The Thinking Node
Added search and save functionality to http://www.pricethinker.com. This is the second phase of the tool where it will web out to other sites.
Also it increased in search rankings. Google type “Price Comparison Tool” it ends up on the second page. Some payoff SEO work of http://www.arhamsoft.com/ i used fromhttp://www.rentacoder.com
This is a great lecture by Mohammad Younus the Nobel Peace Price Winner for work for micro credit for poor people. The lecture is very interesting how the bank for poor people works. He simply reverses the rules of modern day commercial banks and the bank still works. It is a non profit bank i.e. the earnings are re-invested into the bank. It is a truly an eye opener, that there are alternative ways of doing things.
The key concepts of operations are.
It is truely amazing how this bank works. His goal is to have a world without poverty.
Last lesson was a strategy on trading using the direction of the moving average. If a long term moving average (50 or 100 day) direction is up one must buy stocks. If it is down one must short stocks.
The strategy can be improved. Add this as a qualifier to the moving average strategy.
“Buy a stock when the moving average direction is up” and “Wait for a pull back”
When the moving average turn upwards wait for a pull back. This point will be more favorable in terms of odds (see lesson 1 comparison to coin toss gambling). The idea is to buy the stocks when odds are most favorable to you.
Now that you have an account setup we need some base trading strategy. This strategy can work in any time frame, for the purpose of discussion lets assume this is a daily graph of company XYZ (symbol XYZ).
The line in black is the actual daily price almost in zigzag fashion as you would see chart of any stock. The line in red is the moving average. The x-axis are the days (or any time frame e.g. hours) from left to right, and y-axis is the price of the stock.
Moving Average
Moving average is drawn using the last n points (e.g. closing price) and dividing by n. For each day the last n points (e.g. last 50 days price) is used to compute the price on the graph. The net affect is a smooth graph whose underlying data is the actual stock prices.
Choosing Moving Average
Moving average is based on number of days to use to lookup back to compute the average for every bar (bar means daily bar in our case). The longer the lookback time the slowly it will change. A 50 to 100 bar moving average is a good choice.
The Strategy to Buy
Buy when the angle of the red line relative to x-axis is greater than 0 i.e. the line has steered “up”
The Strategy to Sell
Sell when the angle of red line has less than 0 relative to x-axis i.e. when the direction or the line has started to “bend” towards the bottom.
This strategy is simple and profound. When the angle of the curve changes it means the “slow” curve is convinced that the trend has changed. On a daily graph for example it could take months or weeks before a curve changes direction. The longer the moving average duration is the more convincing this curve tells you the long term trend. Always trade in the direction of the trend.
Tip. This simple trading strategy can be applied even to your long term investments e.g. 401 or IRA accounts. Simple look at the graph of S&P or DOW and look at the 100 day moving average. If the angle is positive i.e. upwards stay invested in stocks. If the angle turns downwards start moving your assets into “safer” class.