Posted by 13 June 2006

My Interview in the July Issue of TASC Magazine

Be sure to check out the July 2006 issue of Technical Analysis of Stocks & Commodities Magazine. It contains an interview with some dude who calls himself “Trader Mike” (that would be me). It’s mostly about my transition from swing trading to day trading but it touches on a few other topics as well. An excerpt is available on the TASC website

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Comments

  1. Posted by Eyal on June 13, 2006 at 11:07 am

    Wow.. that’s super cool! Congrats :)

  2. Posted by Glenn on June 13, 2006 at 11:27 am

    Very cool Mike, congrats!!!
    Glenn

  3. Posted by Carey on June 13, 2006 at 12:48 pm

    Nice interview. I wonder which channel will be first to pick up your TV show ;-)

  4. Posted by TD on June 13, 2006 at 2:47 pm

    Congrats! Do you find that your engineering training has helped at all? I am also making a career switch from engineering (over 10+ years) to trading. How do you separate the signal from the noise in trading? Thanks. Keep up the good work!

  5. Posted by John on June 13, 2006 at 4:20 pm

    Congratulations.

    Next stop, Bulls and Bears!

  6. Posted by Marco - Stock Trading on June 13, 2006 at 6:39 pm

    Hey Mike! I’m a university student in my final years of my engineering degree… Are you still a practising engineer or have you retired that career and moved on?

  7. Posted by Jamie on June 13, 2006 at 9:04 pm

    Hey Mike, Congrats on a great interview! You have a terrific blog and the recognition is well deserved.

  8. Posted by downtowntrader on June 13, 2006 at 9:24 pm

    Mike,
    Congratulations once again (Barons,TASC, and TASC again). You are doing a great job and are an ambassador for the Market blog community. Keep up the good work.

    DT

  9. Posted by Michael on June 14, 2006 at 8:19 am

    TD, Perhaps the math skills have helped me to easily grasp the concepts of expectancy and compounding. But besides that it probably hurt more than helped.

    here’s something from Van Tharp’s site on the issue:

    Does a good engineer, doctor, accountant, computer programmer or other analytically trained professional make a bad trader? As with most complex questions, a good answer is, “It depends.” On the one hand, folks that have this type of background are usually very quick to grasp the concepts of technical analysis and can be very controlled practitioners of systematic trading. On the other hand, those of us who have had years of education and practical experience in fields that reward exactness, attention to detail and “being right” have real barriers to overcome as traders. Analytically trained professionals tend to have the most problem accepting that sometimes our models don’t work. Sometimes the markets just don’t make sense. And lots of times we’re just plain wrong about the markets!

    When it turns out they’ve made an incorrect prognostication in the markets, most new traders (especially the technically trained ones) tend to add complexity in order to understand where they went wrong. Extra indicators. More filters. Optimization. It’s time to apply years of training and practice in fields that specialize in problem solving to this special problem called the markets. But instead of “solving the problem”, we step on our heads.

    Here’s the tough part: sometimes we can’t solve the problem. In many areas of life, (trading and investing being the one we’re focused on here) there is too much uncertainty or variability involved to definitively solve the problem. Sometimes the best we can do is to find an edge and take advantage of it. Now, before all of tech buddies freak out, that edge can usually be quantified and put into statistical language. (Whew. For a minute there it looked like this was going to be about psychology and learning “the rhythm of the markets” and all that soft stuff…) So our challenge for this week is to spend a little less time stepping on our heads (overanalyzing) while looking at the markets and more time figuring out what we don’t know and what may be unknowable. Here’s a place to start: why did the Euro tank 150 pips in about 20 minutes, starting at 10:30 EST on 03/02? I read several interesting fundamental explanations, some of which didn’t agree or contradicted themselves. There are also conflicting technical answers. Stretch yourself to think with your whole brain, not just the logical / linear left half. And have fun with it! Who knows, maybe we’ll all spend less time on our cabezas and more time seeing those exploitable edges.

    Marco, no, I’ve been trading for a living since 1999.

    Everybody else: thanks! :-)

  10. Posted by johncw on July 3, 2006 at 6:54 am

    Mike,

    Nice article. You should put your picture on
    your site. :)