Jeremy Whittaker

Let me start by just saying we will never stop Americans’ demand for drugs, whether it’s marijuana, meth, crack, or whatever it is.  The demand will always be there.  Just like alchol, you could never outlaw alchol in the US again.  If you did you could guarantee to boost the drug cartels cash flow.

So with this being the case how do we stop all of this money flowing to deadly cartels on our southern border?  The answer is so simple and right in front of our face.  Legalize marijuana and make it illegal to import.  Funny thing is not only will this limit the money flowing to cartels but it will boost the economy and you can tax it.  This way we can have money flowing to the anti-drug programs in our schools and we can target the source of the issue.  Which is simply the demand.

So today the EURO and the AUSSIE took off after the FOMC reports release.  Had my strategies been updated I would have made 700 pips today alone.  Instead I made absolutely nothing.

So here is a recap of what happenend.  As you all know I use the COT reports for my bias.  Meaning depending on what the COT report says I will only trade a currency pair short or long.  Well I subscribe to the COT report so I get an email notification every Friday as soon as they are released.  This way I can update my strategies bias’ based upon what the report says.  So last Friday I got complacent and lazy and I failed to import these reports.   Well two of my positions would have switched to long from short they happened to be the EUR and AUD.  Because I failed to do this I lost over 700 pips in my strategy.  Not to mention the fact that this pairs could move substantially for awhile.  It is too late for me to enter at this point simply because I have no strategy in place at this point to get in.  My only hope is this a false move and the pairs will fall back down to a more reasonable point where I can enter.  However, I do not believe they will do this any time soon because of the substantial changes the Fed announced today.  I think they were very strong fundamental decisions to weaken the dollar and boost the stock market.

Well, I guess there is always next time… ugh…

The other day I ate breakfast and jumped on my PC around 8AM.  As most everyone knows everything I trade is completely automated.  I do not manually place trades.  So I figured I would check on my strategy to see how much money I had made/lost that night while sleeping.  Much to my surprise I noticed I had open probably close to 50 USD/CHF positions.  I was caught totally off guard.  My account was bouncing around, with every tick in the market I would be up 5% down 5% consistently bouncing around.  We’re talking 5% of my total capital per tick!  I could have easily blown my entire account in a few more minutes if I didn’t do something immediately.  So I called my broker InterbankFX immediately!  “Close all of my Swiss positions at any cost!”  Lucky enough for me they were able to do so with relative ease.  Sure I could have wrote a quick program to close all of my positions but imagine the panic I was in with my account jumping all over the charts.

Ok, now that all my positions are closed and my blood pressure is down to normal operating levels.  I decided to analyze what happened.  Then I immediately realized I had decided to open a manual long USD/CHF position the day previous.  It was not part of my automated strategy.  What happened was when I programmed my application to trade the markets automatically I did not program it for the rare instances when I opened manual trades.  So therefore my computer just kept looping opening trade after trade after trade.  I will need to go back to the drawing boards with this strategy, perhaps all of my strategies in the future, and make sure there can only be so many open positions at any given time.

All of this said and done I did manage to come out ~2% ahead if I had not taken any of the USD/CHF trades.  I realize today how just lucky I am.

So this is my first personal blog post.  I also have a blog that is technical based, here.  I’m honestly not sure how much I will update this blog as my technical one covers 99% of the things I find interesting.  Ok, now onto my post.

Perhaps some of you have heard of a Google program called Latitude.  It is an application you can install on your Blackberry, Windows mobile phone, or laptop.  This tool is simply amazing at locating you.  It uses GPS(obviously), cell towers through triangulation, and Wifi through triangulation.  The one I really want to discuss is the Wifi locator.  

The other week I brought my laptop to a client site in Phoenix.  I fired it up and was amazed to see that it actually knew where I was located.  Now I don’t have GPS in my laptop and I had not used my At&t connect card.  I was amazed!  How did this thing know where I was?!  Amazed by this I immediately Googled how Latitude finds you.  Now Google doesn’t have an official announcement on their secret sauce and how it works.  But I can only assume that when they were driving around creating their street view application(another amazing app by the way).  That they also created a huge database of wifi access points and their signal strengths.  This way they can analyze the wifi signal strength of your PC and query it to their database.   This way they could triangulate your position.  Now I’m assuming they use other variables as well like what your public IP address is to first determine what area you in.  Either way this technology is very innovative whether you agree or disagree with this from a privacy perspective you have to admit this is a thumbs up for Google’s intelligence.