• 4 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 28th, 2023

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  • It is, but forex markets allow traders to trade on significant margin. Meaning, if I have $100, I might be able to buy $1,000 worth of foreign currency (a 1:10 margin) and if the value of the currency increases 1% ($100) you get 10% of the profit, which is 10% of your investment. If the position increases by 10%, you double your money. However, this also means that if the value drops by 10%, your money is gone.

    Now consider that forex traders often leverage at 1:500 margins. You get to buy massive positions with currency pairs, and even the tiniest fluctuations can provide massive profits or instantaneous ruin.

    The algorithm I used monitored recurring micro-patterns, watching for predictable movements. You’re also watching relative value pairs, rather than just an absolute market value. Both sides of a currency pair have nations vying to improve the value of their own currency, so you can make money (or lose money) on either side of the pair. Dollar is low against the yen, buy dollars with yen. Yen drops against the dollar, sell your positions. Euro drops against the yen, go pick up Euros agains the yen, and feel confident that Japan is already trying to strengthen the yen (simplified example, because it’s way more complex than that).

    So if you track currencies across all currency pairs, you can find inconsistencies. I called it “torque” 15 years ago, but I’m sure a proper forex trader can give you an actual name for it. These are areas where three or more currencies are out of alignment, like if the dollar is up against the yen but down against the euro, and the yen is up against the euro. These are situations where you would expect the market to equalize in one direction or the other, and the trick was being able to predict which way it would go.

    And I thought I had figured that out. I had not figured that out. I had gotten lucky several times in a row. In fact, the market can tolerate that sort of incongruity, and the market forces on various positions are far more complicated. And because you’re leveraged, if you bet big, even small swings in the wrong direction can wipe you out.

    And because your leveraged, if the position dips, you can’t just hold it hoping it will bounce back. Once the loss in value reaches your investment, the position automatically closes and you’ve lost everything you put in. It doesn’t matter if it bounces all the way back up, because you no longer own it.




  • It hurt with fake money, because I thought I had discovered some big secret key. Like that movie Pi. And then it was gone. All the sucess, all the dreams of a 9-screen batcave-style computer station with financial tickers and shit. I realized that I had nothing, and I was foolish for thinking otherwise. Stung like a bitch.

    But you’re right, safe investments are the smarter long-term play. I did make an extra paycheck on dogecoin once on a moonshot. But otherwise, my boring retirement funds are all steadily beating inflation by a few percentage points. Why fight the tide?


  • Reminds me of the time I started learning about forex. I used a practice account to test an algorithm for recognizing short-term trends and trading on the activity. I ran a simulation for a few days to make sure it was working, and my fake $10,000 bankroll turned into $50,000 in less than a week. I was excited about the results, and went to explain it to someone with deeper pockets who might actually have $10k to invest, and in the time it took me to walk from my desk to his and back, it went to less than $600. Five minutes, $50k wiped out.

    Needless to say, he didn’t invest and I stopped daydreaming about owning a yacht. Forex is gambling.


  • Boring is fine. I don’t need my phone to be exciting.

    The headline should have been about reliability. The author had to replace the first demo device, and experienced stuttering on the replacement. Will HMD continue to support the device and outfits? Will the maker community adopt the device and start getting creative with the options? Or will this end up in the drawer of abandoned hardware with the minidisc player and active 3d glasses.

    Modularity and flexibility is great. Boring is acceptable. Unreliable is not OK.







  • What you’ve got there is a graph of testing. The slopes are all the same, because that’s when each country received tests, and that’s how quickly they ramped up testing. Covid 19 wasn’t even sequenced until 40 people were extremely ill from the virus. We know now that it is spread through the air, and carriers of the virus can be contagious without being symptomatic. Zero countries were wasting precious tests on deceased people who died in the previous weeks.

    China made for a convenient target for xenophobes and racists to blame. It spread quickly through dense populations, and their government was using (ineffective) draconian methods to contain the spread. Westerners spread the image of indigent communists eating bats and civets, ignoring the growing number of anomalous respiratory illnesses at home.

    Maybe it started in China. Maybe it didn’t. We cannot know for sure, because we deliberately did not collect the data. And anyone trying to convince you differently has an agenda.


  • Title

    :::I don’t know the guy, and had no idea he was a Trumper. If you had asked me yesterday to guess if Adam Sandler was a douchebag, I probably would have bet he was. I’ve listened to his comedy albums, seen most of his movies, and watched Leo, so I’m not at all surprised to learn that he’s a piece of shit.

    But harassing a guy while he’s out eating with his kids is not a political statement. It’s not a deterrent to being a piece of shit, it’s not an argument in favor of progressive policies, it’s just shitty behavior. Like I tell my kids, there’s a difference between respect and decency. If someone is a bad person, you don’t have to respect them. But being a decent person is about you, not them. The way you treat people is a decision you make about who you are. Adam Sandler gets to choose who he wants to be and the effect he has on the world. If you want to fight it, I got your back because the world needs less of him.

    But this ain’t that. This is not productive. It’s invasive and cruel, and it’s exponentially worse because there are kids involved. The person who took this photo is also a douchebag.