Moving On

One of my favorite nuggets in Dr. Brett's poke was the observation that . ."If you're the smartest one in your group then you're in the wrong group." This is a wingtip corollary of "Two heads are better than one" and over the course of the past three years of this blog I've had the immense good fortune to meet and interact with a number of exceptionally talented traders who have stimulated a variety of topics for my research and helped to enrich my grubstake. Many of these traders I've never met face to face and yet, through weekly or daily communications, I consider a few of them among my best and most trusted friends. So . . I'm thinking maybe it's time to build some trader synergy.

For those of you not in the trenches the fact is that being a full-time retail trader focused on daytrading is actually a fairly lonely and isolated livelihood. While there are chat rooms, trader support groups, meetups and expos to provide venues for limited trader interaction, I believe most experienced traders would agree that daytrading requires a unique level of concentration and attention in order to remain consistently profitable. Active swing trading shares the same requirements . . buying the dips, selling the peaks . . and swing traders will always book more gains trading intraday than end-of day. Last Thursday was testimony to that fact.

"Expect success but prepare for the worst" spoketh the Donald and readers who've followed me for a while know that I'm much more concerned about NOT losing money than making money. Capital preservation is Job#1 in my book and is at the core of my bucket list . . that's my bias and it's been pretty transparent in my posts.

At the same time I feel that I keep repeating myself in the course of these posts. . and the blog is getting stale. Really . . if you can't figure out the VIXEN trade after reading a couple dozen of the over 60 VIXEN related posts then you should probably not be a technical trader. The trading setups I use every day are now well documented in the archives and while I may have done a better job sorting them all into neat categories, my goal was always to get readers to conduct their own research and develop their own indicators and systems to fit their trading style and risk management comfort level.

More than anything else, the blog has been a journal of my market investigations and exploration . . . always looking for those nuggets . . . and I've found quite a few along the trail.

But now it's time to move on to something a little different. Over the course of the next month I will be joining forces with several other bloggers and traders to create a practical strategy and solution based site that will focus on trading ETFs using a number of diverse approaches.

I originally lobbied for the site to be called "BZB and More", but that was summarily rejected by my "partners" so we've come up with something a little bit more . . communal.

While there are already other aggregated trader sites, I hope this one will prove to be a little different, speaking with a cohesive perspective and exploring a variety of markets to mitigate risk. At the same time we hope to provide an extended portal for trader resources and offer a spectrum of viewpoints on various trade setups . . sort of like Siskel and Ebert for traders.

When I first started this blog I was specific that one of my long term goals was to develop a basket of systems to trade a basket of stocks/ETF. The new site will provide an operational outlet for that goal, which is shared by the other site participants. Project Z and the PDQ Dashboard were direct products of that goal.

My focus will remain on Project Z and VIX related trading tactics while other members of the site community will focus on ETF rotation models, the SPX, pairs trading and perhaps, in a new departure, Forex . . plus a few wild cards.

Over the course of the next few weeks I'll be providing additional details about our new endeavor, which we hope will prove to be both educational and profitable for our readers.