I had to adopt a strict savings plan when I lived in New Mexico. My starting salary as a junior civil engineer in 1994 was around $26,000 a year, just above the poverty line at the time. I had to adopt a frugal lifestyle to survive and set aside money for investing in the future. The things I learned back then set me up for success now and I want to share these tips with you.

I’ve stopped posting about my various investments that I use to generate passive income because no one cares. Sure they want to find out some ideas but there’s plenty of ideas to glean from StockTwits or Reddit forums. Right now everyone is focused on the meme stocks like $BB or $GME, but those are flashes in the pan. Just the normal noise in the market every day. I’m doing pretty damn great for 2021.

I’m still in awe watching retail traders en masse push these stocks to highs or even new highs. It all started with Gamestock (GME) a few months ago and I was lucky enough to ride the wave for two days and GTFO. My wife wanted a piece of the action, despite my warnings, and bought a few shares at $350. It went to $500 in pre-market trading the next day and then promptly collapsed.

There are many reasons why I hold AT&T ($T) for my passive income goals. The first one is that it was around during the Great Depression and the second, it will probably be around during the next Great Depression. I can be pretty sure that AT&T will weather the storm if another future event like the Great Depression strikes the markets. Sure, all the stocks will drop in price, including the ones with dividends, but think of those skyrocketing dividend yields!

I’ve been hearing a lot of talk lately about the Roaring 20’s and how they’re here now. I guess people are seeing a market near all-time records and are getting scared. Is 1929 right around the corner? Should you buy now? Sell? …and by passive I don’t mean lazy. What a great question! You know that there’s no right or wrong answer here. What’s my advice? Read this book (affiliate link) and then go do your favorite hobby.

This is my second monthly report on how my passive income journey to $100,000 a year is working. This month my passive income was a lot lower. QYLD didn’t have a dividend payout and RYLD’s payout is happening tomorrow. However, my Adsense experiment and Medium produced the most non-dividend income. The downside was that it wasn’t enough to exceed last month’s total income. Overall, I expect there to be blips and bumps along this $100,000 journey and that’s ok.

Today is the day I want to write about Johnson and Johnson ($JNJ) and why I’m holding it for the long term. One, it’s a well-established company that cranks out great products that everyone uses, and two it has amazing dividends. For each share of JNJ, you get $4.04 of dividends per year. JNJ hits all the sweet spots for building my $100,000 a year passive income portfolio. Let’s dig a bit deeper as to why.

Building a dividend producing passive income portfolio requires thought, time, and education. Today I’m sharing 5 tips for building a dividend passive income portfolio and how you can figure out the right strategy for you. As I’ve written before, this idea came to me after my wife and I reviewed her 401k at the end of 2020. She had by accident generated a large sum of dividends without even trying. This was the same for me in my 401k as well and we generated $800 in dividends by accident in our trading account.

It was a musical thing, and you were supposed to sing, or to dance while the music was played. - Alan Watts I struggled with where to publish this article. Part of me wanted to post this to my regular blog Neural Market Trends because it’s where I’m writing about this particular subject a lot. The other part of me thought it would be best to share it on Medium with a larger audience.

Gamestop ($GME) has been in the news a lot lately and I’ve written three articles about it on Medium. It’s been an amazing thing to watch, the short squeeze that took short-seller Melvin Capital down (allegedly) and how crazy the r/WallStreetBets group is. I admit that I traded on all the activity and I made a tidy profit but I considered my success due to sheer luck and being at the right place at the right time.

Today I’m writing a short but important post for myself. It’s to assess how my passive income strategies are working and if I’m on track to building up a $100,000 passive income a year portfolio? Considering I ‘accidentally’ made $800 of dividends last year in my taxable account, I wanted to see if I could build up enough passive income before I retire at 59. Yes, I’m on track to retire by 59!

I continue to collect dividend producing stocks and ETFs on my journey to generate $100,000 a year in Passive Income. Earlier this month I picked up $RYLD, another covered call writing ETF that invests primarily in the Russell 2000. This one has a higher Beta though, so I’m taking on more risk but I’ve kept my initial purchase small. Stock Price RYLD is trading at its all-time highs. Everyone is thinking the Bull Market is getting a bit long in the tooth and are starting to wonder when the Biden bump will fade away.

My quest continues to earn $100,000 passive income in a year. Supporting my strategy is $QYLD, a monthly dividend producing ETF that uses a Covered Call strategy by owning and selling Nasdaq 100 stocks. It’s not one for the faint of heart, but it fits with my passive income strategy and I went long. There are two things that jump out at me risk wise. For my readers, I’ve written covered calls before, and they’re a great strategy to amp up your returns.

I added $GILT to my passive income portfolio at the beginning of 2021. I did it because the ex-dividend date was on 1/8/2021 and I saw that it had a low price with a history of big dividend payouts. Albeit it is a short dividend history. I’ve written that my goal is to build up a passive income portfolio. My measure of success will be when I generate a $100,000 a year income, and right now GILT is part of that strategy.

I spent the first week of 2021 reacquainting myself with Dividend Reinvesting and I’ve concluded that it makes a ton of sense for someone like me. Retirement isn’t here yet but I can see it coming on the horizon. I’d need to think about stabilizing my investments against volatility and start thinking of long term income. When I first started investing I put a small amount of money in Dividend Reinvestment Plans (still long INTC, thank you very much) and focused on growth inside my retirement accounts.

Building a dividend-producing passive income portfolio requires thought, time, and education. Today I’m sharing 5 tips for building a successful dividend passive income portfolio and how you can figure out the right strategy for you. As I’ve written before, this idea came to me after my wife and I reviewed her 401k at the end of 2020. She had by accident generated a large sum of dividends without even trying. This was the same for me in my 401k as well and we generated $800 in dividends by accident in our trading account.

I travel a lot for work, or rather I used to until Covid19 hit. My last work related trip was to Florida to a convention on Robotic Process Automation (RPA). I stayed in a beautiful Hilton Hotel near a marina with a great resturant and bar. I’ve been a long time Hilton Honors member and use the AMEX credit card a lot to gain points, status, and rewards. My Hilton Honors came in handy when my family and I were stranded overnight in Miami because flights were cancelled due to a nasty storm.

I invested in Terra Tech Corp (TRTC) back in January 2018. Marijuana / Cannabis type stocks were making big moves back then and this company looked like it would capitalize on it. At the time it was trading around the $4 to $5 range and I picked up 200+ shares of it for about $4.82. Since then I watched it do a reverse stock split and get put on the Pink Sheets.

Every year in November investors and traders look toward ‘Black Friday’ as a way to gauge how well the end of the year is going to go. Black Friday is the day that retailers and shops are supposed to finally make money for the year, due to heavy demand for ‘stuff.’ It’s too early to tell but I want it to be a good year. Wanting and what will happen are two different things in reality.

Now that Wall Street has accepted a Biden win, we’ll see more easing from the Fed and hopefully a great Santa Claus rally. That should be good news for stocks and for the ones in strong uptrends, it will be awesome! However for the ones in downtrends, well they get coal in their stockings. Here’s a tale of two worlds, NVIDIA’s performance vs Intel’s. Machine Learning and Data Science in general requires big computers to do data processing.

We are living in crazy times. The (Stock) Market is reaching all time highs when the rest of Main Street is falling apart. Amazon is trading in the $5,000 range and people think the market doesn’t represent the majority of us. I agree. The Market is NOT for Main Street and it will never be. It’s for a small group of the population that’s seeking to reallocate your funds to their account.

My position on whether cryptocurrency is a fad or real changes from month to month. I had a hard time connecting the dots until recently. What changed? I discovered the Uphold Interledger. The Interledger is just what it sounds like, a ledger system between multiple currencies or ‘stores of value.’ It’s based on the distributed ledger that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have made famous. It allows you to easily convert between fiat and cryptocurrencies with a click of a button.

Apple was a great winner for me. Too bad I sold it on April 1st but hindsight is always 20-20. I think I went long sometime back DecemberDecember 2018 when the share price was around $160-ish. I screwed up in my brokerage account and put it on margin and when the markets sold off at the end of February and the beginning of March 2020, I decided to take my profit.

From the ‘sad news’ file, JC Penny is getting ready to file bankruptcy. That’s too bad. I remember JCP being one of those ‘stalwart’ companies I grew up with. Bradless, Woolworths, Rickles, Kmart, Sears. All of them are now dead, dying, or long gone. It’s a shame but my nostalgia doesn’t pay the bills for them and they have a lot of debt to pay back. When I think about it, why is that we operate on such an insane debt model?

I picked up a few shares of XLE yesterday. I figured it was beaten down enough and should revert back to the mean, hopefully around $60. Update: Now sold… Chart wise I see two things happening. First, I see a window was opened when XLE fell off the cliff in March. I should probably do the statistics on it but the general wisdom is that eventually this window would be shut.

I’m a reader of Reddit and I found a subreddit that makes me sad. It’s called r/WallStreetBets. Everyone is posting on how much money they make or lose from trading ‘stonks’ using put or call options. I ruminated about this in a video that I’m going to post soon. Everyone get’s making money confused with the real thing, time. You can’t make more time, you can always make more money.

We all went on our first cruise last year on Norwegian Cruise Lines (NCLH). S and I had a great time, our kids were bored. When my wife first proposed the idea of going on a cruise, I rejected it. I was like “why do I want to be cooped up on a floating metal coffin?” I was wrong, I had a blast of a time. The food was fantastic. There was so much to do for entertainment, and different port of calls were great too.

Some of yesterday’s winners or most active should be no news to any who looks at the markets. Gilead Sciences announced some positive results working on Covid19 related drugs. Good, we need more stuff like this to get our lives back to normal. I don’t know about you but I’m getting stir crazy after being in ’lockdown’ for two months now. My chart generator is showing me that there’s only a support line down at $64, so congrats to all the stock pickers.

I don’t know where the market is going. Will it shrug off all this Covid19 pandemic or will it fall apart? I really don’t know. That’s the thing with the Markets, you can try to build all these decision support systems to predict if the market is going to go up or down, but that always remains such a futile effort. The only thing you can really do is protect yourself in down times and invest smartly for the long term.

The Oil markets are a really dumpster fire these days. With the Russian and Saudi oil wars going on the result has been a flood of oil in the markets. Prices collapsed for the May 2020 contract to -$37.63 a barrel. That’s nuts. I’m starting to see prices being pushed down at gas stations too. Since Covid19 put a damper of travel, I think well see sub $10 a barrel oil coming.

The markets have been in a complete freefall over the past few weeks. The likely culprit is Trump’s mishandling of the Covid-19 (aka Coronavirus) response and overinflated prices. Who knows what is the real market contagion here but I think it’s time to make a shopping list. With free falls in some of my favorite holdings (MSFT and AAPL), I can’t but help think it might be time to add to these long term holdings and buy more stuff like ETF’s and Mutual Funds.

I have had some time to continue on my Python Forex Trading Bot (code borrowed from here and tweaked by me) now that we’re all self isolating. This is purely for educational purposes because when I run this sucker, it loses money. Not so much anymore but it’s not profitable. The reason why I say ’educational purposes’ is that coding is not my first choice of career and I teach myself as I go along.

Right before the New Year I posted an article on Medium titled “Is Passive Investing Going to Kill Us?” It centers around one particular chart where the amount of money flowing into passive investing is staggering. While I’m a big fan of Passive Investing and I’ve been riding its success, I can’t help but wonder if I was just plain lucky. I know that markets love to correct imbalances but the question is when?

Yesterday Morgan Stanley announced a 2% reduction in workforce across the entire organization. It’s citing an “uncertain global environment.” That’s a code word for “recession” if you ask me. The job cuts at the investment bank, the world’s biggest equities trading firm and a leading mergers advisor, will hit technology and operations roles hardest, said the people, who declined to be named. New York-based Morgan Stanley had 60,532 employees as of Sept.

WOW! I posted this over 12 years ago. Talk about being spot on the money! I hate to do this but I’m going to quote myself here: I firmly believe that data mining, AI, and machine learning trading will accelerate over the years. Who knows, maybe my little model will move markets one day! :) As far as the trend in AI goes, it’s really getting started now. AI is being adopted by the next tier of companies.

I forgot to link to this image back in early May 2019. It’s from Bloomberg and it makes a lot of sense, maybe eye opening for some. Essentially it shows that the market is the be and end all. Of course the market is an average and there are funds or AI traders that beat the average, but others will underperform the average. Over time, your little ’edge’ will eventually underperform and you have to keep writing new code and new strategies.

Identifying stock market trends is like eating and drinking the Zeitgeist. It has to be inside you to understand it. You have to be social, go outside, go to parties, etc. If you’re not “hip” then you’ll never see emerging trends until they’re already established. Then it’s a matter of chasing their coattails and riding them for a bit. Years ago Howie had a great tag-line for his blog, it was “Trends… Find them, ride them and get off.

On the heels of my last post, I’ve extended those functions to the EURUSD pair. The data starts from this year 2019 and goes through to yesterday. It’s actually a pretty neat script as it takes data from Onada and then generates the support and resistance lines for that particular pair. The next step would be to create a buy/sell order in the Oanda Practice Account. Once I do that it’s then a matter of writing a trading strategy and testing it in real time.

I just read this CNBC article that Ray Dalio is going long Gold. He believes that the markets are undergoing a paradigm shift and he might be right. The operative word is might. His fund’s been taking losses this year but appears to be recovering this July as gold perks up. Why is gold perking up? There’s a lot of economic and poltical uncertainity happening right now thanks to Trump, the Chinese Tariffs, and many other things.

I want to share my experiences as a Real Estate Investor (REI) and expert in the engineering field as a way to help novice real estate buyers. My wife and I made a lot of mistakes when we started buying properties. Now, after a few years we’ve gotten it down and are ruthless when evaluating a property. We’ve bought a house from auction, written short sales documents for banks, bird dogged, and researched flood prone properties as a way to get smarter about being real estate investors.

It’s been a long time since I wrote anything related to Real Estate (RE), especially about flipping houses. I heard on Bloomberg yesterday that the real estate flippers are exiting the market as fast as they can because the real estate market is starting to slow down. That’s interesting news because of my personal history with RE. I have been a real estate investor that wanted to be a flipper but got caught in 2007 slowdown.

**Disclosure:** Some of the links below are affiliate links and at no additional cost to you, I’ll earn a commission. When you purchase a product or service using one of my affiliate links, the company compensates me, which helps me run this blog and keep my content free of charge to you. I recently picked up the late John Bogle’s book, “The Little Book of Common Sense Investing” and I plan on reading through it despite knowing the basic jist of it.

I’ve written about this countless times but I’m a big fan of passive investing in the markets. By doing less, I actually gain a lot more in returns. That’s all great and wonderful but currently it’s not ideal for me. What I really want to do is turn that passive investing into passive income. So even in their golden years, they have to budget carefully. Passive Investing != Passive Income What’s the deal with passive investing and what is passive income?

I’ve been a long term shareholder of MSFT and I’ve been rewarded quite well. Under the leadership of CEO Nadella, Microsoft has become and AI powerhouse, and I believe he’ll win the cloud computing wars. Right now Amazon is the dominant player but based on what I see in Azure’s development, I think both companies will be ’neck to neck’ in a few short years. Investors have rewarded the stock with new highs and crossing (before retracing just below) a $1 Trillion dollar valuation.

The r/investing sub cracks me up sometimes. This guy has had enough of the sub because all it spews is how great Buffet is and dollar cost averaging. If you ask me, all the things he complains about are good. ETF’s are good, low cost(ish), and easy to get in and out of. Dollar cost averaging has really helped me build a good size 401k nest egg but it required consistency and time.

Passive investing saved my life in many ways, but not in the way you think. It didn’t swing from the trees like Tarzan and snatch me away from a charging Rhino nor did it give me a Flu shot. It did it in two main ways: Saving my time and avoiding costly mistakes. How? Read on my friend, read on. I know many people that lived through the Real Estate boom and implosion in 2008.

Ray Dalio’s Pure Alpha Fund returned 14.6% for 2018. That’s an amazing feat considering the majority of hedge funds averaged a loss of 6.7%. How does he do it? Simple. He always asks, “how do I know I’m right?” The Westport, Connecticut-based firm is the world’s biggest hedge fund with about $160 billion in assets. The gains for its Pure Alpha Strategy came as other fund managers were whipsawed by volatile markets, resulting in the industry posting one of its worst years ever.

Boy oh boy the real estate market is back with a vengeance. All of my Architect and Engineering friends are busier than right before the 2007 meltdown. Building additions, knockdowns, and the like are flooding in. It seems that everyone just woke up this year and got busy. Flippers are back And the Flippers are back… My real estate investing friends (aka Flippers) are snapping up house at County Court Houses for pennies on the dollar, cleaning and fixing them, then flipping back onto the market.

**Disclosure:** Some of the links below are affiliate links and at no additional cost to you, I’ll earn a commission. When you purchase a product or service using one of my affiliate links, the company compensates me, which helps me run this blog and keep my content free of charge to you. Somewhere between 2010 and and 2011 I stopped Forex Trading and stopped stock picking. It was just too much stress and felt very futile.

I got my ass spanked in the markets over the last year.  My 401k portfolios are surviving after some severe drawdowns (25%) between 2008 and 2009 and my trading capital in my Forex and Stock accounts got destroyed.  Luckily it was only risk capital, money I could afford to lose, but it still hurts anway.  So what did I learn from this hell of a market?  I learned that I’m not as smart as the market and that I tried to second guess it too much.

After I read this WSJ article I realized that we are in the buying opportunity of a lifetime. That is if you are a contrarian, emphasis mine. =) The ups and downs of the market are prompting more retail investors to abandon buy-and-hold strategies in favor of opportunistic trading. Some want more control over their money, so they are fleeing funds and advisers — not to mention the feelings of helplessness raised by recent months’ losses.

Say what you want about Robert Kiyosaki, the author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad, but he’s a smart man. I could help but laugh when I read this line from an interview with The Street.com. “I haven’t been this bullish in years,” says Kiyosaki. “What a buying opportunity. … The stock market goes on sale, and everybody runs away.” But, he’s excited probably only for a short time. “When the market comes back, I go back to sleep,” he says.

I roamed around a lot when I lived in New Mexico and I came across several ghost towns. I loved finding them out in the middle of nowhere and poking around in them. If I had more time I would probably researched the reason why they were abandoned but we didn’t stay too long at them. Usually they were on private property and had big “KEEP OUT” signs and we had to always watched out for a Rancher with a big rifle.

Ugly posted this interesting LA Times article his Del.icio.us link role a few days ago. It seems that people with upside down mortgages (where your mortgage is greater than the value of your house) are voluntarily letting their properties be foreclosed on. A homeowner who can’t sell his house tells the L.A.Times, “Foreclose me. … I’ll live in the house for free for 12 months, and I’ll save my money and I’ll move on.

I’m going to spend some time updating this old post from 2007 where I had a banner year trading Forex. Granted, this was for a tiny account but I wanted to see if I could really make the returns that everyone was shouting about. The short answer is “YES! but…” There’s always a ‘but’ in when investing, trading, or speculating in any traded market. As promised, see the PDF link below for my entire 2007 Forex trading log.

Babak posted about a possible double top forming in Gold (and Oil) in his blog a few days ago. While I agree with his technical analysis on the daily charts, I disagree with his conclusion that Gold has topped out. In my mind, Gold is driven 80% by fundamental reasons instead of technical analysis. If you look at the weekly chart, Gold looks poised to possibly make a run higher after this consolidation.

I live in a semi-rural area of NJ with lots of trees, open space, and great neighbors. My wife has gotten into gardening over the past few years and learned that you can “trade” plants instead of buying them at Lowes and Home Depot. She met this old German couple on the other side of town who transformed their 1 acre property into a virtual Garden of Eden and did so by trading plants with neighbors and friends.

I’ve been laying low for a while now with respect to buying and flipping foreclosure properties. You might think that I’m nuts because everywhere you turn now you see and hear about the parabolic rise of foreclosures in this country and the end of the RE world. Although foreclosure activity has picked up and more houses are now being repossessed by banks, I still haven’t smelled enough blood and desperation out there yet.

Every Forex Trader I know trades differently. Some are mechanical traders while others are purely discretionary in a nature. Some even use “bots” to trade automatically with little or no intervention from them. No matter what kind of Forex Trader you are, the one thing I learned in trading these insane markets is that when you find something that works, stick with it! If you’ve been following my $100 Forex Experiment, you’d know that my Forex education has had its ups and downs.

Sherry posted an excerpt from an article she read in my “Real Estate Will Get Worse” post. The author of the article, Jackie Corr, points out an interesting leveraged strategy that is very plausible why hedge funds have been posting out of control losses recently. If you buy a stock for $36 and sell it for $72 four months later, you’ve made 100% on your money. If you add $30 of borrowed money to $6 of your own to buy the stock at $36 and sell the shares at $72, your profit is $36, but you’ve made 600% on your $6 of which the hedge fund takes a percentage, roughly 2 percent or 72 cents, so your profit is now $35.

I used to flip foreclosure properties leading up to the height of the RE bubble. It was tough work finding these properties, marketing to them, and then screening the potential sellers. Since I didn’t have the capital to buy the properties myself, for cash, I had to get an investor involved and made a few bucks at it. I learned a lot but realized that it was too time consuming so I stopped.

My wife owns Dodge & Cox’s Stock Fund (DODGX) and its been a great performer for her account. I just wish they offered it in my 401K! Despite the nice trending chart below, DODGX is not without its risks. I ran a quick Monte Carlo simulation and discovered quite a few nasty negative return outcomes for DODGX. In fact there’s 0.04% chance for a nasty -51% rate of return over the past 10 years.

I stumbled across a +45 minute podcast from the Royal Society of Arts yesterday which is highly entertaining, in a quantitative sort of way. The speaker that night was none other than Nassim Taleb, author of Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan. It’s a fantastic listen to, especially when he talks about something called “Black Swan positive.” Black Swan Events (BSE) are outlier events, events that you never dreamed of occurring but they do.

I went long $XLV in mid January 2007 for one of my personal IRA accounts. Its had its share of ups and downs but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist, or a fancy neural net, to figure out that health care is a long term bet. If you don’t believe me, look around for all the graying baby-boomers who want to desperately hold onto their youth. This time I’m holding XLV for a very long time and won’t be shaken out of it.

The inspiration for my S&P500 Volatility Timing model came from rereading portions of Mandelbrot’s book, The (Mis)Behavior of Markets, and trolling around the Internet for Nassim Taleb’s research work on risk. I think both guys push the envelope on truly understanding unseen risk and those pesky financial asteroids. Since my model is currently being developed, I thought it would be worth my while to truly learn and understand how historical volatility (HV) is calculated.

CMG is hitting an all-time high these days and after eating their tasty food, I can understand why. Good food at high prices is always a surefire way to make your stock a winner, until your fickle customers become cost conscience. My favorite dish is the chicken burrito bowl w/ sour cream and the red hot sauce. :) Update I posted about this stock back in May 2007 when it was trading at $82 or so and now, in 2019, it’s way higher.

I’ve posted this article before on my old site and thought it was fitting to re-post it here. It’s a story about a company called Tradebot Systems, Inc. CEO David Cummings, a former commodity pit trader and programmer, built an Automated Trading System, or Tradebot, which trades between 50 and 100 million shares a day! Wow! Tradebot trades 50 million to 100 million shares a day. Anywhere from 1 billion to 2 billion shares trade daily on Nasdaq.

Howard wants to buy put options on SMH. Me? I will wait and see which way she breaks from this narrow range, which started in mid 2005, before I do anything. Has it been trading in range for that long? My guess is that semiconductors aren’t the technology darlings they once were, maybe its because chips are more of a commodity now. Disclosure: Long INTC from years back. Update Here’s a perfect case for long term passive investing in an ETF.

Today I wanted to share with you a part of the algorithmic back end to my ETF Trend System. Note, I said “part”, I’m not giving away all my secrets. It’s written completely in Excel, incredibly simple, and is a macro that you can import. The system works by using something called linear regression slope. What’s that? The easiest way to understand what linear regression slope is, is to think back to your basic statistics class.

I worked in my vegetable garden for most of the weekend and with every weed I plucked, the words “Ethanol” and “bio-fuel” kept popping in my head. I know that everywhere I turn, I see and hear about how Ethanol is going to save us from oil dependence and global warming. Despite my skepticism about Ethanol, I am curious to know what set of this new trend in the Agriculture index?

I’ve been following the China iShares, FXI, for a long time now and I noticed that Maoxian posted about it nearing its all time high. This reminded me of the time when the talk was that FXI might be overextended or possibly reaching a top. At the time, it sure looked that way. I even posted on my old site saying that the trend might be over but the more I thought about it, the more I wondered if my initial call was wrong.

Several years ago, when I was living in New Mexico, I had a girlfriend who used read very esoteric books about cutting edge theories on biology, evolution, and astronomy. We were talking about “what-if” scenarios one day and the conversation drifted to some called “punctuated equilibrium.” It was explained to me, at the time, that species evolve slowly in an environment that’s in equilibrium. A sudden leap in a species evolutionary development happens when a catastrophic internal or external event occurs.

In my old blog, Digital Breakfast, I posted a few times about my desire to build an Automated Trading System (ATS) using Excel. I figured I’d build it in Excel since I know that software the best and conveniently enough, Interactive Brokers offers an API for Excel. Today, I located my old real time ETF Trend Signal system, which is based on statistical performance measures to generate trend signals, and decided to begin additional back end development on it.

There’s something to be said about buying winners. Winners continue to win, and in the case of stocks, they keep making new highs. I know that AAPL is a favorite holding of Howard and his hedge fund’s strategy of finding and investing select stocks making new 52 week all time highs is a smart. The trick is to buy the right company making the high. It’s safe to say that Apple is the right company, its emerged as an innovative powerhouse once again.

Sometimes trends have intra-trend reversals (which are great selling or buying opportunities) and then quickly resume their trends. Motorola tried to break free from their down trend, and almost succeeded with the introduction of their wildly popular Razr phone (I have one). With no new innovative product followup, MOT resumed its downward trend. Update Just over 12 years ago I posted about how [Motorola (MOT) was in a downtrend because it couldn’t come up with a new breakthrough product.

Could the trend party in IYR be over? Maybe. A lot of information can be gleaned from observing a price chart, mostly technical information. A lot of traders/investors forget that fundamental and sentiment information also drives prices up or down. Learn Stock Trading, Investing, and Risk Management There are a handful of financial and trading books that have made a HUGE impact on my investments. If you want to trade and learn about money and risk management that I suggest you get the Tharp book.

Good Morning. Yesterday’s currency sell-off triggered several of my buy orders as the EURUSD and GBPUSD pairs dropped through support after support. The end result was that I started to pyramid losses. However, I stuck to my trading plan and planned for a long wild ride. In case any new readers are wondering, I will (re)post my trading plan on this blog later today. Finally, overnight the pairs started to firm up and now my GBPUSD pair is showing a nice profit as it heads back to the magic $2.

EWM was good to me in the past, too bad I sold it! Update EWM. What a great ETF for investing into the Asia area. This is one of those emerging market ETF’s that I should’ve held onto for the past 13 years. Once again I’m going to repeat what I wrote about passive investing: diversify, buy low cost mutual funds/ETFs, and dollar cost average. Look at EWM now, trading around $27.

My FXI neural net model continues to show an UP trend. Nice to know! :) Update I realize that after 13 some odd years, this one sentence blog post with a FXI chart is very much out of context. This post was a simple confirmation of a model I built for trading/investing in this particular ETF. This was the early days of my learning Data Science and boy was my model wrong from the start.