A Merry Christmas to the reader, or happy (your_religious_winter_celebration_here) to you.
Stuff in my life… Not overly much has really changed. I get along really well with my party chief now; he’s a bit odd, and an alright guy. Having worked with him a little over a month, I pretty much know what he wants when he wants it on a job, thus everything runs really smoothly and we get our work for the day done almost everyday.
I’m getting back into Scouting again; I went to the local District meeting, and got an introduction to a local Troop that’s supposedly nuts into backpacking. I tried to go to their committee meeting, but then discovered that the Catholic Church they meet at is not an ordinary church, but a sprawling two story complex that takes up a whole block by itself. There’s the Church, and then there’s the private school immediately next door, and both are massive affairs. There was a receptionist working the front desk; it’s that kind of huge. She didn’t know where the Troop was meeting, and all I had was directions to the Church. Oops. So rather than wander around the place (I’d done enough of that getting there), I just went home. I’ll email them and ask about where exactly in the complex the meeting normally happens.
I have a new book! It’s another nerdy tech book/manual entitled “How to Make Profits Trading In Commodities,” by W. D. Gann, the most famous (or infamous, your pick) and massively successful trader to ever live. Everything I’d ever seen online about Gann’s works called them such things as difficult to understand and obtuse. The material was insanely dull although informative, and one had to contend with the “fathomless writing style” of Gann. I was thus leery about purchasing one of his works despite the man’s repute, but I got a deal on it used on Amazon, and have been reading it now for two days and am VERY pleasantly surprised! The man knows how to write, and it’s all extremely well done I think. It’s no nonsense book that’s blunt and easy to understand, and it imparts alot of information quickly. You even get occasional bouts of humor, such as this quote describing a bear market cycle:
“First, it has a sharp decline. Second, it rallies and is distributed. Third, it has another decline, ending the second section of the decline. Fourth, it rallies and meets selling. Fifth, it has another decline, ending the third section down. Sixth, it rallies and hesitates. Seventh, it has a final big break or what we call the clean-out, when investors, traders and everybody got scared and decided that Commodities are never going up again and sell out everything.”
Now, maybe it’s just me, but I find that to be both humorous and informative, just the sort of style I’d use if I were talking about it.
There’s a great deal of talk in the opening pages about how most traders trade on emotion, either hope or fear, and how to be successful one must eliminate that from buying and selling decisions. It’s an interesting concept that I’d never thought of before, but it has a ring of truth to it, and the challenge of achieving such is very interesting.
Just goes to show you, you can’t trust secondary sources overly much (unless you’re doing a scholarly research paper, in which case theoretically they’re almost as important or more so than the primary sources, haha). When you’re researching and studying to figure out how to do something, it pays to go to the original primary source and make your own assessment. It’s hard to tell what Billy Bob was smoking when he wrote his paper that’s now your secondary source, isn’t it? Or if you prefer an optimistic view of humanity, what Billy Bob’s level of reading comprehension is. Oh well; life isn’t perfect, and it keeps resisting my efforts to make it so. Time marches on… Did you know that a shovel can double as a hammer for a sufficiently skilled wielder?