You owe disclosure because I read your site often.. Frankly I think you are losing credibility and I will have to stop my free RSS subscription if you don’t agree.

Sheeskabab.

Look at Kirk’s readership responses and fade them. They want more of the stuff that isn’t helpful in making money trading and less of the stuff that is. I would post something about it but I’ve never had an annoying enough comment on my blog to spur me into action

I’ll still read your blog. I like the links at times and certainly the summaries of what happened.

And your personality, of course.

-Mike O’Connor

I have been able to validate some of the ideas Mike has expressed in three ways.

a)These are well reasoned arguments within a blog of other well reasoned arguments.
b) They are corroborated by other credible commentators
c) I’ve paper traded ideas relevant to me for some months.

You can’t expect these guys to do it all for you after all.

I appreciate your opinion but I guess you’ll have to drop me. I’ve been doing pretty much the same thing since I started the blog back in 2003 and I don’t see it changing much. From day 1 I rarely talked about my actual trades nor my performance. Even that 100R post caused me more grief than it was worth. Despite the amount of detail I gave on that post people were still bitching and moaning that I didn’t put dollar amounts in that post. Maybe if I just uploaded my SSN and bank account numbers & passwords people would be happy.

I do plan on posting more actual day trades this year but much more than that isn’t gonna happen.

You said “nice work if you can get it”. That’s funny — as if ads were making me rich. Unlike many a blogger, I didn’t start this site with plans of making money. In fact, I had no clue one could make money from a site when I started blogging. Google’s Adsense came along a few months later & by then it made sense to me to try to use advertising to at least pay myself something for all the time I was spending on the site. I should figure out an hourly rate to see how close to minimum wage it is.

I want to respectfully suggest that perhaps you and Charles Kirk are going in the wrong direction. There has been precious little information given out by you on how well you’re doing with your own trading. I get the impression that going forward you intend to inform us even less— even as you are still putting out daily opinions about the market for the rest of us, about how some chart patterns or indicator behaviors supposedly favor certain outcomes.

Well, that’s nice work if you can get it (and in the blogosphere evidently one can and still have at least some readers).

I have been thinking for some time that there are even certain trading-blog guys who secretly don’t trade anymore, because a certain very popular trading-blogger daytrading technique that they all use doesn’t really work and they didn’t make any money.

I notice that I’ve been dropping those guys who don’t report on actual trades from my daily blog reading unless I’m desperate for infotainment, in favor of a few who do at least talk about their outcomes in some detail. I especially appreciate those who disclose all of their trades.

Now you once did report on how long it took you to get to— what was it?— 100 R. Frankly I’m looking for that and more. I want that plus some indication of risk— of drawdowns or of the volatility of your traded equity. Updated, say, quarterly at least.

After all, you evidently don’t backtest, because your methods are a form of chartism that don’t lend themselves to backtesting, not without a lot of work. So no one knows whether or not your lines of support and resistance, the OBV confirmations or non-confirmations, etc., have any utility at all in practice. (I am aware that many books on technical analysis cover the methods that you use. That all means nothing to me.)

-Mike O’Connor