HYPR Bankruptcy Play?

i am not recommending this play unless you're REALLY good with charts. HYPR just announced (nov. 9, 2006, abt 5pm) it's filing bankruptcy. this is not a quant thing right now- it's more of a t/a play with a 15-min chart. "Q's" often bounce and this one might too. since they haven't yet actually filed, i don't know if friday it'll be HYPR or HYPRQ.

Stick Around

yeah, stick around. i'm watching one. when it gets ripe i'll holler. check in over the weekend- it may be ripe by then.

now i want to go off topic a bit. here and there you may have noticed my links to my quant website whattolearn.com. well, last night i found out, to my great anger, that my so-called hosting service was screwing up again and my site was "site unavailable". the hosting service was vizaweb.com. i am now with another server. a word to the wise if you're putting up a website: never ever trust vizaweb.com. they lied to me about a "compensation plan" for their downtime but never came through. and now i can't even reach their site.

TD Ameritrade Haemorrhaging Customer Base

td ameritrade (AMTD) shares have slipped from an early october high near $20 to near $16 today, as traders express disgust over tda's recent policy of not allowing buys to go thru on certain stocks. it is widely believed that tda has heavy short positions in certain stocks (including SSSU and TDCP) and is attempting to manipulate prices downwards for their own benefit, to the disadvantage of their own customers. some flavour of the growing tempest can be seen here where traders are pulling out of tda en masse...

Quant Verified Again

DRGV. yup, HOD dropped from .064 thurs to .060 friday. i think dip would've been even bigger if i hadn't posted abt it here and on a forum. quant picks are easily messed with is why i rarely post them. please note that my post on this (just previous) was at 4:24 a.m. friday, 'way before mkt open.

i don't like sharing picks, especially quant picks because quant is like a rare orchid- very sensitive to light. it's a stalking tool, a sniper thing. that said, looks like this one going down some today (friday nov 3 2006). don't know if it's shortable (might be a pink) but if this quant picture is true then is good for short early or for long once it bottoms...

Quotetracker Picked Up By TD Ameritrade

here's a tidbit to munch on... on Sept 29 2006 td ameritrade through its subsidiary T2 API Technologies, LLC acquired the medved quotetracker program.

hmmm- too soon to read the tea leaves but if recent experience with tda is any guide we should all be expecting quotetracker to go from free to astronomical in no time. the qt site still looks the same except for the tda watermark stains here and there, and LOL the fact that they've disabled all links to other brokers.

for those who didn't know, qt is a free streaming quotes and L2 program that you hook up to your broker's feed.

Td Ameritrade Saga Continued

ROFL, i'm slowly piecing this together and in a way it gets funnier by the minute...
it now appears that i'm one of a select group (LOL) of ppl who had something to do with the recent TDA debacle over sssu, even though i don't hold any sssu. let me explain... someone who'd been away from the marketmillionaires tdcp thread for awhile sent me a pm asking what the heck was going on with tdcp. i wrote him back with this...
while you were gone something interesting came up: we were trying to figure out how to stop our brokers from using our own shares to short us and stop them from loaning our shares to mm's to short us. so LOL catfish says, "Hey, if you put a limit sell on your shares they can't do anything with 'em." so ppl did, with ridiculous limit sells like $75 etc. and then we forgot abt it. well, it looks like the news spread and it really killed td ameritrade's action. so td ameritrade decides to restrict buys based on supposedly "questionable practices" of tdcp- hahaha. so now you know the story. cracks me up!!
so okay, hehehe- what obviously happened was that this whole thing spread like wildfire all over the boards and folks started putting all their other stocks on limit sell because very soon after Scottrade, e-Trade and others started in with the same "buy restrictions- sell only" monkeybusiness as stupid Td Ameritrade. ain't the internet just wunnerful?!!

Dreams DO (sometimes) Come True

lousy filthy trash stinkbox td ameritrade may be about to get its due. in part, silver screen studios is suing td ameritrade because...

" Due to the conduct of TD Ameritrade and ETrade preventing investors from purchasing our shares and receiving a dividend they will be forced to cover, we will hold a board of directors meeting to set the dividend date on this weekend and make an announce on next week. Market makers and brokers will have 10 days to balance their positions in preparation for the dividend. "

link to full smartbrief.com story

like i said last week- i hope somebody sues the crap out of them! so dreams do sometimes come true- i blogged about it thursday and this came out friday!

The FOREX Market

the FOREX market is the currency exchange market. you buy and sell currency of different countries. it is extremely volatile, it is extremely tricky, and you can lose a lot of money fast.

now the bright side. you can trade FOREX 24 hrs a day, from sunday afternoon until friday afternoon. you can make a lot of money, but because things happen so fast, you absolutely must have a plan and follow it. and it has to be a GOOD plan, obviously. yes, you could use technical analysis as a plan. and i have to admit that here, in FOREX, t/a has a special advantage over quant: raw speed. if you haven't bothered to quant the currency pair you're trading, t/a can give you that quick snapshot you need to make a decision. if you're very good, you'll be right at least about half the time, which is profitable if you limit your loss to less than your gain.

on the other hand, if you quant the pair and do updates every few minutes, you should find your success rate jumping to about 80% or more. for you quant aficionados, i do provide a set of reporting algorithms in my tutorial. for everybody else, here are some general rules to follow when trading FOREX...

• your FOREX broker has a page that lists all the upcoming scheduled government news releases. STUDY THEM and about 30 minutes before they come out, GET OUT of the related currencies. you never know- the pr may cause the price to go 'way up or 'way down and it's real hard to predict. NOTE: by "related currencies" i mean any currency related to the one issued by the government who's issuing the pr. you'll have to study to figure this out. for example, a USA pr will often have a dramatic effect not only on the USD, but also the opposite effect on the EUR (euro); or, the USD and the CAD (Canadian dollar) often travel in lockstep with each other. again, study and know- but mainly get outta the way!!!!
• never trust common t/a patterns (indicating strong price change) for more than a minute or two, and maybe not at all. these turn into fakeouts- i dunno, maybe half the time. as covered earlier, too many people are using t/a. so the big banks and governments (yeah, govt's trade the market too) know exactly what everybody's gonna do before they do it and they clobber ya!
• my personal rule, most of the time, is never use trailing stops, either for stop loss or for limit stop. the fine print in your deal with your FOREX broker tells you why: "in extremely volatile conditions, trailing stops may not be honoured". and they mean it! i've got burned on this once and learned my lesson. so always use hard stops and limit stops.
• if you can afford it, do not set your stop loss based on what you can afford to lose. set it based on what you realistically believe the pair "could" move to. if you can't afford this, you might want to reconsider the trade and find something better because all you're doing is gambling.
• never gamble on a trade. quant it, or use t/a. do not go with just your hunch.
  

if you can follow just these rules, you should be able to survive in FOREX long enough to make a profit.

How Your Broker Screws You

i was just about to go to bed when i decided this just had to be blogged. i hang out at a stock forum and for days the significance of a certain small firestorm had eluded me. the light just went on. apparently, TDAmeritrade is restricting the purchase of certain stocks, including TDCP. you can sell, but you can't buy. i don't use TDAmeritrade because its fees are 'way overpriced, so i don't have a direct interest in the controversy. but i do have an indirectly powerful interest since i hold some TDCP.

the key question for me came up tonight on the tdcp thread when somebody asked if what TD Ameritrade was doing was legal. not being a lawyer but delighting in legal puzzles, i decided that it's probably illegal and i hope like hell somebody sues the crap out of them. TD Ameritrade's explanation so far is that they restrict purchase of "questionable" stocks or companies with "questionable practices". well, if you know anything about TDCP, that just doesn't fit.

what does fit, however, is something i mentioned earlier in this blog- your broker can short stocks against your interest and can loan stocks to market makers to short against your interest. if there's strong buy pressure on the stock (as is the case now with TDCP about to have its stockholders' meeting on oct. 28th, and a demo of its technology with Oklahoma University), then any brokers or market makers holding heavy short positions are about to get screwed big time.

so if you're really big like TD Ameritrade, why not use your market muscle to deny all your clients the right to buy TDCP? and for added fun, why not scare them all into selling with the "questionable practices" red herring? that way, you get some shares to sell when things do break loose. in addition, you drive the pps down.

now, besides my opinion about TD Ameritrade's practices on TDCP being illegal, i consider that it's also a violation of their fiduciary obligation to place their clients' interests above their own. bottom line, if you're with TD Ameritrade or anybody else who suspiciously restricts buys, i say dump the suckers and find another broker.

Quant: External Correlation

earlier, i stated that quant mainly uses open, hi, lo, close, and volume data. that's generally true, but there are other ways to quant the stock of your choice. all things are connected. here are a couple of ways to quant against external data:

• quant against a related index. for example, if yours is an energy stock, you could quant the index performance against your stock's pps. there are many such indices. somewhere, buried in that data, is the relationship to your stock.
• quant against an apparently unrelated index. this may be even more fruitful than using a related index.
• devise your own index, quant it, and run it against your stock's pps. now it gets really interesting. by doing this, you're introducing some "apparent" fresh randomness to the process. but it's not really randomness, since everything, under quant rules, is related anyway. so what you're actually doing is finding new correlations not yet noticed by other quants.

true, you may often have to factor your net values to make them all readable on a single chart, but that's a small price to pay for the potential richness of the enquiry.

Where and How to Screen

okay, you made it through the splitter minefield.

your further screening now depends on your style of trading. if you're a fundamentals trader, you'll want to look at certain things. i suck at fundies so we won't even go there. if you're using technical analysis (t/a), you'll want to look for certain things. i have skill there but i already posted some good places to get that info- and they all do a better job than i could do here, though i may revisit the subject later.

that leaves quant. if you've chosen to be a quant trader, this post will help you. there are two kinds of quant trader- long-term, and short-term (like me). and in case you missed my earlier warning: sitting ducks get shot. that's why i'm short term, 1 or 2 days at most.

first, where do you find stocks to look at? well, places like nasdaq.com, otcbb.com, smallcapcenter.com, and stockcharts.com, as well as others, have listings of the day's winners/losers or gainers/losers, etc. currently, for quant, i use the smallcapcenter.com listings, for no particular reason except that i have a (free) "screening" account there.

if you google "screen stocks" in quotes, you'll find tons of free screening sites. a "screen" is a set of parameters you set to search for stocks that meet your criteria. you might choose to set a variety of t/a values for various indicators, such as "closed above open", "macd crossover", "rsi above 50", "volume above X value", etc. the system produces a list for you and then you look a little deeper to decide your trades, if any.

but for quant work, i don't much bother with screens (although screening with a t/a volatility indicator might be helpful). i just run the winners or losers and mainly look for my price range and good strong volume and volatility. if you're a long-term quant, you probably want to avoid volatility and just look for a healthy longterm trend. but as a short-term trader, i want high volatility because i want to get in there, make my money, and get the heck out!

so for a quant, it's really as simple as that. no setting up of screens and poring for hours over t/a charts. i just grab data for a few promising candidates and start quanting them. in an hour or so, i can get maybe three or four to answer strongly to a custom algorithm. and if the algo says any are ready to go, next day i may trade them. otherwise, they go in my reporting algo library and i keep them under watch. adding data to these each day and reading the resulting charts only takes a couple minutes per stock. when they get ripe, i'm ready to hit 'em.

if you want to learn quant: whattolearn.com . or go to amazon.com and buy a book- but be very selective; many quant books get you 10 feet deep in higher mathematics in the first three pages, therefore proving pretty useless to most people. quant just doesn't have to be that complicated. spreadsheet skills and common sense will do the job, which is why i've simplified quant at whattolearn, along with a simple video spreadsheet tutorial if that's all you want.

Screening: Finding Good Stocks to Trade

before we even go down this road (screening), i want to make an important point:
never, EVER, buy a splitter!!

there are some rare, very rare exceptions, but chances are you'll never see one.
mainly, this rule applies to OTC stocks under about $5. but splitter disease is spreading north into higher priced stocks too.

oh, for those who don't know, maybe i should explain what a split is, huh? okay, there are two kinds of splits, forward split, and reverse split. both suck. and the lower the stock price the worse they suck. splits are notoriously bad in pennies, especially pink sheets, where no warning is required before a split.

let's pretend you have 100,000 shares of fictitious stock "ABCD" at .001 at 10 a.m. on a monday morning. total real value = $100. and then at 10:01 they announce a 1/2000 reverse split. this means that for every 2000 shares you held at 10 a.m. you will now have only 1 share. but that 1 share will have an "instant" value of 2000 times what each of your previous shares had. so you will theoretically have 50 shares at a new value of $2 per share. total real value again = $100. so far so good, right?

but, and i can almost guarantee this, by 10:15 a.m. you'll be lucky if your shares are even worth .25 each. total real value = $12.50, for a loss of $87.50. and, to make matters worse, you probably won't even be able to sell them at that price. and just when you think it can't get any worse, it DOES!! the ticker symbol gets "instantly" changed in a split and you can't trade anything- it takes days to sort it out with your broker. so what happened??

what happened was, splits make traders nervous and they start dumping huge quantities of stock and that drives the pps down. it makes them nervous because splits (reverses) have historically been used by companies to boost their share price and to cover up some real bad balance sheets. more often nowadays, however, r/s are used simply to screw the investor and line the pockets of company officers. they wait for the pps to crash then buy back in.

take a look at JKRI (former JRIV, former JKRV)- but hurry before they split again and change their ticker. it's one of the nastiest pieces of stinking crap i ever had the filthy misfortune to trade. luckily, it was 'way back when i started so i didn't lose that much. the absolute nastiest piece of crap was WTVN (former WFTV)- i didn't lose much there either, but i watched one lawyer lose $120,000 literally in a few heartbeats the morning it happened.


but you can protect yourself, more or less. most of these scumbags are chronic splitters. so if you check their history for splits going back at least a couple years and you see even one, run like hell and warn everybody else! splitting is an addictive way for crooks to make money. you can check for splits by going to nasdaq.com, loading the chart for the stock, set it to show maybe 3 years of data, select the "Splits" checkbox below the chart and click "Update". the chart will then show you splits for that period with an "s" in a circle where they occurred.

forward splits have historically had somewhat better outcomes, but these days even those suck. they're the reverse of a reverse split (you get more shares but a proportionally lower "instant" pps). using the above example, but instead a 2/1 forward split, you would end up with 200,000 shares at an instant price of .0005 per share. and the same events would likely unfold, for much the same reasons.

alright, so that's step1 in how to screen for good stocks.
next post we'll get further into screening.

One More Funny

this one's hilarious, in a macabre sorta way...
i can't post it here 'cause it's not mine. but when you get to the page scroll down to the post by "grizzums" and check out the animated avatar and his signature...
here's da link... marketmillionaires.com

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More Stock Humour...

and this one's about what happened with one stock when sharp online traders dug in their heels over a stock and refused to let the mm's run the show (the fight continues).... LOL

Some Stock Humour

time for a break! humour about stocks and market makers (well, it's funny to us retail traders, but maybe not to the mm's, heheh...)

Making a Profit: Sticking It to the Market Makers

whoo-boy! that last post got my blood up!

so how do you make a profit in spite of market maker manipulation? here are some pointers for how to profit, while at the same time screwing the hell out of the market makers, shorters, and brokers...

• never give a sucker an even break. your broker "loans" your shares out to market makers who in turn use those shares to naked short the stock you're in, driving the price down. you can prevent this. simply put a limit sell order in at a price you like- brokers CANNOT loan out your shares once you do this. this screws them and the mm's.

• if you see lots of buys going through but the pps (price per share) is not going up, it means the mm's are naked shorting the stock. get out now! don't go back in until you see the price reacting normally to buy/sell volume.

• stocks that you're considering that have high buy volumes but little northbound price change are highly suspect! don't buy them! before making any trade, check the naked short list here. this tells you how long the stock has had FTD's (fails to deliver). rule of thumb: any stock on this list is suspect.
  
• sitting ducks get shot. keep your trades very brief. long-term trading may look good to you now (even in blue chips), but when the crap hits the fan you'll be glad you followed this advice. never stay in any trade longer than a couple days. you can always go back in on a price opportunity. keep the suckers guessing!
  
• stocks getting a LOT of forum attention are sure targets for mm manipulation. this applies also to blue chips where there are no mm's but there are huge institutional traders who will manipulate the hell out of the pps. avoid them like the plague. find your own dang stocks!

well, these tips should keep you busy 'til the next installment of this mad blog. meanwhile, if you haven't found a source to learn quant, here's my tutorial.

next blog, we'll talk about- uhhh- something important...

The Darkside: Market Makers , cont'd.

resuming where we left off....
oh- i WILL be getting to how you avoid getting hurt by mm's, but first you need context, flavour....

so what is NSS? NSS (naked shorting) is the selling of shares you don't actually own, i.e., you are selling "ghost shares", "counterfeit shares", "fraudulent shares".

now the funny thing is, the SEC allows mm's to engage in NSS, but only if they've made good faith "arrangements" to actually borrow the shares from somebody else (like another mm or broker). it sounds like a good system, ideally providing liquidity in the markets. but it absolutely does not work because it's riddled with mm abuse. but why is this important to you as a retail trader? ....

well, remember a little thing called the law of supply and demand? in other words, as demand increases and supply decreases, the price of the item should go up. but mm's use increasing demand to drive price down!!! they do it with NSS- counterfeit shares. they sell shares that don't exist, causing the price to go down! those "good faith arrangements" to borrow actual shares are often just a flimsy nod to the law and the actual shares are never even delivered. if you doubt this, go watch this video- the data comes from academics, PhD's, not some rant-mongers. i started watching and couldn't stop! and it's a long video.

daily, millions of new counterfeit shares hit the market. and a large number of those never gets delivered. these are called "FTD's" (fails to deliver). it's been going on for years, and the effect is cumulative. someday soon, coming to a bank near you, there has to be a balancing of accounts. there has to be a reckoning. that "correction" will make the crash of 1929 look like a hiccup. believe it. having to cover their naked shorts with either real stock or real cash will ruin market maker after market maker, bank after bank, broker after broker.

we're being systematically looted by criminal elements inside the usa and outside the usa (the epicenter of one major NSS scheme was traced to a Moscow ring). watch the video!!

okay- let's move on to how to protect yourself and make a profit in spite of the mm's.

The Darkside: Market Makers

awright, time to talk about the dastardly market makers.

let's suppose you've survived the ravages of ignorance, greed, false hope, fear, and bragging. now, to stay alive in the market, you must outwit the market makers.

market makers (mm's) are financial "institutions" whose role it is (supposedly) to maintain orderly markets (by preventing extreme volatility- again, "supposedly"), and to make a market for the stocks they handle.

okay, enough with the "supposedlies". these people don't give a rat's a** about being orderly OR making a market. all they care about is making money for themselves. their methods include craft, stealth, and outright violations of the law. some people say it even includes criminal conspiracy.

when you see the bid/ask/last on an OTC stock price, those are set by mm's. ask is the price at which you can buy the stock; bid is the price at which you can sell the stock; last is the price of the last transaction.

there are dozens of market makers. when bid/ask prices are posted (often changing within seconds), the bid price is posted from the mm with the highest bid price, and the ask price is posted from the mm with the lowest ask. so you would think it's a competitive market. many observers doubt this, however, and accuse the mm's of price-fixing, i.e., criminal conspiracy to fix prices. they also accuse the SEC of lax enforcement. be that as it may, there's little you can do to directly change the way things work. (ummm- actually, in a later blog i'll cover what some people are planning to do to "encourage" the SEC to do a better job).

for now, your main issue is how to avoid getting beat up by the mm's. and this is a good time to cover short selling, or "shorting", and in particular, "naked short selling", i.e., NSS. as a retail trader, in certain stocks (not pink sheets) you can engage in shorting for profit. here's how it works:

you must have a margin account (in FOREX, your cash balance is your available margin- but here i'm only talking about stocks, okay?- i'll get to FOREX in a later blog). using your margin as surety against being wrong, you borrow some stock from your broker at the current price. your broker will then sell those shares into the market for you. if the price goes down, you make money. for example, if you shorted 1000 shares of ABC at $5 a share ($5000 your total trade), and it then drops to $4 per share, and you decide to buy the shares back at that time, you would make $1000 profit. but, if the price goes up to, say, $7 per share, and you decide to buy the shares back at that time, you would lose $2000. if you get to a point where your loss is greater than your available margin to "cover", you'll get a margin call from your broker to ante up some more cash or they'll buy the shares back and you eat the loss up to that point.

brokers make money a couple ways here: if you're right and the price goes down, they make special commissions; if you're wrong and the price goes up, they make the commissions AND (probably) a big chunk of that cash you lost. to understand this last bit, think of yourself as a broker. here comes some stupid client who wants to short a stock that you figure (based on what your quants tell you) is sure to go up. so you know your client is going to be a loser and will either bail when things get rough or not bail and go all the way through their available margin. what do you do? well, you analyze how much cash reserve you have, balance that against how many shorting knotheads you have that day, and "maybe" choose to not even "actually" place their trades, to the extent that you can stand the risk. then you just sit there and collect the money when things go bad for your clients, i.e., you get to keep the value of the whole transaction, instead of just some commission crumbs. like the song says, "nice work if you can get it". if you're wrong, and things go well for any clients, you simply pay them what they should have made on the trade. but the odds were always in your favor, get it? and by the way, it's another reason why brokers pay quants such astronomical salaries- and yet another reason why YOU should learn quant. whattolearn.com.

so what is NSS? NSS (naked shorting) is the selling of shares you don't actually own, i.e., you are selling "ghost shares", "counterfeit shares", "fraudulent shares".

this post is getting long enough.... continued next post