Moving to a New Site!

I will be abandoning traderchronicles.wordpress.com in favor of a new blog site:

manilatrader.wordpress.com

same content, same layout, same everything! i guess the only thing that changed was the name. HA-HA.

so there. please visit manilatrader once in a while, and many thanks for visiting this startup blog.

Why Onions Make People Cry

I love to put onions on my fried rice, corned beef and everything else. The problem is they make tears.

There’s a chemical process involved in chopping onions. Allium cepa has allinases, enzymes that break down amino acid sulfoxides. These molecules become two kinds of molecules: sulfenic acids and thiosulfinates. First, the sulfenic acids spontaneously rearrange into syn-propanethial-S-oxides which trigger the tears. The thiosulfinates, on the other hand, are the chemicals that cause the odor.

So, what do we do to stop the tears?

The onions can be heated, in microwave or in boiling water. Leave the enzymes to be degraded for even 5 minutes. I find it rather clever, actually. Simple, but really clever.

Who Would Have Thought…

June 27, 2008, Friday

-$39.89 on 14,200 shares traded.

I have this unnatural tendency to panic. Well, I guess that’s still normal, and that makes me human.
When I have a position that escapes my stop-loss in TA (technical analysis), I panic too much and press the exit button. But panic clouds your judgment, and most certainly when you expected that things will go your way…

Sayang. Yun ang laging nababanggit sa office. Madali lang ang manghinayang…

By my guesstimates, I feel that Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays are more “readable” than Mondays and Fridays. May mga araw na nasasakyan mo, pero may mga araw din na hindi. Kanya-kanyang raket lang ‘yan.

One Step at a Time

June 26, 2008, Thursday

$30.98 on 7,800 shares traded.

My real office made a record total profit today. Yey! Team Kulas rules.

Thoughts for today:
I lost -$17 from AT&T, but gained $47 from Walmart. I have more confidence selling stocks short. Mornings are easier to read. The charts in the afternoon are more unreliable, I lost as much as $15 before gaining a turnaround.

Fed Report Clobbered My Profits

June 25, 2008, Wednesday

-$9.22 on 11,200 shares traded.

Huhuhu. Morning session: almost always negative (-$10). Lunchtime: pretty positive ($18). w00t. Then the Fed Report pretty sealed my fate: a series of losses amounting to $18. It was very erratic by 2:15pm, and afterwards. I hated every single moment of it.

From 10 to -10

June 24, 2008, Tuesday

-$7 on 14,400 shares traded.

Okay, today’s trading was really rather exciting, volatile but still readable. Walmart moved in a large intraday range (56.25 to 57.85), and there were a series of crests and troughs.

I had fun even with a -$7 on my blotter. At the start, it climbed up to $10, then I misunderstood everything and dumped to -$9, then it went up again to $12, and then I finally ended up with -$7.
The good news is I was able to contain my losses within [10,-10].

My Second Shutdown

June 23, 2008, Monday

-$51.73 on 5,800 shares traded.

I can’t really be imaginative with the title. I mean, if the losses go on forever, I’d rather be suffering from some kind of curable cancer than die of a heart stroke because of trading… Seriously.

I need help. But I can’t find a master trader who can train me. Miss ***** is too busy, and I find it awkward to bug her everytime. Miss ***** is too strict, and… never mind.

The four of us in my batch awfully needs some support, mostly psychological. I’m just holding on, you know.

Eating Inexpensively

For roughly four years in college, I am used to eating out in restaurants, fast food chains, and carinderias (pinoy version of small food outlets) almost all the time. I live away from my real home in Davao, and here in Manila, I find no time to cook in my apartment (with serious studies and not-so-serious gimiks as valid excuses).

Admittedly, eating out also means shelling out some cash, so food budget really takes the bulk of my expenses BEFORE. But now that I am a li’l more mature, already graduated from college, moved out from my old apartment, and earning my keep, I know that eating out everyday is a no-no.

Right now, I cook at my new apartment. The food staples in my kitchen cupboard are beans in tomato sauce, sardines, tuna, canned corned beef, fresh eggs, tomatoes, a cheap loaf of bread, margarine and lots of bananas. Also, I have my daily consumption of coffee, chocolate, or juice from concentrates. Trust me, they might seem a lot, but they cost only a few hundred pesos in the grocery. I do my grocery twice a week. So far, this way of life is earning me a few bucks already.

For some, however, eating out is their only option because of their busy schedules. Anyway, the thing is to eat healthily. Taking in fastfood fries and chicken everyday can be a tough ordeal with our digestive system -simply, bad nutrition.

I just felt sharing these things because I read Simple Dollar’s blog about food. It made me hungry. I may not be a culinary expert, but at least I am learning a few tricks with the stove.

Have fun in your kitchen!

Indiana Jones and the Abridged Script

* Read this abridged script of the 4th Jones movie -totally hilarious.

* The summer solstice, the longest day of the year, in the Northern Hemisphere falls on June 20. Should be a conspicuous time for exquisite rituals and paranormal stuff.

* The North Pole faces its first ice-free summer in its history. Thin ice around the North Pole readily melts in the summer heat; some perennial (thicker) ice around the Arctic Circle will still survive though.

* People have a normal tendency to feel sleepy by afternoon. The active-asleep rhythm (see illustration here) of our bodies are common in mammals, too. Besides, it is scientific fact that taking 26-minute naps can boost performance by as much as 50%.

Start with the End in Mind

June 20, 2008, Friday

$23.33 on 3,400 shares traded.

Today is quadruple-witching day, and to Investopedia.com, it’s when “contracts for stock index futures, stock index options, stock options and single stock futures (SSF) all expire. Quadruple witching days occur on the third Friday of March, June, September and December.”

To me, it simply means changing my chart from ESM8.NA to ESU8.NA (that’s the symbol for the S&P futures). Goodbye ESM8.

Most significantly, today was highly, no, extremely volatile, especially with Walmart, so despite some big losses there and then, I managed to climb higher by 11:30. I decided to stop trading then, and went instead with my college barkada for a weekend chat. Sweet.