Category Archives: stock market

miscellaneous, stock market, Writing

Taxes Almost Done

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Yes, I’m very, very close to having my taxes done. Normally I do them much earlier than this, around the end of February and first of March. But, this year at that time I was working on Preserve The Revelation and “Growing Up Too Fast”, either editing, writing, or publishing. They were done toward the end of March. I needed a break, so didn’t begin them for a few days, maybe around April 3.

I won’t take a long time explaining this. Our taxes are complicated. Our stock trading partnership, my writing sole proprietorship, my work, Lynda’s social security. It makes for lots of forms, and worksheets from the instructions. I have Excel spreadsheets built to do the calculations. All I have to do is come with the W-2, the 1099s, and deductions statements. This year my paperwork was well organized. I also have to check my spreadsheets against the forms and instructions for the tax year, in case something has changed.

I had the Federal done, and began working on the State. My spreadsheet links the State to the Federal, and rounds the Federal amounts to 00 cents, as Arkansas requires. Everything flows quickly from the Federal to the State. But, at the last minute, the State wanted me to attach Federal form 8889. I scrambled, and found that form 8889 is REQUIRED if you have an active Health Savings Account, as I do. I’d never heard of this before, but apparently I should have filed it every year since I had the HSA, about six or seven years. Since my HSA is funded with pre-tax dollars, I have no tax consequences. However, I still have to file it. I had two stressful days learning about and then completing Form 8889. But it’s done.

The status is: My Federal and State forms are done, printed, signed, copies, and mailed. My partnership calcs are done, the forms printed, and signed. All except for one form that I forgot about printing. I couldn’t do it at work today, so I’ll do it at home this evening and mail it all Monday. I also do taxes for my mother-in-law. I did the calcs on them last night, concluded she didn’t owe any taxes, and so decided to set them aside for a couple of days and take a break.

During these last two weeks, engrossed in taxes as I’ve been, I’ve done almost nothing for writing. That should change this weekend.

miscellaneous, self-publishing, stock market

Back to Normal?

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Yesterday we took our three grandchildren back to their parents in Oklahoma City. We took them to our house to spend Spring Break, intending to bring them back today. However, having a 7 year old, 5 year old, and almost 3 year old proved to be a bit much on the nerves and constitution. So back they went, a day early. That means today we were back to normal.

But what is normal? Is there such a thing? My “normal” I mean usual routines. I am a creature of routine, I must admit. Yet, for the last year or more I have not been able to find or establish a routine. My work at the office is somewhat routine. Leave the house the same time each day; work till lunch; eat lunch at my desk; walk a mile if weather and energy permit; work the afternoon; leave each day about the same time and drive home. The activities on any individual day could shift, but they rotate among predictable tasks.

Evening has become a little routine. I’m hot and heavy into stock trading right now, trying to come upon a winning formula that will allow us to recover from prior losses. Alas, that takes up all of the evening. Or, more correctly, it takes up all the remaining brain energy. By the time I spend an hour or two figuring out what to do with stock trading, I have no mental energy left for much else. I might be able to file papers or update the family budget records. But creative writing? No, won’t happen.

So, I’ve written nothing since October last, other than the Blizzard of 1948 story for the Meade County Historical Society webpage (which they have yet to post; not sure why). Things continue to float through my head, and I continue to suppress them. I have three works that need revision. On is a very minor revision on one page, and applies only to a print version and Kindle version. That should be easy. The other two require a number of typos to be fixed in each, and each having two different e-book versions and no print version. Those are three discreet tasks. They aren’t exactly creative writing, but they will further my writing “career,” so I should knuckle down and do them.

Perhaps I will this week. Before starting this blog post I finished my income taxes. I had them almost all done two weeks ago, or maybe three, but then the non-routine got in the way of the non-routine, and I had to lay tax preparation aside. But I just got them done, now needing only printing, signing, copying, and mailing. That’s the last non-routine item out of the way, which should allow me to concentrate more on writing.

May it be so.

family, goals, stock market, Writing

Hard to Return to Routine

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On June 11 our three grandchildren (ages 7, 4, and 2) came to stay with us while their parents went on a sabbatical trip: business mixed with pleasure. I immediately shifted my routines and established a new routine. I delayed coming in to work until around 10:00 a.m. I got the kids up, fed them breakfast, got them dressed, had the two older ones make their beds, saw that their teeth were brushed, then headed out for work. My wife took the day shift. In the evening we worked together on supper and jointly got them ready for bed. Afterwards I spent a little time in The Dungeon, working on writing and stock trading tasks.

Then, on June 23 their parents arrived, and the routines were shot. They all left two days later on the next leg of their trip, returned on July 6, and left for home on July 8.

So it’s July 9, and time to get back to our usual routines. Actually, I should have begun that on June 25. I tried, really I did, but there were things working against me. One was the Independence Day holiday, which gave my a 3-day weekend Friday-Sunday. The other was lack of a major writing project at home and delay of a certain project at work. So I was without a focus at each location. Consequently I floundered at both. I got stuff done at both, but my productivity was nowhere near what it should have been.

Also working against the routine is being the organizer/planner of my wife’s family’s reunion the last weekend in July/first in August. It’s going well, but it’s a one time thing, not a routine thing. What writing tasks I had were minor corrections to on-line listing of my books, again not routine. At work I had a series of one-off things to do. I also have non-routine things coming up the end of August, end of September, and end of October.  Planning for those has already begun—another thing to draw me out of my routine.

I don’t do well with the non-routine. I’ve long noticed that, but it was certainly confirmed this month. Last night I found myself at home, the kids and grandkids gone, and the evidence that they’d been there mostly cleared away. So I went to The Dungeon in the evening, was confronted with some non-routine tasks, and almost got nothing done. I finally concentrated on my stock trading routine, and was able to enter one trade with my broker, which filled today. Yea! Back to routine.

We’ll see what happens over the next four months. I hope I can be productive, but I’m afraid I will be only marginally so. I have most of the non-routine things on my to-do list (the non-work ones, that is). If I just work that list I’ll be okay.

stock market, Writing

No Writing Tasks Yesterday

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I’m in the midst of the Time Crunch (which I may re-label the Great Time Crunch), as I reported before.  My time is being consumed with normal gotta-do-it-to-live activities, as well as this new stock trading education program we’re in. That especially is taking up a lot of time, more even than I expected when we started.

Saturday I did nothing at all on writing, except maybe look at a writing blog or two. Well, thinking back and trying to remember, I may have found time to look at a few a Thomas Carlyle’s letters, researching for a future book. So maybe I can’t say I didn’t get to do anything that day.

Sunday I know for sure that my only writing tasks was research into those letters. I did that while watching Sunday night football, and think I may have gone through almost two dozen of them. But as far as putting words on paper, words of my own, nothing.

Yesterday was a null day as far as writing was concerned. I checked in on a couple of writing blogs, and was able to hurry a post on to my other blog, but as far as preparing new works, nothing. No research. No writing. Nothing. That may be the first weekday in a long, long time where I haven’t done something to further my writing career. Since blogging doesn’t seem to be doing anything for that, I don’t think I can count it.

Today doesn’t look any better. Lynda will be coming home with Elise, our granddaughter, who we’ll watch for a few days. The stock trading educational activities continue, including a webinar tonight, as well as homework assignments.

I don’t know when writing will resume. Right now it’s not in the foreseeable future.

stock market, Writing

A Time Crunch is Here

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Time has always been a factor in how much writing I can accomplish. The day job sure gets in the way of writing production! Still, I’ve been able to manage, and think I’ve published quite a lot the last (almost) four years.

But, I think I’m heading into a very dry six-month period right now. Lynda and I have signed up for some intensive training in stock trading, in an attempt to figure out what we’ve been doing wrong and, as a result, get to the point where we will be more consistently profitable. We are paying for this training, of course. Upon starting it we learned it is much more intense and time consuming than expected. It consumed parts of the last two evenings, enough of them that I had no time for anything else; or at least the time chunks left over were not long enough to entice me to pick up my pen, or read for research.

This will last for the next six months, possibly longer. I don’t foresee being able to give more than a couple of hours a week to writing before that’s over, i.e. before April 2015. That means I probably won’t have any new items published much before June-July 2015.  That’s an unfortunate side effect, one I’m not real happy with, but, as they say now a days, it is what it is.

I’ll still try to post here twice a week, but for sure a minimum of once a week. I don’t know what I’ll have to report, but I’ll figure something out.

Buildipedia, flood studies, Health, stock market, Writing

Expectations: Some met, some Waiting

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On Monday I wrote that this would be a week of expectations. Many things of somewhat momentous consequence in my life all seemingly coming together. It’s now Wednesday, and I thought I’d give an interim report.

The stock trade I wrote about was for a down market. With the market plummeting yesterday, I made money and closed the trade not too far from optimum. This is my first trade since coming back to stock trading after a two year hiatus. Of course, my friend Gary is right when he commented that a single trade doesn’t mean a whole lot, and that stock trading (as opposed to investing) is more chance than skill. Those that employ this full time would disagree. In fact, on my personal trade development sheet, I wrote where I thought the downtrend was most likely stop. It was right where it did stop yesterday. Time to reassess now, see where investor sentiment takes us (a pause on the way down or a rebound) and plan the next trade.

My flood study, of two tributaries to Blossom Way Creek in Rogers, Arkansas, goes slower than hoped. CAD help is the problem, as horses switched in midstream and I have received nothing to key-in yet. Hopefully this afternoon or the first thing tomorrow morning I can work in earnest. Completing the keying-in this week is in jeopardy. But I’ve used the time wisely in studying in the handbooks a new aspect of floodplain analysis that applies to this project, so that’s good.

No word on those three proposals for conference papers, yet. Today was the published deadline for submitters to hear back. Down to four business hours (five; they are on mountain time).
Edited to Add: The e-mails came through a half-hour ago. All three abstracts were accepted! Two are for 1-hour workshops, and one is for a 1/2 day training class. More about these in future posts. I should say that acceptance is conditional–upon my meeting certain deadlines for increasingly more detail about the presentations, and upon the reviewers liking the extra material. “There’s many a slip,” as Pamala Tudsbury said. [in Herman Wouk’s Winds of War]

Yesterday I spoke with the editor of Buildipedia.com, and we had a great visit. He liked my ideas for the first article in the infrastructure series, and confirmed that I can do that and pitch many other things to him. He liked the three or four ideas I gave him for articles and features. I received the contract in the mail today, complete with deadline, word count, fee, and copyright info.

Weight wise, I can’t seem to lose any more. I have had three or four consecutive days of eating right and getting good exercise. Normally when I do that, especially when I start at the top of a recent range, I lose four or five pounds. Not this time. Two only. I’m not sure what’s going on, unless the extra exercise I’m doing has signalled my body to shut down its metabolism a little. That doesn’t make sense, but I can’t think of what else it could be.

So, two of my expectations have not been experienced yet, the others have or are in progress. It’s a good week so far.

stock market, Writing

Money, meet Mouth

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Three weeks ago I wrote on this blog of how I had been doing some research into stock market trends, and that from the research I saw signs in the trading of 25 May 2010 that the market would turn around and begin an uptrend. That’s exactly what happened. A couple of days later I told my wife that I had accurately made the call, and she brought me up short. “It’s only a call,” she said, “if you put some money into it.”

Of course, she was right. I took all the stock trading training with her that we originally had, though she’s had some more since then that I didn’t have. But wanting to concentrate on my writing, I let stock trading go, and barely looked at it all through 2008-2009. What little time I did spend on it, I spent on overall market research. I found a pattern that looked promising to me (wrote about it later in a Suite 101 article), but really didn’t want to get back into trading. Consequently, that pattern I’d watched came and went in February of this year, and I wasn’t watching to see it happen and take advantage of it. It happened exactly as my research suggested it would.

In the spring, when I decided to come back to trading, I also decided I would study the major market movements for a while prior to placing trades. So I began doing that, and wrote a number of articles from that research–but placed no trades. Until yesterday.

The research I did Wednesday night convinced me that we were in a short-term market pull back, one that might give up as much as 10 percent of its value. Already it had fallen 5 percent. I had done several paper experiments with trades designed to take advantage of these short movements, including to the downside. I didn’t get the trade ready on Wednesday night, but decided instead to watch the market opening on Thursday and be ready to enter a trade if 1) the downtrend continued for the first half hour of trading, and 2) it did not exhibit any reversal just after the first half hour.

That’s exactly what happened. So I fired off my trade, a put option in the S&P 500 index. It filled at my limit price. I could make this trade because my work yesterday was to be all at my desk, on the computer, so watching the trade during the day was easy. Easy to sneak a peak at the market from time to time.

Well, the market went down, and the value of my trade went up. It wasn’t a large trade; I’m not about to retire on the gains. But it was nice to be able to say: I studied the market; determined its probable direction; planned a trade to take advantage of that movement; placed the trade; and by the end of the day saw the value increase by 5.6 percent. That’s a good result.

Of course, it kind of makes me wonder why I’m bothering with writing, which pays next to nothing even if you are successful. Both writing and stock trading have their own type of creativity. Both have subjective and objective elements. Both can be frustrating and fulfilling. But due to time constraints I can’t be both.

What’s an engineer to do?

stock market

A Stock Market Move Called (sort of)

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This post would be a lot more impressive if I had posted it Friday or Saturday, as planned, but perhaps it still has value.

Tuesday May 26 was a wild ride on Wall Street. The market plunged at the open , traded down hard most of the day (about 3%), then at the end of the day rose just as hard as it fell. Some of the indexes closed up a reasonable amount for a normal trading day. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed down less than a half percent.

I had watched the market a little during the day, casually, since I didn’t have any stocks in my account. But I didn’t hear about the late day rally until driving home. I thought from the report, “The market made a hammer today. Better look at charts tonight.”

A “hammer” is a candlestick pattern of a price variation, such as a stock, a stock index, or really any commodity whose price varies. Candlesticks are a way to display price variation so it is easy to read the important information of a security’s open, high, low, and close for the period. Any period actually. Candlesticks can be drawn minute by minute, for half-hours, hours, days, weeks, months, or even years. Any time period you want. Different types of traders use different time frames. I was thinking of a hammer candlestick on the daily chart.

So I studied the stock index charts that night. All the major indexes had indeed made a hammer of one type or another. I came upstairs from the Dungeon and told Lynda it looked as if the market was about to go on a run to the upside.

So what happened? Wednesday and Thursday saw strength in the market. While many indexes went down on Wednesday, they closed well above lows of the previous session. Thursday was up strong. At some point on Wednesday, when the market was strong at midday, I told Lynda, “I nailed it.”

She reminded me that you can’t claim to have nailed it unless you put some money behind your prediction. And I hadn’t. Knowing the busyness of the next few days at the office, I knew I couldn’t watch trades, so I didn’t place any on Tuesday night. Had I done so, and managed the trade according to risk-reward rules, I would have made a few percentage points on a trade over two or three days. I could have accepted that. The movement, of course, may be rather short-lived, as the market today closed below the close of last Tuesday. It’s still above the lows of the 26th, so the movement may not be over yet.

Lynda did take a position on a stock on Thursday, based on my prediction, and made 1.5% from Thursday to Friday, closing out then. I’d take 1.5% overnight any day.

So, I guess I’ll keep watching stock price and volume patterns, trying to figure out where the money is moving, and what is happening, spotting the trend, making 1.5% every few days. Maybe, just maybe, I can make some money with all this training I’ve received.