail about the presentations, and upon the reviewers liking the extra material. "There's many a slip," as Pamala Tudsbury said. [in Herman Wouk's Winds of War]

Yesterday I spoke with the editor of Buildipedia.com, and we had a great visit. He liked my ideas for the first article in the infrastructure series, and confirmed that I can do that and pitch many other things to him. He liked the three or four ideas I gave him for articles and features. I received the contract in the mail today, complete with deadline, word count, fee, and copyright info.

Weight wise, I can't seem to lose any more. I have had three or four consecutive days of eating right and getting good exercise. Normally when I do that, especially when I start at the top of a recent range, I lose four or five pounds. Not this time. Two only. I'm not sure what's going on, unless the extra exercise I'm doing has signalled my body to shut down its metabolism a little. That doesn't make sense, but I can't think of what else it could be.

So, two of my expectations have not been experienced yet, the others have or are in progress. It's a good week so far.

Money, meet Mouth

Three weeks ago I wrote on this blog of how I had been doing some research into stock market trends, and that from the research I saw signs in the trading of 25 May 2010 that the market would turn around and begin an uptrend. That's exactly what happened. A couple of days later I told my wife that I had accurately made the call, and she brought me up short. "It's only a call," she said, "if you put some money into it."

Of course, she was right. I took all the stock trading training with her that we originally had, though she's had some more since then that I didn't have. But wanting to concentrate on my writing, I let stock trading go, and barely looked at it all through 2008-2009. What little time I did spend on it, I spent on overall market research. I found a pattern that looked promising to me (wrote about it later in a Suite 101 article), but really didn't want to get back into trading. Consequently, that pattern I'd watched came and went in February of this year, and I wasn't watching to see it happen and take advantage of it. It happened exactly as my research suggested it would.

In the spring, when I decided to come back to trading, I also decided I would study the major market movements for a while prior to placing trades. So I began doing that, and wrote a number of articles from that research--but placed no trades. Until yesterday.

The research I did Wednesday night convinced me that we were in a short-term market pull back, one that might give up as much as 10 percent of its value. Already it had fallen 5 percent. I had done several paper experiments with trades designed to take advantage of these short movements, including to the downside. I didn't get the trade ready on Wednesday night, but decided instead to watch the market opening on Thursday and be ready to enter a trade if 1) the downtrend continued for the first half hour of trading, and 2) it did not exhibit any reversal just after the first half hour.

That's exactly what happened. So I fired off my trade, a put option in the S&P 500 index. It filled at my limit price. I could make this trade because my work yesterday was to be all at my desk, on the computer, so watching the trade during the day was easy. Easy to sneak a peak at the market from time to time.

Well, the market went down, and the value of my trade went up. It wasn't a large trade; I'm not about to retire on the gains. But it was nice to be able to say: I studied the market; determined its probable direction; planned a trade to take advantage of that movement; placed the trade; and by the end of the day saw the value increase by 5.6 percent. That's a good result.

Of course, it kind of makes me wonder why I'm bothering with writing, which pays next to nothing even if you are successful. Both writing and stock trading have their own type of creativity. Both have subjective and objective elements. Both can be frustrating and fulfilling. But due to time constraints I can't be both.

What's an engineer to do?

A Stock Market Move Called (sort of)

This post would be a lot more impressive if I had posted it Friday or Saturday, as planned, but perhaps it still has value.

Tuesday May 26 was a wild ride on Wall Street. The market plunged at the open , traded down hard most of the day (about 3%), then at the end of the day rose just as hard as it fell. Some of the indexes closed up a reasonable amount for a normal trading day. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed down less than a half percent.

I had watched the market a little during the day, casually, since I didn't have any stocks in my account. But I didn't hear about the late day rally until driving home. I thought from the report, "The market made a hammer today. Better look at charts tonight."

A "hammer" is a candlestick pattern of a price variation, such as a stock, a stock index, or really any commodity whose price varies. Candlesticks are a way to display price variation so it is easy to read the important information of a security's open, high, low, and close for the period. Any period actually. Candlesticks can be drawn minute by minute, for half-hours, hours, days, weeks, months, or even years. Any time period you want. Different types of traders use different time frames. I was thinking of a hammer candlestick on the daily chart.

So I studied the stock index charts that night. All the major indexes had indeed made a hammer of one type or another. I came upstairs from the Dungeon and told Lynda it looked as if the market was about to go on a run to the upside.

So what happened? Wednesday and Thursday saw strength in the market. While many indexes went down on Wednesday, they closed well above lows of the previous session. Thursday was up strong. At some point on Wednesday, when the market was strong at midday, I told Lynda, "I nailed it."

She reminded me that you can't claim to have nailed it unless you put some money behind your prediction. And I hadn't. Knowing the busyness of the next few days at the office, I knew I couldn't watch trades, so I didn't place any on Tuesday night. Had I done so, and managed the trade according to risk-reward rules, I would have made a few percentage points on a trade over two or three days. I could have accepted that. The movement, of course, may be rather short-lived, as the market today closed below the close of last Tuesday. It's still above the lows of the 26th, so the movement may not be over yet.

Lynda did take a position on a stock on Thursday, based on my prediction, and made 1.5% from Thursday to Friday, closing out then. I'd take 1.5% overnight any day.

So, I guess I'll keep watching stock price and volume patterns, trying to figure out where the money is moving, and what is happening, spotting the trend, making 1.5% every few days. Maybe, just maybe, I can make some money with all this training I've received.