Песец

Well, it took them only 14 more months than they said it would, but I am now a beneficiary of the Social Security Administration of the US Government.  In light of the President’s recent comments, I would like to assure the government that I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the Democratic Party that Trump says is “the greatest enemy America has” after Iran.

I had a good job in America back in the day, so my retirement benefit is 50% *more* than I was able to earn with Uber Eats Canada, before Uber’s IPO in 2019.  It’s like 3× as much as I could earn these days in food-delivery with Skip The Dishes (which I’m not supposed to do anymore, because the Americans are paying me to be retired and let the younger people work).  Hopefully soon, my wife will be applying for her own retirement benefit which is half the size of mine, so the two of us will be bringing in more than *double* what we were making when driving for Uber Eats together.  I expect to finish paying off the house this year and then we’ll be raking in the dough… to prepare for the steadily-mounting expenses of old age.

This — is an em-dash followed by “curly quotes”.  If you want to say that this proves I am an LLM, you are a fan of dehumanizing ad hominem attacks and you shall be 🈲 from commenting here.  You’re absolutely right and it’s not this, but that.  (This paragraph will cease to make any sense in maybe a year or two.)  No LLM would think to put two spaces after sentential periods, as people my age do.  I use   (or a binary U+00A0 character) to insist that web browsers obey me on this matter, so obviously I’m an ass.

☛  Overly-formal subheading that doesn’t belong on a blog  ☚

Let us return now to the HVAC difficulty that was once mentioned here.  So, the installer wouldn’t fix anything and the manufacturer refused to help.  Then the rebate inspector rejected my application because he thought the wrong kind of indoor coil had been installed, effectively doubling the cost of my home improvement.  So I filed my first lawsuit!  I asked for the rebate, plus the cost of hiring another HVAC guy (in March 2025) to finish-and-inspect the installation, plus the HELOC interest that I had to keep paying until the rebate arrived.

𝙇𝙖𝙬𝙨𝙪𝙞𝙩: Attempting to serve my papers, I discovered that my installer’s office-of-record has no posted hours because they all work from home.  I called the salesman and asked where to serve papers — he dodged the question.  Then I talked to his boss, who also dodged the question of where exactly I should send my papers and he wouldn’t admit to having seen my email with a copy of the paperwork.  Presumably this is because there is a 20-day clock that begins when papers are officially served.

The boss insisted that the coil was covered by the government rebate and his other customers had no difficulty getting paid.  He agreed to talk to the inspector regarding this matter.  Unfortunately, the inspector decided to take that moment to go on vacation for the entire month of August!

Eventually I got an email from the inspector, stating that he had talked to the installer and it seemed he had been mistaken in rejecting my application.  So then the app went on to the local methane (= “natural gas”) utility company (it’s a convoluted rebate system) and eventually I got the money in December 2025, about a year late.  It was more money that I had asked for in my suit; apparently I was eligible for an additional $2,000 somehow.

𝙎𝙢𝙖𝙡𝙡 𝘾𝙡𝙖𝙞𝙢𝙨 𝘾𝙤𝙪𝙧𝙩: So then it was time to tell my good news to Small Claims Court and cancel the lawsuit.  Problem: the suit no longer showed on their website dashboard.  They remembered that I once paid them $100 but there was no longer any indication of what they thought I was buying.  I tried entering the case-number they emailed to me — it was assigned to someone else!  I don’t think that a court should ever need to reassign 19-character case-file numbers!  Good thing I didn’t actually have to proceed with this suit.

Today I checked again.  Now my case is back!  But it’s not clickable and there is no indication of current status, even though small claims cases are supposed to be auto-cancelled if no notice-of-service is filed within six months.  So I can’t say I’m very impressed with the provincial court system.  Maybe I could have saved the $100 and just emailed the lawsuit paperwork to the installer without actually filing it.

𝙍𝙚𝙨𝙪𝙡𝙩𝙨: My heating system (which in the end cost *less* than I had been expecting) is working great and saving lots of money.  It automatically chooses methane furnace or electric heat-pump based on current outdoor temperature, fetched over the Internet because I don’t have my own temperature sensor.  Unfortunately, the Ecobee thermostat is unable to understand Time-Of-Use billing (why not?), so now I “need” to replace my living-room Netflix computer with a low-power always-on unit that can run Home Assistant automation to inform the thermostat over Wi-Fi how much electricity costs right now.

My home energy comes from domestic nuclear reactors, domestic hydroelectric dams, and methane wells (half domestic, half US imports).  Rates are set months in advance, so hopefully should be immune to Iran’s shenanigans.  We’ll see.

Yep, this is a stock-trading post.  Let’s have an orderly exit from our seats, please.  Children and the handicapped first.  There’s no need to block the aisles.  Please latch your tray-tables in their full upright positions.

tl;dr  Of course you don’t want to read this, so I’ll just summarize: I still have that imaginary IWM short that I mentioned last time; it has been doing poorly.  Meanwhile, I have completed several TNA long trades (all imaginary) that went okay, followed by one that went badly and dropped my account value by 20% for a time — then, using the seat of my pants, I was able to keep the realized loss to only –2.4%.  Yay!

April 8ᵗʰ, 2024:  Kid #1 wanted to see the total eclipse, and she bought my car, so I drove her.  We went to Main St. in Norwich ON, which seemed like the closest totality-spot to our house that would not require any westward travel for the drive home.  It was cloudy when we left, but cleared up by the time we arrived.

In this photo, there is a picnic bench at 42.9871°N, 80.5999°W and a water-tower off to the left.  At eclipse-time (3:20pm), the Sun was roughly above the white house.  Across the street, flying the sideways maple-leaf flag, is a Foodland supermarket.  Kid #1 had pre-checked its sale flyer and found nothing interesting.  Behind us in this photo is the Norwich Deli and Bakery, where we had planned to waste some time during the partial eclipse and maybe get a bite to eat.

Norwich Deli is reasonably large, but I didn’t find anything I wanted to eat there.  The food was all labelled in Dutch. A lot of it seemed to be from American factories, shipped to the Netherlands for wholesale and then reshipped to Canada for retail.  My area of Ontario was pioneered by German-speaking Mennonites, so I had not seen these Dutch food-names before.  Money at our house is extremely tight these days and I am generally not very hungry due to denture issues, so a “just because” purchase seemed inappropriate.  I had thought to buy a sandwich, but they emphasized their gooey Gouda^non-PGI cheese and I am generally not a fan of oily foods.  So instead I sat in the car (parked behind the viewpoint of this photo) while Kid #1 walked up and down Main St., contributing to Open Street Maps and thinking that there will probably never again be a reason for us to visit this town.

We are very unfriendly people and I did not talk to the townies except to refuse (hopefully graciously) their offers of assistance at the deli.  We just needed a spot to see the Sun and they had one; it was unfortunate that I didn’t find anything I wanted to buy from them.

Eventually we just sat at the picnic bench, waiting for totality.  No one competed with us for the spot.  There are around 700,000 other people in my metro area, but apparently no one else made this trek out to the boonies.  There were a few people parked in front of the Foodland, wearing their eclipse glasses and staring at the Sun.  I didn’t think that was a good idea.  I arranged my eclipse glasses above my regular glasses, so if I looked up I saw the Moon partially blocking the Sun, but if I looked down I could see the grass.  It worked great!  Really, you only need to look at the partial eclipse for a second at a time to see how it’s progressing.

As the darkness of totality approached, it got windy and cooler and ominous, until suddenly the corona popped out and all was peaceful for two minutes.  I can’t find an animation that shows what the corona looked like to me.  It was a thin blueish-white ring that (because we’re at Solar Maximum) went all the way around the Sun.  It is visibly turbulent because it contains material being expelled at supersonic speeds from a out-of-control fusion reactor.  I could not see the blue outermost part of the corona, which we recently learned extends 18.8 radii out from the Sun’s disk, when the material finally slows down enough to become the solar wind.  I didn’t do the trig to figure out how far across the sky that is, and therefore where the Parker Solar Probe was positioned during the eclipse.

After the total, it was back to the partial eclipse until 4:30.  But we couldn’t stick around for that because 4:30 was also when Kid #1’s work shift started, so I drove home during the partial.  I think I was successful in preventing the Sun from shining into my eyes from any angle during the drive home.  Eyestrain the following day seemed minimal.

As we arrived home, we took a moment to use our eclipse glasses for one last time; the Sun was still maybe 10% occluded.  There will not be another total eclipse in my part of the world for the next 120 years.  It was nice to see, but two hours of travel for a 2-minute show seems about my limit, so I don’t expect that I’ll be travelling to Australia to see the 2028 eclipse.

Lawyers:  The wrongful-death case will be going to trial.  The court date has been set for January 2025, seven years after my aunt’s death.  There’s no way to know how long the appeals process will take.

Oh boy!  Another good month in imaginary stock-trading.  I bought repeatedly at the lower blue line, then sold at the upper blue line for a nice +1.1% profit over 12 market days!  This trade-set could have been a +5.0% gainer if only I had had more imaginary money for purchases on the other four days (see below).  I am done with my bullish trade; Rome may now begin burning ad libitum.

For 2024 I have decided to record purchases and sales as translucent circles, centered on the trade-price and sized so their area is proportional to the transaction size.  This makes it harder to read the prices but easier to see the sizes.  (Price is generally the previous day’s blue line or the open, whichever is better.)

This pale green dotted/dashed line represents a trend to which prices keep returning.  It replaces (at least temporarily) the dashed orange line that we were watching for much of last year.

Oh dear.  This has been a terrible quarter for imaginary stock-trading.  I was actually starting to feel good about things during the last week of October, which should have been my clue to quickly close the short before the good mood evaporated.  But no; I was greedy and added twice more to my position due to “Fear Of Missing Out”.  So instead I missed out on the big run-up during Q4!  Oh well; there are some traders online, who have far more experience than I, who have also reported bad fourth quarters that ruined their trading years.

The economy is so bad in China, they stopped publishing ‘youth unemployment’ after it hit 21.3% back in June.  In December, the government of China started publishing a new ‘non-student youth unemployment’ figure, which was 14.9%.
      On Jan 16 we were told that manufacturing in New York State, which had been expected to be down -5.0%, was instead down -43.7% for its worst performance since 2020.
      And so the stock market is… up?  Yes, Rome refuses to burn and we’re seeing new all-time highs these days.  But I expect that the market will roll over and start facing reality after faking everyone out and maximizing their pain.  Late 2024 could be really bad for bullish investors.

I am continuing to hold that 180% short position that I told you about on Nov 08.  Since I allow myself to go to 300%, that means I had only 120% unused buying power available for this month’s contrarian long bet.  But actually, my spreadsheet showed lots more available money than that.  When you sell short, you get the cash immediately for the shares you borrowed and sold — and that cash can be used to buy something else!  Except, as discussed on Aug 29, I don’t believe I can actually short stock for the profit levels being shown on this blog.  If I buy TZA instead of shorting IWM, that is a ‘purchase’ and so the money is not available for re-use.

Standard advice is never to hold TZA for more than a day and especially never hold it for many days in a row when the market is moving against you, because the daily re-leveraging will surely eat your profits alive.  If I had really shorted IWM last quarter, my current unrealized loss would be -27.8%.  But if I had stupidly bought TZA at those times, which you should never ever do, then my unrealized loss today would be a whopping -22.7%.  Which, um, isn’t as bad.  You know, there’s a lot of bad advice floating around on the Internet.

Finally, here is a summary of last year.  Remember when Silicon Valley Bank went bankrupt in March, giving us that dashed orange line that continued to be meaningful for months?  Well, the market might possibly bounce off that line yet again on its next downswing.  The new dashed/dotted green line connects the last two peaks, but I don’t know yet how meaningful it will be.

Note that the last three peaks have been getting higher, while the last three troughs have been getting lower and are nearly aligned.  This is the Broadening Top pattern, which Bulkowski says is a “poor performer” and not worth betting on.  Hopefully the market will now mosey back down to the bottom of this range so I can close my short and be done with this thing.  Maybe in six weeks?

(Subject is the title of a book by Douglas Adams.)

I hereby raise my bet to 150% short.  I hope this turns out to have been a good idea.  Today’s closing price is higher than I would have preferred, but at least we are still within the lime-green channel.  If we hit that ole’ dashed orange line again (or even exceed the lime channel significantly), this trade is toast and I will need to cancel it at a loss.  Right now I’m sitting on an unrealized imaginary gain of +1.6%, hoping for more.

On Aug 29 I wrote: “the red line came very close on Aug 25, … so I think I’ll skip the contrarian trade on the next downswing.”  But then on Sep 07 I wrote, “Meanwhile, the red line has since fallen away…, so why not trade long here?”  This utterance is my chief contender for “stupidest thing said all year” and a solid reason for you to always remember that you are watching 🐔 🪛 ⚾ (The Crank Channel).  A quick scan through recent years (which I could have done at any time) shows that long trades after falling red lines do not do well.  This makes sense: a falling red line means there have been no new highs in a month, so maybe not a good time for a bullish bet?  If I add a new rule “needs to have been a new high within the last 22 days before beginning a long trade” then the entire -14.6% loser trade would have been skipped.  What an expensive lesson!

Lawyers: nothing.

Lawyers: So, the deposition finally happened last Tuesday, 67 months after my aunt died.  The most surprising thing was the effect of the 1,100-page book on Unicode that I had submitted, which was never mentioned — but it became my credential as a linguist.  When I told them that I used to have a job finding typos in medical books, despite a lack of specific training, by “approaching the task as a linguist”, it was like I had struck gold — I could say anything I wanted about my aunt’s medical records, even though I couldn’t speak to whether the medicine had been performed correctly.  So I summarized the records as “she died of treatment delay”, and then mentioned repeatedly the nursing home’s policy document (which I haven’t actually seen) in which they had said they wanted to be the kind of home that would call a doctor on a weekend (which they did not in her case).
      My sister gives her deposition this coming week, then some staff from the home will be deposed by ‘my’ side (who are my opponents on most/every estate matter other than this wrongful-death lawsuit).  I guess that will all wrap up around American Thanksgiving; then we wait to see whether the lawyers want a jury trial.  Meanwhile, everyone suffers.

My bullish imaginary bet: Well, that didn’t work out well at all!  My loss was -14.6% when I finally closed the position at 9:48am on Oct 04.  I should have closed Oct 03, but I was busy with the deposition.  This loss is so big, it wipes out all my profits since March.  Ouch!
      On Aug 29 I wrote, “the red line came very close on Aug 25, … I think I’ll skip the contrarian trade on the next downswing.”  Well, I should have stuck with that idea, which would have postponed the start of this trade until Sep 20 (three weeks after the almost-hit on the red line), which I believe would have reduced the total loss to -5.0%.
      On Sep 07 I wrote, “I’m expecting another bounce at the dashed orange line”.  Wrong!  We fell to that line on Sep 20, then gapped down rather than bouncing upward; this was followed six days later by a bounce-down from the underside of the orange line — which is extremely bearish.  Note that price spent some time below the lower blue line, then crossed the channel but did not hit the upper blue line, then fell to new lows.  This is my “crash signal”.
      Also on Aug 29 I mentioned that there was a “4-month-wide head-and-shoulders” pattern, which has completed.  Unless something drastic happens, that dashed orange line should act as a lid on prices for several months, maybe until spring.  It’s amazing how much predictive value that line continues to have (it’s pinned to the Silicon Valley Bank bankruptcy in March).

My bearish imaginary bet: That bullish trade ended with a ‘capitulation’, which suggests that I should immediately bet the opposite way.  So I bet 100% of capital at the open on Oct 05 that the market will be going down.  Of course, it immediately went up!  But Friday is often the most bullish day of the week and Friday’s high was still below the EMA(10) average (shown here as a solid blue line).  I plan to wait 4 days (until Tuesday) and then start using the EMA(10) as a daily trailing stop.  If price is already above that on Tuesday that I’ll cancel this trade with another loss.  Shit happens.

War: Meanwhile, Hamas has decided to invade Israel.  What effect will that have on the US stock market?  I’m guessing a ‘paradoxical’ rise on Monday, but not much else — I think this market really wants to do an October crash and doesn’t care about the rest of the world right now.  But we’ll see.

So, I won again.  The gain was +1.151%, which rounds up to 1.2%.

There were four days of shorting (10%, 10%, 10%, and 20%), and the last one had a largeish drop so I didn’t place a BUY-to-exit order for Sep 06.  But I wasn’t too impressed with the bearishness that day, so I did place an exit order for Sep 07, which filled.  Now I’m not so sure that was a good idea.  Maybe, when we have one of these downward-rush events, I should wait for an ‘up’ day and then exit the following day?  Needs more research.  Another research topic: if we go immediately back up again tomorrow, should I restart the short-selling at the 20% level (like a continuation) or go back to 10% (as a fresh trade-set)?

On Aug 29 I wrote: “the red line came very close on Aug 25, … so I think I’ll skip the contrarian trade on the next downswing.”  Meanwhile, the red line has since fallen away and I’m expecting another bounce at the dashed orange line, so why not trade long here?  Dunno what to do.  The algorithm doesn’t have enough code for dealing with edge cases!

✶ ✡ ✡ ✡ ✶

Soon it will be Jewish New Year 5784!  In the beginning, there was the fire and the light, as God set off the Big Bang.  And it was evening and it was morning, 379,000 years, until the universe cooled enough so there could be some dark spots.  And that’s how God (blessed be He) gave us the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation!  So dip your apples in the honey and salt your challah — then we’ll go do some Jew science!

(LiveJournal is talking to me again!  Not all past posts have been copied.  If you’re using LJ to read this, note that both of the links in this post point to my blog-copy as hosted on DreamWidth.)

Hi again!  Yep, another win.  +0.5% this time.  Stock-trading is so easy, compared to everything else in my life.

On Jun 02, I exited at the open and then the market sailed higher without me (you get used to that), then I did nothing until Jun 25, when I wrote, “We’ll see if my next imaginary stock-purchase happens tomorrow.”  It did.  It was a rather short swing, with only two purchase-days, one do-nothing day, and then today’s exit.

Also on Jun 02, I wrote, “Worst thing for the bears would be if the market stays up for a couple of days, then kisses the dashed orange line from the topside, then heads upwards into the stratosphere.  Ow!  We could be looking at a June blow-off top to begin our summer.  (The orange line is the gap from when Silicon Valley Bank had its liquidity crisis…)”  This prediction was of course mostly wrong — you’re watching 🐔 🪛 ⚾ (The Crank Channel) — but it’s interesting that price did bounce off that line on Jun 23.  Of course, it’s been more than “a couple of days”, I did not foresee that wobble on Jun 02–04, the stratospheric rise hasn’t quite happened yet, we’re out of time for a June top — but otherwise pretty good!  I identified where the market would bounce 3 weeks before it happened.  And separately, my regular algorithm got me a piece of that action.

For my next trick, I will predict a double-top: price will hit $189.24 around Jul 5 or so.  I will not be betting on this prediction.

The orange line above looks meaningful.  It is horizontal, as we would expect of a line anchored to a gap.  The spike-top on May 23 was only 0.05% below the low of Mar 09, while Jun 23’s low was only 0.04% below.  Any two of these could be a coincidence, but surely…

Well, actually, the above chart has been ‘adjusted for dividends’ and it does not show the historical prices such as you might have written in your spreadsheet at the time.  Instead, it shows what prices would have been had IWM not been a dividend-paying stock.  Without that adjustment, the orange line appears slanted on this second chart.  I think, if we draw a line from Mar 09 to May 23 and then extend it to Jun 23, then that day’s low was about 0.07% below the line, so still pretty close but way less impressive-looking.

The dividend adjustment formula is utterly standard, has no parameters, and is generally applied by default to charts for all dividend-paying stocks.  I didn’t select it to make the orange line pop out in this case — but that’s what it did!  So huzzah for the dividend-adjustment thingy.

Tomorrow: no trade orders.  I’ve been getting firmer in my belief that I should not buy the first hit on the blue line after a channel-crossing.  If there’s no short to cover, then just do nothing that day rather than starting the long series.  It’s my impression that oftentimes only that first purchase in the series is unprofitable, so I should just skip that one.  Meanwhile, I’m still scared off short-selling by that imaginary arbitrary green line.

Lawyers: nothing.  (There’s rather a lot of text in this post, considering how little has happened since last time and that the set of readers is approximately empty.)

Dear Diary: just thinking of you.  Nothing in particular to write about today.  A geyser on Enceladus is now known to be 6,000 km high and spewing water all over Saturn.  The weather forecast for Earth’s northern half calls for a hot stormy summer, due to the sea-surface temperature anomaly being the largest it’s ever been, by quite a margin.  Vladimir Putin hasn’t lost his war yet.

Here is a chart of the last year of the Russell 2000 stock index.  My usual cyan marks have been omitted for clarity.  Actually, this chart is a-year-plus-a-week, just to make it clear that the buy-and-hold people haven’t made any progress during this time.  Meanwhile, I made 16 trades, of which 14 were profitable, totalling to +30.6% for the year.  If only this were using real money!  Anyway, I wanted to point out that this algorithm does have occasional losses.

Each of these vertical black or red lines represents 6½ hours of blood, sweat, toil, and many tears for the legions of traders.  I just put in my trade orders when the market is closed and skip all the heartache (and the excitement).

On Jun 02 I wrote, “Worst thing for the bears would be if the market stays up for a couple of days, then kisses the dashed orange line from the topside, then heads upwards into the stratosphere. Ow! We could be looking at a June blow-off top to begin our summer.”.  This clearly has not happened.  The market’s price bounced through that line three times, failing to respect it.  If what we have now is a ‘bull flag’ then there is still a chance for a bounce off of roughly where that line was.  Regardless, the ‘June blow-off top‘ is still a live possibility.

I am staying out of the market until things calm down.  No trade orders for tomorrow.

Lawyers: The eternal torment never ends.  I have now heard that the deposition scheduled for August 2023, originally scheduled for February 2022, will need to be rescheduled.

(LiveJournal is back to giving me “Access Denied”, so this post is DreamWidth-only.)

I won again!  It was +1.1% this time.  Took only 6 days, so that’s like 46% annualized return, which is better than a savings account.  The swing consisted of four days of ‘up’, a null day, and then ‘down’ to my finish line.  It’s just that easy!

This ‘short’ trade-set was indeed very short-lived.  I expect that my next move will be of the ‘long’ type and will last for several weeks while the market drops, oh let’s say 4%.  A long trade involves buying ordinary stock like a normal person, but then immediately putting it up for sale again using a LIMIT order as if I were some sort of dealer.  This would be a ‘contrarian’ trade because I’m buying while expecting the market price to drop — but I don't know how far.

Alternatively, if the market participants decide to bid prices up going forward, then my next move will be (like this just-completed one) a serene series of short sales, in accordance with my standard algorithm.  No special foresight required!