Back To Planes, Trains and Automobiles - The Travelling Engineer
Tuesday, April 8th, 2008
Today mark the 1st week at my new job. Although working for myself (internet business and trading) was fun over the last 1 year and 1 month it did not necessarily make a lot of money. In the end I realized that making a living trading is very difficult and not everyone can do it. You have very little control over the market and therefore having a consistent stream of income to pay the bills can be difficult. As for the internet business, I realized that this may take some time to build all the websites up to a point where they can generate an income that I can live off of. I am not going to stop those two activities however, I will continue doing those things on a part-time basis from now on, on my own free time.
I added a new category to my blog called “Trading Psychology” to explore of course the psychology of trading, whether it be stock, option, futures or foreign exchange trading.
I was recently told by a trader friend of mine that finally TD Web Broker accounts finally offers direct to market order routing for options contracts. It’s about time, but very late in the game compared to many of the discount brokerage companies out there.
The last stock market drop was back mid July 2007 to about mid August 2007 with a decline of roughly 10%. That is one month a drop of 10%, however this current downturn in the market is a bit more severe. From the beginning of November 2007 until now January 17, 2008 the indexes has fallen almost 20%.
Year 2007 as the title of this post suggest was an extremely volatile year for me. At the beginning of 2007 I watched on CNN a gentleman from Hong Kong, talking about the Chinese pig or boar zodiac, and calendar prediction for 2007. The man said that usually years ending with the number 7 are very volatile, and he also mentioned that 2007 has metal, fire and water elements associated with it. Well, when you mix hot metal and water you get a lot of sizzle and volatility and that is exactly what I got for 2007.
On August 16 there was a stock market correction, and where there is turmoil there is opportunity. I opened quite a few CALL contract positions during that time and then left for vacation, when I got back 2 weeks later at the beginning of September the market recovered and the stocks I bought option contracts for did recover as well. 
This morning at 10am, I have a job interview at well known I.T services and software company. Unfortunately, I won’t name the company until after I get the job, If I don’t get the job then I will name the company. This is for privacy reasons of course as there are some people who know me, whom are malicious who reads my blog from time to time.
