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Post by meeno8 on Sept 3, 2020 11:12:43 GMT -6
I thought a separate thread should be dedicated to this topic.
When I was in high school, my father hired me in the summers as a part time job. He instructed me how to scan stock options prices in the newspaper and do some simple calculations to find suitable ones for trading, which he then used to trade some spreads and straddles in the over the counter market (this was prior to the opening of the CBOE exchange).
Flash forward to the summer of 1983, and he showed me a system he had devised using technical analysis and moving averages on oats futures contracts. Technical analysis simply means analysis of price and volume irrespective of the fundamentals of supply and demand. In the case of the fundamentals, there was a drought, which squeezed supply and drove up grain prices along with expanded price volatility. I opened a margin account with $3000 and started trading the oats futures. Within 10 weeks I had an account balance of $12,000, and that was trading very conservatively or it could have easily been $30,000 to $50,000. Unfortunately (from the standpoint of the trading system, and not the abundance of the food supply) the drought ended, and so did the buy and sell signals for the system.
Then many years later came the book deal with Bloomberg Financial (now an imprint of Wiley & Sons), and my book, Technical Analysis Tools, was out in print in hard cover in February of 2008. It was even later knocked off (counterfeited) in paperback, for which I get nothing in royalties, but still a compliment nonetheless.
People used to deride technical analysis as market voodoo, and the Wall Street Journal historically promoted fundamental analysis to the exlusion of technicals. The world has changed now. All of the electronic trading platforms being advertised on TV commercials are chock full of technical indicators for use by the individual trader/investor. All of the big hedge funds use technicals in combination with quantitative algorithms for trading strategies executed by computer programs in lightning fast 'high frequency trading'.
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Post by meeno8 on Sept 3, 2020 11:28:47 GMT -6
FYI. The dramatic sell off today on the S&P 500 and Dow Jones indices correlates with a transit of a graha, as the prices reached historic highs as of yesterday's close. The transits are not just of the rashis, but also of the 27 minor constellations around the zodiac, or nakshatras.
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Post by meeno8 on Sept 3, 2020 13:27:18 GMT -6
As I say, we should not really be concerned with events in this universe, and cause and effect. They do not matter for us as adherents of CV. We are not trying to accumulate good deeds to reap the benefits of those in our next life, or to get us to Vaikuntha.
When a new temple is consecrated in India (or here in the West), the gemstones of the nava-graha are placed under the cornerstone before the building is constructed, and often a small mandap in the temple courtyard with the nava-graha murtis is placed there during construction. You don't find nava-graha mandirs, rather Lakshmi-Narayana or Radha-Krishna mandirs. I see nothing wrong with the practice, and personally I really like looking at gemstones and minerals. I find them quite fascinating. I don't wear rings with gemstones on them, and would not want to, because they would be very uncomfortable.
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Post by meeno8 on Sept 3, 2020 17:08:46 GMT -6
Since Nitaidas Ji brought up the 'trading program'. There is no such program. Several years ago I intended to develop an automated trading program with my skills as a software developer. But I ran into an insurmountable obstacle. I found out after several months of looking around for a way to do that, that all of the electronic trading platforms that used to have APIs (application programming interfaces) to allow for that no longer have any, nor will they support them either. I had a conversation with a friend recently who is a former software developer and stock broker that his own hedge fund with some partners. He told me he had discovered the same unfortunate situation.
Like so many other plans, that one looked great 'on paper'.
I do appreciate the ribbing from my gurubhai. Although I have that 'feather' in my cap which is becoming a published author with an advance and royalties, I don't want that to be my peacock feather. And that flute of mine has been sitting in its case for years now just gathering dust. It needs an overhaul at the repair shop, because the pads are leaking, and these old hands really can't play it for more than about 20 minutes at a time anyways. If I take that khol out of the closet and dust it off, it will be even worse. I found that out when we had a little kirtana when Nitai came to town several years ago. It threw my back out due to how I had to sit on the couch while playing it. I should have made him play the drum instead of the karatalas.
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Post by meeno8 on Sept 3, 2020 17:12:03 GMT -6
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Post by Nitaidas on Sept 3, 2020 18:13:10 GMT -6
Since Nitaidas Ji brought up the 'trading program'. There is no such program. Several years ago I intended to develop an automated trading program with my skills as a software developer. But I ran into an insurmountable obstacle. I found out after several months of looking around for a way to do that, that all of the electronic trading platforms that used to have APIs (application programming interfaces) to allow for that no longer have any, nor will they support them either. I had a conversation with a friend recently who is a former software developer and stock broker that his own hedge fund with some partners. He told me he had discovered the same unfortunate situation. Like so many other plans, that one looked great 'on paper'. I do appreciate the ribbing from my gurubhai. Although I have that 'feather' in my cap which is becoming a published author with an advance and royalties, I don't want that to be my peacock feather. And that flute of mine has been sitting in its case for years now just gathering dust. It needs an overhaul at the repair shop, because the pads are leaking, and these old hands really can't play it for more than about 20 minutes at a time anyways. If I take that khol out of the closet and dust it off, it will be even worse. I found that out when we had a little kirtana when Nitai came to town several years ago. It threw my back out due to how I had to sit on the couch while playing it. I should have made him play the drum instead of the karatalas. My dear friend and gurubhai, Mina, you know how much I treasure you, I hope. We have known each other for a long, long time and have shared many experiences together. Yes, I rib you some as you do me, but we have a shared connection with Baba and through him with Radha and Krsna and their manjari-sevaks for nearly half a century. I half expect to find you there already if ever I should make it. I am sorry to hear about your back problems. I have suffered from similar pains and would be suffering a lot more if I had not been able to lose some weight and practice some yoga. A Surya-namaskara a day will keep your backache at bay. It is easier said than done, I know. At any rate, I still lament your fascination with this jyotish stuff and wish you had taken the energy you gave to jyotish and applied it to bhajana or improving your Bengali or Sanskrit and translating some of the seminal texts of CV. You are a superb writer and certainly enormously bright. Together we could have perhaps out done the IGM saffron-swathed baboons who have translated everything into ISKCON gibberish with little understanding and even less depth. Our gurubhai Jagadish das couldn't learn another language if his life depended on it and anyway he is off sporting with Ganeshji. Anyway, we are both flawed and could have done better. For all my years of study and trying, I have not really produced much that is useful to the next generation of the CV tradition. I may still crank out a few small things before death takes me, but it is not what I hoped for when I got phudded all those years ago at the U of C. Thanks for your input and comments on this site. Speak your truth, bro! |
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Post by meeno8 on Sept 3, 2020 18:42:10 GMT -6
Well, the truth is that my fascination with jyotish is long gone, but I do still enjoy looking at exhibits at museums of turbans of maharajas and necklaces of maharanis decorated with emeralds, rubies and sapphires, and some of the largest diamonds in the world. Perhaps I should have been a mineralogist.
The rational to me tends to be more tedious and boring than the irrational, quite frankly. Hence my fascination with quantum mechanics. And how I will watch any sci-fi film, even if it gets low ratings on Rotten Tomatoes.
If there ever is a trading progam down the road, which would likely be based on quantitative analysis involving stochastic calculus (as it is with most hedge fund analysts) implementing some algorithm based thereon - there are people that have already stepped forward to do any type of promotion for it, as long as it has a 2 year track record. So there is the catch 22. Without the track record, there is no promotion. Without the automated trading, there is no chance for a track record.
Anyways, my passion has been for my work in software development, which I enjoy very much, plus it pays quite well. Financial markets are not all that interesting to me, quite frankly.
The chiropractor I see is quite good in dealing with my pinched nerve in my shoulder, the baker's cyst on my knee, and any periodic back issues, which do not arise all that often and not by any measure severe. He even treats my vertigo, which is caused by one cerebellum being overactive, and the one on the other side being underactive.
As far as getting back into translating any texts, my language skills are so rusty at this point, I would likely need months to bring them back up to snuff, if not years. What I may end up doing is authoring some English language books using secondary sources in the form of good translations like the ones coming out of Blazing Sapphire text. But that will have to wait until I really retire retire. They will have to be submitted to my publisher Wiley & Sons first, because of my contract with them. And of course they will reject the proposals, because I am not a professor at a major university.
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Post by meeno8 on Sept 4, 2020 8:20:06 GMT -6
By the time I was off with Baba in Braj-mandal in 1980, I had completely lost all interest in jyotish.
It was in the fall of 1984, that I began research into planetary orbits and futures markets, and that was at my father's suggestion. We were attending a commodities trading class and the instructor spoke of a famous early 20th century wheat futures trader that claimed to be using phases of the moon for his trading decisions. But that had nothing to do with astrology, especially since he never put any stock in any such form of fortune telling. It was purely based on astronomy, and since I had some knowledge in the field, from college classes, I was equipped to delve into that study.
In 2005 I was told by a fellow that was a former floor trader at Chicago Mercantile Exchange that some of the guys trading on the floor had been using astrology. I have no idea if they were astrologers themselves, using some astrology software, or paying some astrologers. I was mildly surprised to hear that they were using astrology, because the only trading strategies I knew of for guys trading on the floor had nothing to do with astrology. There is a statement attributed to J.P. Morgan: "Millionaires do not use astrology, but billionaires do." There is no evidence, however, that he ever said that.
The real take away from this thread should be that cherry picking stocks or delving into derivatives is not for everyone, and they should have deep pockets if they want to be active traders. Mutual funds and bond funds are the safer way to invest and have some growth of investment capital.
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Post by meeno8 on Sept 4, 2020 13:42:21 GMT -6
There is a book on my shelf in Sanskrit with an English translation, which has a section on commodities and jyotish. It states that whenever the sun enters the sign of Leo (an annual event), one should expect an incease in the price of gold. Well, I checked that out on decades of price charts from the 20th century, and it never happens. Did it actually work back when the text was written? I think I do not care.
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Post by meeno8 on Sept 6, 2020 15:08:19 GMT -6
Probably 99.99% of CV adherents are married with families, or at least married. That means it behooves us to have good investments for when we retire from out jobs. In the US the main investment for most people is their home, and they typically have a 30 year mortgage loan (or 15 year) from a lender to acquire the property. Historically, the property values increase over time, and there is only so much land, especially in urban and suburban areas, so the demand tends to outstrip supply.
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Post by meeno8 on Sept 11, 2020 9:56:37 GMT -6
Nitaiji wrote:
"My dear friend and gurubhai, Mina, you know how much I treasure you, I hope. We have known each other for a long, long time and have shared many experiences together. Yes, I rib you some as you do me, but we have a shared connection with Baba and through him with Radha and Krsna and their manjari-sevaks for nearly half a century. I half expect to find you there already if ever I should make it. I am sorry to hear about your back problems. I have suffered from similar pains and would be suffering a lot more if I had not been able to lose some weight and practice some yoga. A Surya-namaskara a day will keep your backache at bay. It is easier said than done, I know."
Backatcha, brother. All of us that followed your path are indebted to you, whether it led to Baba or some other valid diksha lineage. We played more tennis than golf back in the day, and you taught me the rules and scoring system for tennis. It has been golf for me since the mid '90s, and I spent thousands of dollars on lessons to be able to hit the ball straight off the tee and on the fairway. Now I miss not being on the course the past few years because of the pinched nerve in the shoulder. Getting out and hiking around the neighborhood is my current option for cardiovascular health.
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Post by meeno8 on Sept 11, 2020 10:46:12 GMT -6
I remember being horrified to hear from either Jaisachi or Jagannath about how, after you on the advice of senior Vaishnavas in Vrindavan had sent a respectful letter to Bhaktivedanta Swami explaining your reasons for leaving ISKCON. That stirred up the hornets' nest, and a small band of ISKCON thugs went out searching for you with nails with boards in them and accosting sadhus around the countryside to see if they knew your whereabouts.
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Post by Nitaidas on Sept 11, 2020 19:26:00 GMT -6
I remember being horrified to hear from either Jaisachi or Jagannath about how, after you on the advice of senior Vaishnavas in Vrindavan had sent a respectful letter to Bhaktivedanta Swami explaining your reasons for leaving ISKCON. That stirred up the hornets' nest, and a small band of ISKCON thugs went out searching for you with nails with boards in them and accosting sadhus around the countryside to see if they knew your whereabouts. That was the second letter. The first letter I wrote was an angry one. I felt angry and cheated when I, after many inquiries, determined that it was really true that Bhaktisiddhanta had never taken diksa from Gaurakisora Das Baba and that as a result Bhaktivedanta and all his disciples were not really members of the Caitanya tradition. And yet, IGM had the audacity to claim to be the only "living" lineage remaining in the CV tradition. This latter lie was no doubt the result of a chewing out Bhaktisiddhanta got from Pandit Ramakrishna das Babaji. Babaji asked him during one of Bs's visit to Vraja whether he had received initiation from Gaurakisora Das Baba before he passed. Bhaktisiddhanta's answer was "Yes! In a dream!" Initiations in dream are not real initiations. Panditji really let him have it because by then Bhaktisiddhanta had himself started giving out diksa to others. After that, Bs revved up his rhetoric against the real tradition and began condemning Babajis and Goswamis and anyone who actually belonged to the real tradition. He forbid his followers from visiting anyone outside the GM. Anyway, Parimal Visvas read the first letter and told me I had to tone it way down. So I did. I wrote a very nice letter telling Bv I was leaving and asking for his blessing as I depart to take shelter with advanced guru of the Caitanya Vaisnava tradition. I heard later from someone that he said: "Blessing?! I stomp on your head! That is my blessing." He was not a sadhu. He was a business man. I watched him curse an old man in Mumbai because that old man did not want to sell his land to Bv to enlarge the ISKCON temple in Juhu beach. When the man died he joyously took credit for it. This is the kind of follower Bhaktisiddhanta created. Jagat criticizes me for not giving Bv more respect. He introduced me to Krsna after all. What he really did was scam us. He took our money and our youth and gave us nothing in return. Most members of ISKCON dropped out eventually and had nothing to show for their troubles. Some even died while in the movement or because of the movement (Visnujana Swami?). I was lucky. My vartma-pradarzaka guru, Dr. Kapoor, saved me and pointed me to my real Vaisnava guru. Sri Tinkudi Baba gave me shelter when Bv's thugs were out hunting for me. They were dragging their knuckles around Radhakunda while I was safe with Baba at beautiful Ratankund way out in the wilds of Vraja. Baba preferred lonely places frequented only by snakes so that no one would bother him in his bhajan. |
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Post by Deleted on Sept 12, 2020 6:29:18 GMT -6
I thought a separate thread should be dedicated to this topic. When I was in high school, my father hired me in the summers as a part time job. He instructed me how to scan stock options prices in the newspaper and do some simple calculations to find suitable ones for trading, which he then used to trade some spreads and straddles in the over the counter market (this was prior to the opening of the CBOE exchange). Flash forward to the summer of 1983, and he showed me a system he had devised using technical analysis and moving averages on oats futures contracts. Technical analysis simply means analysis of price and volume irrespective of the fundamentals of supply and demand. In the case of the fundamentals, there was a drought, which squeezed supply and drove up grain prices along with expanded price volatility. I opened a margin account with $3000 and started trading the oats futures. Within 10 weeks I had an account balance of $12,000, and that was trading very conservatively or it could have easily been $30,000 to $50,000. Unfortunately (from the standpoint of the trading system, and not the abundance of the food supply) the drought ended, and so did the buy and sell signals for the system. Then many years later came the book deal with Bloomberg Financial (now an imprint of Wiley & Sons), and my book, Technical Analysis Tools, was out in print in hard cover in February of 2008. It was even later knocked off (counterfeited) in paperback, for which I get nothing in royalties, but still a compliment nonetheless. People used to deride technical analysis as market voodoo, and the Wall Street Journal historically promoted fundamental analysis to the exlusion of technicals. The world has changed now. All of the electronic trading platforms being advertised on TV commercials are chock full of technical indicators for use by the individual trader/investor. All of the big hedge funds use technicals in combination with quantitative algorithms for trading strategies executed by computer programs in lightning fast 'high frequency trading'. OK Mean0: So you caused the Great Financial Crisis of '08 knocking off 20 Tesla Start-ups from manifesting. WAY to GO. WAY to Go. Pranams! |
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Post by Deleted on Sept 12, 2020 6:32:57 GMT -6
I remember being horrified to hear from either Jaisachi or Jagannath about how, after you on the advice of senior Vaishnavas in Vrindavan had sent a respectful letter to Bhaktivedanta Swami explaining your reasons for leaving ISKCON. That stirred up the hornets' nest, and a small band of ISKCON thugs went out searching for you with nails with boards in them and accosting sadhus around the countryside to see if they knew your whereabouts. That was the second letter. The first letter I wrote was an angry one. I felt angry and cheated when I, after many inquiries, determined that it was really true that Bhaktisiddhanta had never taken diksa from Gaurakisora Das Baba and that as a result Bhaktivedanta and all his disciples were not really members of the Caitanya tradition. And yet, IGM had the audacity to claim to be the only "living" lineage remaining in the CV tradition. This latter lie was no doubt the result of a chewing out Bhaktisiddhanta got from Pandit Ramakrishna das Babaji. Babaji asked him during one of Bs's visit to Vraja whether he had received initiation from Gaurakisora Das Baba before he passed. Bhaktisiddhanta's answer was "Yes! In a dream!" Initiations in dream are not real initiations. Panditji really let him have it because by then Bhaktisiddhanta had himself started giving out diksa to others. After that, Bs revved up his rhetoric against the real tradition and began condemning Babajis and Goswamis and anyone who actually belonged to the real tradition. He forbid his followers from visiting anyone outside the GM. Anyway, Parimal Visvas read the first letter and told me I had to tone it way down. So I did. I wrote a very nice letter telling Bv I was leaving and asking for his blessing as I depart to take shelter with advanced guru of the Caitanya Vaisnava tradition. I heard later from someone that he said: "Blessing?! I stomp on your head! That is my blessing." He was not a sadhu. He was a business man. I watched him curse an old man in Mumbai because that old man did not want to sell his land to Bv to enlarge the ISKCON temple in Juhu beach. When the man died he joyously took credit for it. This is the kind of follower Bhaktisiddhanta created. Jagat criticizes me for not giving Bv more respect. He introduced me to Krsna after all. What he really did was scam us. He took our money and our youth and gave us nothing in return. Most members of ISKCON dropped out eventually and had nothing to show for their troubles. Some even died while in the movement or because of the movement (Visnujana Swami?). I was lucky. My vartma-pradarzaka guru, Dr. Kapoor, saved me and pointed me to my real Vaisnava guru. Sri Tinkudi Baba gave me shelter when Bv's thugs were out hunting for me. They were dragging their knuckles around Radhakunda while I was safe with Baba at beautiful Ratankund way out in the wilds of Vraja. Baba preferred lonely places frequented only by snakes so that no one would bother him in his bhajan. It's called Boxing for Christ's Sake. The Great Boxer AC Swami Prabhupada, maybe you heard of him, your Guru. |
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