Stock Trading Game

This is about a stock trading game, and that’s my apple for the teacher.

What follows seems far from a discussion about a stock trading game, at any rate, I showed this screen shot on Aug 23, saying this chart screams buy me. Let’s see what happened here on Sept 23. I should say that I don’t own any KGC and never have owned any, it’s just an example.

Charting coutesy of Stockcharts.com

And here we are today Sept 23, a 25% gain in 1 month and its now time to consider taking the money and running. There are signs of exhaustion here. My bet is it will backoff to the mean and take one more run, but I’d skill take the money and run. You can see the RSI is over 70, it doesn’t stay there for long, Volume is falling off, The Stochastic, (STO at bottom) doesn’t stay of 80 very long either.

It’s starting to run out of gas. Can you see how in mid Sept. it tried to return to the mean, which is the dotted line between the two green lines on either side of the mean. These green lines are confidence limits on the mean, they show that 95% of the pricing is between them. When you are outside these limits, it’s time to go. Another thing is an exhaustion candle on the day before the decline. Candle sticks are the the graphics that represent each days trading range. These tell you about supply and demand. They are a very old way to represent prices, used centuries ago by rice traders and today by technicians.

This is not rocket science, there are other factors at work here as well, like remember I said “Sell in May and go away”, this is an old saying that has some merit. The market slows down for the summer months and gets back into gear at the end of summer. But has the possibility of tanking in October, which is another reason to take the money and run.

If you trade all the time you will lose. My point is to trade when you get a killer hand dealt to you, the poker analogy, which is usually when prices are below the 200 day moving average (red line). You just read what the chart tells you and go pickup your dough, but you have to be smart about it. You wait for the killer hand. It may only happen a couple of times a year. Be disciplined. The one thing I learned about playing poker is, don’t bet unless your chances of winning are highly probable because you can’t bluff in the market.

This is a long ways from buy my game, Big Board Raiders, but Im trying to show you there is a portable skill you can take with you after, its not hacky sack or some useless pursuit like mastering Wii and becoming an effective bunny killer.

Technorati Tags: Big Board Raiders, bigboardraiders, corporate takeovers, interactive math games, stock exchange game, stock market games, stock market simulation, stock trading game, virtual stock market

This is my daughter, who is in grade 7 now, who after playing our stock trading game, Big Board Raiders, which is also one of the coolest interactive math games, was ready to learn to read Techincal charts, something I had no clue of at her age. This of course is a cheap attempt to get my key word into the first sentence so google likes my post more, sort of google sucking up like an apple for the teacher. Lots of people look at the stock market as gambling, except the professionals. To the professionals its just math, actually statistics, a very twisted and boring math to learn. Luckily, today you don’t have to learn it, you just have to read what the answer is and that isn’t difficult. I played poker as a kid, taking the paper money from the other kids. It was our way of cutting out the competition, because we bought the papers for 5 cents and sold them for 10 cents, and that really dates me. I never really learned how to play poker until I played at this bucket shop, where I worked as a stock salesman on Howe Street, of the notorious Vancouver Stock Exchange. They sold moose pasture to the suckers who believed the the stories they invented. The same piece of ground got sold over and over with a new story. I worked there 6 months and never sold a single share. I was 19 years old and not a good enough liar. If someone said NO, I accepted it as NO. These guys didn’t understand NO. This was a concept I could not get past. If someone was dumb enough to buy a few shares, they turned him over to the loadman, who was basically a verbal bully and he’d have you selling your house to buy more. It was however a very good education and that is what got me going down the path I took when I went to university. It was taking a kid who grew up in a pool hall, which in those days were those places mothers hoped their kids would never enter, and educating him. It did give me the ability to see the game that was going down. God I do ramble on. I had this thought about how you could compare playing poker, like Texas Hold em with playing the market using Technical Analysis (TA). If you went to Las Vegas and sat down at a poker table and paid your anty, they call it the blinds, and looked at your cards and folded if you didn’t have at least 4 of a kind, a very good hand for those non poker players. First of all, you would need really deep pockets for this strategy and second if you did bet everyone would fold because they would know you had a killer hand, this would be the most basic of “tells”. So your poker strategy would be a big loser. Poker is just too big of a risk for the reward that you might get. If on the other hand, you used Technical Analysis to tell you when you had a very high probability situation for you to take a position in the stock market, say greater than 97% in your favor, this would be like a 4 of a kind hand in poker, but there are no blinds to bleed you dry and you only bet when you had these odds, this would be a winning strategy. So you might only play 2 or 3 times a year, but you wait for that killer hand. Well, happily nobody would fold on you, but they might panic and sell stock to you cheap or at the other end buy your over priced stock, because when you have these odds, you definitely are at the end of a big move and the odds favor a reversal. This strategy is done all the time using Technical Analysis by hundreds of thousands of people in all countries. If they all see the same signal, then this creates a sunami of money flow in the direction of their bet. It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Almost to good to be true. Just don’t stay at the table too long, that’s where they get you. TA is not a system that someone can hose you to use, it’s math, plain and simple. There is no system, that is for niave kids fresh out of high school. Systems have been pursued for the last 200 years, by some pretty damn smart people. It’s niave to think this generation is smarter than those that came before us, in fact human beings are very predictable when it comes to fear and greed, these are the oldest of emotions. Da Boyz know all about stampeding the herd, the minute you think you have a system, Da Boyz from wall street will eat your lunch. But there are those odd times when things are so out of wack, that they have to go back to normal. These are the times TA will tell you this is a winner. There is one thing that is always true, when prices get far away from the mean, they always return to that mean, a rough paraphrasing for simplicity, in actuality they use a 100 or 200 day moving average.  The tendency to return to the mean is a mathematical truth. TA is free to all that want to take the time to learn it. The people who use it are more than happy to teach you, the only thing you have to do is learn it. There’s no money you have to pay. If someone wants money from you then you’re being screwed. The cool thing about it is that the more that use it the more it delivers. The democracy of money. So I say Poker is a low probability play, Technical Analysis when done right is high probability.

Technorati Tags: Big Board Raiders, bigboardraiders, corporate takeovers, interactive math games, stock exchange game, stock market games, stock market simulation, stock trading game, virtual stock market

This is a stock exchange game that mimics the wars that go on for the control of companies that trade on public stock exchanges. These are the real soldiers of fortune, but they don’t use guns or bombs. It’s all nice and legal.

These guys were called Raiders. They were always the unwelcome guests at the party. They were lawyers, accountants, investment bankers, brokers and hustlers. They were bright and they hunted in packs like Rapters.

I guess the best image people have of Raiders would be the part Richard Geer played in the movie Pretty Woman.

The big boards, when I started this project in 1971, before electronic trading, which my daughter calls the olden days and she even asked me,”did we have cars then”, were the huge chalkboards that lined the walls of the many regional stock exchanges in most cities around North America.

Guys would mark the bid and ask on these blackboards with chalk as they ran back and forth on suspended walkways, and communicated with the floor traders with a colorful array of hand signals. Every city with a stock exchange had a big board.

Ultimately, if an enterprise has significant wealth, it is inside a corporation. This is because of our tax laws and the litigeous society we live in, to name a few reasons. The really scary part is that this represents a nations best companies, our resources, our intellectual property , our ports and transporation networks and even our media networks. When the markets crash or recessions hit, the value of the shares that represent the ownership of these countless companies become cheap. This is when the Raiders come out to play.

It used to be that the raiders were indigenous to our nations but that has all changed. Today, the raiders are asian companies and governments who are gobbling up our best companies and resources. This is whether we like it or not, a silent war that is happening right under our noses and nobody seems to get it. We need to wake-up.

As a footnote, I was given a hard time about not having women portrayed on the cover. This was done on purpose, after a lot of deliberation. Raiders are gamblers, they put it all on the line today knowing they could be broke tomorrow. Women are investors, they are methodical, calculating and my observation is this is not in their nature. The prospect of sleeping in the car tomorrow, ain’t going to happen. While it is not representative, there will be those that are exceptions. This was my mindset when we designed the cover. Women are the power in the market.

Technorati Tags: Big Board Raiders, bigboardraiders, corporate takeovers, interactive math games, stock exchange game, stock market games, stock market simulation, stock trading game, virtual stock market

After I had posted sentments about my concerns for the coming season in the market, I found these two Vids by Tony Robbins. Now I’m not a TR groupie, but he is echoing what I wrote. The first link is vid 1 of 2, you can find number 2 below that.

http://www.youtube.com/v/XOfRLINVqcg?fs=1&hl=en_US

http://www.youtube.com/v/7ZlQDdLCgJk?fs=1&hl=en_US

Technorati Tags: Big Board Raiders, bigboardraiders, corporate takeovers, interactive math games, stock exchange game, stock market games, stock market simulation, stock trading game, virtual stock market

On one hand I am annoyed at the people who keep sending email comments about their great system where I won’t have to do anything but visit the bank and have this perpetual stream of income. All the while I, in the end am trying to get you to buy something, namely a board game called big board raiders that is fun and uses a virtual stock market as a backdrop, really its your weaponry to control the outcome. You and your wits are in large part responsible for the outcome. There is no computer to spit out some algorithm to make you think you’re some hot shot trader, and suggests you should run out and get yourself a real trading account. Most of the sites that are returned in search engine submissions are computer models and I think these are not games but come-ons by the financial institutions that put them there. They are baiting you for the sting.

I am not promising you anything but some old fashioned fun in a board game.

There is no system you can use, the guys on Wall Street are so sophisticated at taking your money, the more you study it the more corrupt you see it is. And it is astounding at times just how much collusion goes into these market moves. You will never hear or see anyone from the financial industry say anything bad about the markets. Its a gravy train for everyone or they would have you believe it.

They will cast this out as that which a crack-pot, a know-nothing nutbar would say. I know that my influence is infintely insignificant, like a cork in a sunami, but if you learn the language of these rogues there is room to profit. A contradiction to my previous claim. Its like you are a pilot fish traveling with this huge white shark and you take just enough of the stuff that he doesn’t consume to not piss him off. But each meal changes, there is no system.

On another note, has anyone taken notice of the hostile takeover bid by the Australian mining gaint to take a controlling position in the Potash mines of Saskatchewan. As I understand it, if this goes through, the price of Potash will then fluctuate like Oil, and this will make food prices fluctuate in tandem. Not a good thing to happen. I can see a lot of hunger coming from this consollidation of the fertilizer industry.

I went to a Rodeo with my daughter, and she noted how in the calf roping that the baby cows would get yanked off their feet when roped. She asked me if that would hurt the baby cows, and I told her that if you had a rope around your neck and ran full blast and were then yanked off your feet, I guess it does. I like Rodeo, but the way she got me to see it, it does seem cruel. 

Enough chatter for today…over and out.

Technorati Tags: Big Board Raiders, bigboardraiders, corporate takeovers, interactive math games, stock exchange game, stock market games, stock market simulation, stock trading game, virtual stock market