My Chartgame Records

Chartgame had played an incredible role in helping me solve the riddle of the stock market. The advantage of the game is that it lets us try out our ideas on real data (albeit historical) in a virtually real time manner accelerating days into seconds. This accelerated mode actually takes us into accelerated learning phase by letting us experience stock price movements very fast. In reality as it takes weeks to play with each stock, the lessons learnt from each transaction lose their weight by the time we start another trade. If one is not a day trader, but pre-occupied with another profession, trading takes a backseat. Despite years of experience it can still look like a mystery as to what makes the individual stocks move.

In the first two years of my stock market operations I had few moments when I felt I found the best way to bigger profits. The white candlestick idea was one such moment. After looking at many stock charts and by also emulating real time experience by loading multiple charts differing in their last day, I noticed that a white candlestick indicates the strength and two such consecutive ones indicate possible upside in the following days. Stop loss was there for the worst case possibilities. But I had never done an analysis to see how effective stop losses can be or what happens if stop losses become random because of various possibilities. This had caused me lose a great deal consistently that too during the worst ever meltdown period in 2008.

Everytime I got a new idea I used to focus on the postive sides of it and ignore any downside risks. But Chartgame shattered all of my myths and hope that there must be some strategy to consistently beat the market. Stock price movements turned out to be totally random madness. All kinds of possibilities that one can think of have showed up after playing one stock after another. By accelerating the experience (an experience for those who have learned up to feel this game as much as a real experience) it helped me learn those things that would have taken decades to learn. Once can waste decades of life, just to learn that stock market is simply a random game. But from this experience I realized what it takes to succeed in this game and also decided never to suggest direct investments in stock market for the innocent, ignorant and the weak-hearted.

Thanks to its creator Matthias Wandel, we now have the opportunity to evolve our trading habits without spending money. It is very useful to practice despite not mimicking the intraday stop orders that are possible in real trading.

b>My Chartgame Records

When we play at chartgame.com we should note down the code in the tail of the URL which has so far been (since 2008) 6 characters long. This helps us review the performance later on, not only giving an overall summary of total gain over total number of traded days comparing with buy & hold performance but also including viewing details of the trades executed in each individual stock, date & price along with the stock chart highlighting the period of play.

My best record is the one where my capital plunged from $10,000 to $90 but after that I had applied 5/9 golden rules to return back upto $11,387. There is a beauty in this particular record if one looks at the distribution of gains and losses from $90 after Marsh & McLennan Companies, Inc.  (MMC). Its code is qwekfw. Below is the full URL:
http://chartgame.com/trackrecord.cgi?qwekfw

My latest game is recorded at : http://chartgame.com/trackrecord.cgi?1kpy95

The older ones:
http://chartgame.com/trackrecord.cgi?mp2aes
http://chartgame.com/trackrecord.cgi?qtamjh
http://chartgame.com/trackrecord.cgi?qgevaw
http://chartgame.com/trackrecord.cgi?qx1wcx
http://chartgame.com/trackrecord.cgi?qk7dk7-1
http://chartgame.com/trackrecord.cgi?bscbnv-1
http://chartgame.com/trackrecord.cgi?qwekfw-1
http://chartgame.com/trackrecord.cgi?qwekfw-2
http://chartgame.com/trackrecord.cgi?qwekfw-3
http://chartgame.com/trackrecord.cgi?qwekfw-4
http://chartgame.com/trackrecord.cgi?qwekfw-5
http://chartgame.com/trackrecord.cgi?roob8x
http://chartgame.com/trackrecord.cgi?tjer2s
http://chartgame.com/trackrecord.cgi?wgcbdf
http://chartgame.com/trackrecord.cgi?1afgww
http://chartgame.com/trackrecord.cgi?qxkbek
http://chartgame.com/trackrecord.cgi?wj6cvt
http://chartgame.com/trackrecord.cgi?1egjj4 (played last week)

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Resuming Posting After a Long Time

I had lost touch with this blog for a long time since August. The breakdown of SELMCL coincided with lot of other things. The worst of recession has happened after that time.

September and October were the two bloody months that the world markets all together have ever witnessed. Lot of unwanted but inevitable things happened during that time. And that has set the tone or upper limit for the markets which haven’t crossed till now. I don’t think they will ever cross that limit.

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I had become very busy with my daily work and couldn’t concentrate on continuing this blog. Well, there was no special incentive in maintaining this blog. It was a matter of expressing my thoughts about stock trading on a day-to-day basis. But because of overpressure in other works, I had to put a pause to it. I didn’t know how long at that time.

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Things were only getting worse and I had stopped my trading. I realized that I couldn’t trade the way I used to before. A loss was always unbearable for me and I always cut it when it is small even though painful. I never take diversification. That is a myth. It is like taking alcohol and driving a car. Feels good and safe till the accident happens.

I have learned the importance of organizing information that I had been learning with my trading. I will plan to post them over time. I have written down rules that must be strictly followed while trading. There are lots of ways to find stocks or filter them, for day trading, for trading in the morning or evening and also for short term trading. Long term trading is a phenomenon that doesn’t exist now. I don’t have any hopes for it in the future.

Coming to the present day, I noticed that my broker, Indiabulls, regularly sends an article to give a “morning brief”. This is cool to get some fresh information early in the morning. Indiabulls seems to be doing some best job for their clients.

Today’s news are not breaking news. But there is an interesting news. DLF has cut back its residential project prices by Rs. 13 Lakh in Chennai. This shows that there is a good fall in property prices in popular cities. We need to wait for more action that can spread this to all the parts of a city like the area where I live. Just be patient. That is surely going to happen.

Let us look at the chart for Nifty.

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There is a suggestion that there could be an unexpected uptrend after all the dancing that happened since November. The white candlestick after a “dragonfly doji” day. This is a classic followup. But still the moving average above it shows the resistance. We can safely assume that it will breakdown surely but gradually once it crosses below the magical 2500 mark. It will because the hell is going to break lose like anything we have never seen before. Don’t say not again.

Putting it aside because it is the long term trend, we can see that this time is a pause from the long term trend. These are the best days to start any venture, shift jobs, look for a new office or anything. I think this is the optimal chance. It may not come again anytime soon.

From the general statistics that I track, I checked only the stocks making 52 week high. I found one stock – “Cambridge Solutions”. It is in information technology sector. This is one of those rare, unpopular stocks like the SELMCL. But its volume is lot lesser. Putting the chart below. I think this can be the next good bet.

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This looks like a nice trend. It is bouncing above its moving average. But my broker may not allow me to buy the stock. There is some restriction in Indiabulls. We can only trade heavily traded or high volume stocks. That sucks, Indiabulls being the best in class brokerage service for trading on National Stock Exchange.

There may be more next good bets lurking in the shadows. It needs some effort to check the older statistics and filter them with various criteria. I will post them as I find them.

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