Trading thoughts from the Twitter page of AusTexTrader:
Focus on decisions, not outcomes. Focus on executing a good decision-making process and let the results take care of themselves.
Focus on decisions, not outcomes. The point is not to be right all the time, the point is to practice a good decision-making process.
Having grown up in the BCD era — Before Compact Discs — I have a fairly healthy collection of vinyl records. Some of you may have heard of them, or you may have actually seen some at some point in your life. They come in cardboard envelopes about 12 inches square…usually with pictures or fancy artwork on the outside.
You need a phonograph/turntable (yeah, kinda like those things the rappers use, but theirs are ‘special’…) to play the music that is etched on these archaic pieces of plastic, and today you might have trouble even finding a stereo receiver/amplifier with a phono input — nowadays, ‘receivers’ aren’t much more than audio/video switching devices, and have connections for more speakers than a football stadium. But I digress…
At any rate, I got to thinking a bit ago that it might be nice to get copies of some of my favorites on CD. I’m not planning on replacing ALL of my vinyl with CDs, but I’d hate it if something would happen to the vinyl copies of some of these favorites, and I didn’t have some sort of backup copy. However, as luck would have it, I’m the last to find out that some of my favorites were indeed available on CD — but only for a short time, a few years back, and now they’re out of print on CD. And it’s not like these are real rarities — I guess it’s just a matter of them not necessarily being the biggest stars of the 70′s (like the Zeppelins and the Floyds were), so record companies just didn’t go all out to make sure that later generations were able to get their stuff on CD. Oh sure, some of my stuff I can find on sites like the Amazon used/new section, and can get still-sealed, brand new CDs for under 10 bucks shipped. That I can handle. But some of these other albums? I was pretty surprised — and disappointed — to find out that we’re talking 60, 70, or even 100 bucks for a single CD on the used market. Yeah right. Not in this lifetime. Maybe they weren’t considered rare or valuable then, but they’re pretty rare now.
So, thus was born the BMB vinyl restoration project. Why not just digitize the vinyl I already have and put it on CD? Sure, the little crackles and pops are annoying, but then at least my vinyl would be preserved. But in this digital/computer age we can go a step further, and once that analog signal has been digitized, it can be processed and altered via computer…
Enter Wave Corrector software. Just one of a number of digital audio processing programs available out there, but it was designed specifically for the purpose of helping the home user digitize and restore their vinyl records and cassette tapes. Unlike many of the other pop/click processing programs, it lets you modify the results and even add your own corrections if you so choose, giving the user pretty much total control over the end result. And it doesn’t mess around with any of that lossy MP3 stuff — it records and processes lossless WAV files, which can then be burned directly to audio CD format by your favorite burner program.
So next time you wonder why BMB hasn’t posted anything in a while, just imagine he might be in the ‘studio’ with his headphones on, staring at a couple of squiggly red and green lines on the screen, trying to track down that elusive click — that one he’s just certain is there (he’s pretty sure he can hear it clearly at 1/4 speed!), but darn it all, it’s a tough one to pin down because it’s jammed in there right on top of that last kick-drum ‘thump’…
His idea of ‘fun’ has always been a bit different than that of a lot of other people.
Update: If you can get your hands on a good sound card or USB interface to do your A/D conversion, do it. Your digitized recordings will be much better than if you use an el-cheapo sound card. I lucked out and picked up an old ESI Waveterminal U24 USB interface (no longer in production – replaced by the U24XL) on eBay at a very good price — it does a wonderful job. The difference is most noticeable on the bottom end — recordings produced by a cheap sound card were much ‘thinner’ by comparison.
Update: I thought it might be useful to post some audio samples. For file size considerations, these are MP3 (compressed) samples, but all file processing and CD burning is done with lossless WAV files.
The clips are the from the guitar intro to “Raging Fire”, on the ‘A Place In The Sun’ album by Pablo Cruise, circa 1977.
Original vinyl recording:
Audio ‘restored’ with Wave Corrector software:
A trading lesson from Deron Wagner:
Ten years ago, when I began my career as a professional trader, I was of the mistaken belief that I needed to be active in the market every day, or else I was being lazy and not doing my job. However, I eventually learned this was far from the truth. On the contrary, I discovered the most successful traders were actually out of the markets more than they were in the markets. Rather than being in the markets every day, I learned the most profitable traders laid low when nothing was going on, while being aggressive when trading conditions were ideal. My personal experience has proven this to be true. Over the course of my trading career, many of my biggest losing months have been the result of overtrading during low volume, choppy markets, not the result of suffering big losses in a bear market. Rather than adhering to our usual format of sharing individual trade setups we like, we thought new traders may appreciate this brief, yet very important psychology lesson. Similarly, experienced traders may appreciate a reminder on the dangers of overtrading when there’s not much going on.
If your recent trading results have been disappointing, ask yourself if you’ve been forcing too many mediocre trades, rather than patiently waiting for the perfect setups to come your way.
—
Focus on catching the meat of the moves in the stock market, not every little nook and cranny. Above all, remember to “trade what you see, not what you think!”
Recent Comments