It was 130 this morning and after two meals and a 2.5 mile walk it was 112. That is the lowest reading I've seen in years, and folks: its normal. That is a normal blood sugar reading. The commercials for the testing supplies show 98 and 101, but the normal range is considered to be 80 to 120.
That's pretty amazing for being on the new meds for 5 weeks, considering that I was having morning readings of 225 before going on it.
This stuff works.
Saturday, October 30, 2010
Friday, October 29, 2010
Too Tired To Trade, trading as learning to fly.
Its not at all obvious that active trading can wear you out, but it does. It requires vigilance, at least when you're in the early learning stages. This vigilance takes mental effort, you are building new muscles in your mind, and that's hard work. A lot of it is getting more automatic, but as I am in these early learning stages its all news and I'm having to make myself remember all of it.
At a previous job I had my boss was learning to fly an airplane and owned a plane with a group of people. One day he invited me to go on a flying lesson with him. He was in the main chair and the instructor was in the chair next to him.
During the lesson the instructor kept barking at him to watch different instruments because their values would fall out of range. There was a dashboard of something like 6 or more different instruments that displayed all the different values you need. Each instrument had a range of values that were appropriate for what you were doing right then, and if the plane got out of the correct range you had to make an adjustment of some sort to the plane, tilt or speed up or slow down or whatever.
What I learned, and this has always stayed with me, was that the discipline of flying involved cycling through each instrument, noting its values, and making the appropriate adjustment. You had to learn to do this so it was automatic. The natural tendancy isn't to cycle like that, its to flit, but you had to just go through each one in turn and methodically record where it was.
Trading is like that. There are a few things that you have to observe when a trade is active, such as where you are with respect to the stop and where the market is and what the action is telling you. Experience and education prepare you, but the act of trading involves asking yourself over and over where things are with respect to some guideline and whether or not that requires a decision. This act of cycling through reminds me of my boss and his experience learning to fly. Its hard work at first, the mind doesn't like to shift around like that, it wants to find a place and rest. It isn't like you can't get up from the chair and get a drink, but you really don't want to wander when you've got trades on.
As a result, I get tired from paying so much attention. I'm exercising and developing mental muscles that I've never used, and they get sore. There was a nice trade opportunity at the end of the day today that I would love to have put on, the setup was very nice and, in fact, it would have worked. I was just done, though. I had a small loss today and didn't want to take any more risk and didn't want to have trades on that I was paying attention to. I was tired. Too tired to trade. If you aren't able to give the trade your attention you are asking to lose money because you will have no tolerance for a loss. That tolerance for a temporary loss (without being stopped out) comes from patience, and no patience means an early exit just to get out and be done with it.
Oddly, or not, this phenomenon doesn't happen for swing trading, where I almost always have some positions on. I'm checking them, to be sure, but I'm not right on top of each tick. Those trades last for days and can last for weeks, so checking them once a day to see if they've gone south is fine.
At a previous job I had my boss was learning to fly an airplane and owned a plane with a group of people. One day he invited me to go on a flying lesson with him. He was in the main chair and the instructor was in the chair next to him.
During the lesson the instructor kept barking at him to watch different instruments because their values would fall out of range. There was a dashboard of something like 6 or more different instruments that displayed all the different values you need. Each instrument had a range of values that were appropriate for what you were doing right then, and if the plane got out of the correct range you had to make an adjustment of some sort to the plane, tilt or speed up or slow down or whatever.
What I learned, and this has always stayed with me, was that the discipline of flying involved cycling through each instrument, noting its values, and making the appropriate adjustment. You had to learn to do this so it was automatic. The natural tendancy isn't to cycle like that, its to flit, but you had to just go through each one in turn and methodically record where it was.
Trading is like that. There are a few things that you have to observe when a trade is active, such as where you are with respect to the stop and where the market is and what the action is telling you. Experience and education prepare you, but the act of trading involves asking yourself over and over where things are with respect to some guideline and whether or not that requires a decision. This act of cycling through reminds me of my boss and his experience learning to fly. Its hard work at first, the mind doesn't like to shift around like that, it wants to find a place and rest. It isn't like you can't get up from the chair and get a drink, but you really don't want to wander when you've got trades on.
As a result, I get tired from paying so much attention. I'm exercising and developing mental muscles that I've never used, and they get sore. There was a nice trade opportunity at the end of the day today that I would love to have put on, the setup was very nice and, in fact, it would have worked. I was just done, though. I had a small loss today and didn't want to take any more risk and didn't want to have trades on that I was paying attention to. I was tired. Too tired to trade. If you aren't able to give the trade your attention you are asking to lose money because you will have no tolerance for a loss. That tolerance for a temporary loss (without being stopped out) comes from patience, and no patience means an early exit just to get out and be done with it.
Oddly, or not, this phenomenon doesn't happen for swing trading, where I almost always have some positions on. I'm checking them, to be sure, but I'm not right on top of each tick. Those trades last for days and can last for weeks, so checking them once a day to see if they've gone south is fine.
Thursday, October 28, 2010
115
That was my sugar reading after a long walk in the park. Exercise is essential in treating diabetes. I haven't had a reading that low in a long, long time. Its a long road and its nice to celebrate the minor victories.
sugars and weighing
138 this morning! I'm also certain that I've lost some weight since my last visit with the clinical trial people last week.
My last official weigh in was 239 after a month on the new meds. I don't weigh every day, and my scale is wildly and variably inaccurate anyway. Weighing every day can create false hope on the one hand and unnecessary despair on the other there are just too many variables.
The real goal is to have a plan in place that is working and just live and have it be something that happens in the background, not so fast that its worrisome. I was about to say 'and not so slow that ...' but I'm not sure there is a 'not so slow'. I've lost weight several times and put it all back on and more because my habits didn't change. There were times I'd lose a bunch over a few weeks and feel weird about it, like it was wrong, like I was in danger.
I think my pace is about a half pound a week or so, 2-3 pounds a month. That is plenty good enough. I'm getting the rewards of feeling clothes be a little looser and things fitting better. The numbers on the scale matter, of course, I would like to get back to 190 pounds or so, which is about 50 from where I am now. I'll be on these meds for two years, that's how long the trial is, so if I can lose a half a pound a week I'll get there in two years. Of course, I don't expect that to be continuous, I'll probably lose more up here then when I'm down there, and if I end up at 200 I won't be crying about it. From the perspective of the disease that will be a huge advantage, and although it won't be skinny -- 165 would be rail thin for me -- I will have dropped out of the 'obese' scale and into 'normal, but a few extra pounds'.
My last official weigh in was 239 after a month on the new meds. I don't weigh every day, and my scale is wildly and variably inaccurate anyway. Weighing every day can create false hope on the one hand and unnecessary despair on the other there are just too many variables.
The real goal is to have a plan in place that is working and just live and have it be something that happens in the background, not so fast that its worrisome. I was about to say 'and not so slow that ...' but I'm not sure there is a 'not so slow'. I've lost weight several times and put it all back on and more because my habits didn't change. There were times I'd lose a bunch over a few weeks and feel weird about it, like it was wrong, like I was in danger.
I think my pace is about a half pound a week or so, 2-3 pounds a month. That is plenty good enough. I'm getting the rewards of feeling clothes be a little looser and things fitting better. The numbers on the scale matter, of course, I would like to get back to 190 pounds or so, which is about 50 from where I am now. I'll be on these meds for two years, that's how long the trial is, so if I can lose a half a pound a week I'll get there in two years. Of course, I don't expect that to be continuous, I'll probably lose more up here then when I'm down there, and if I end up at 200 I won't be crying about it. From the perspective of the disease that will be a huge advantage, and although it won't be skinny -- 165 would be rail thin for me -- I will have dropped out of the 'obese' scale and into 'normal, but a few extra pounds'.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
To day trade you need DESK: Discipline, Experience, a Strategy and Knowledge
I was down $330 today because I got overconfident from 2 days in a row of very good discipline. I completely lost my discipline today and I paid for it.
I'm still very early in my own learning, less than two months of really serious effort. I've lost several thousand dollars, part of tuition, but I've also gotten steadily better. I know exactly why I lost money today. I was only wrong a couple of times, mostly I got sloppy. You can expect to be wrong a percentage of the time, its built into life, and you can never expect not to be wrong. That isn't the goal. You can, however, learn to make the right decisions and respond correctly to the situation. The correct response in a particular situation may be to take a loss. I'm actually feeling more confident about trading futures -- the e-minis -- these days.
There are four things you need to day trade.
Knowledge
You acquire a lot of knowledge early on, and its about basic things like what the mechanics of trading are -- the role of ECN's, how to work your software, what a P&L is. In terms of the stock market itself you need to have heard of a lot of different companies and understand sectors and the companies in them. You don't need to know who the CEO of XYZ is or anything, but knowing that Akamai (AKAM) is an Internet company and that Proctor and Gamble (PG) is a food company or that Goldman Sachs (GS) is an investment bank is important so that you understand who the real solid companies are. There are a lot of ticker symbols out there that you can trade, but only a tiny percent are really suitable. Fortunately this universe is fixed in size, and although companies come and go you will find yourself in a world of familiar names after a period of time. You won't learn this unless you read real business papers like the Wall Street Journal and watch CNBC for many hours on end. This has to be interesting to you on its own or you'll never learn it. I like reading about business, to me its like sports. Its the human condition in a certain wrapper.
Experience
The experience of day trading is, like most of life, unlike anything else. Its its own world, ultimately part of our world, but its little corner. There is only one way to get experience, and that is by doing it. You can paper trade some, and should so that you can get a sense of the scope of how things move, but when there is real money on the line that's when you find out how emotional you will be. Hopefully you will have learned how to avoid risking too much -- part of knowledge -- and you will have enough time in the trenches to turn the corner. I'm in a trading room with an expert who is a teacher and mentor, and he says that it can take from 3 months to 18 months to develop the necessary skills and knowledge. I've logged hundreds of hours watching stocks intraday now and its becoming less intimidating, and I'm starting to see some patterns recur; certain kinds of action and movement and what a good decision is for those. I'm still a newbie, in diapers really, even though I've traded stocks for over 20 years. Day trading is its own world and very little of the knowledge I learned from other parts of the stock market applies.
Strategy
It would seem that its ultimately about strategy, and yet this part turns out not to be the most mysterious. Here is a simple strategy based on momentum. Find stocks that are making new highs or new lows and jump on board with them. Of course that's a broad stroke. How do you find these stocks? The software should have a screen that displays them. How do you pick good ones? Select names that have good volume and that may be part of a theme for the day. How do you know if the action is good for this strategy? Watch it to see if its in motion -- if the price is changing quickly on heavy volume. When do you get out? Watch for how it behaves at a round number, a pivot line, a fib line or if its approaching a round number of dollars like $5 or $10 in price change.
Now of course that's a lot of information and it would be impossible to start new and understand that -- what's a 'fib line'? Nonetheless, its a strategy, and its a pretty basic one. Day trading uses a playbook, certain kinds of responses to certain setups. There are not an infinite number of them, there may not be more than, what, a dozen or so? After all, a price can only go up or down. How many variations on that can there be?
Discipline
This is where the rubber meets the road. You can have everything else lined up and not show good discipline and get wiped out. Discipline gets you in and makes you stay in or get out. There is some board game out there with a simple set of rules and it states that 'takes a few minutes to learn and a lifetime to master'. That's the role of discipline in day trading, and its all about you and your mind. In that respect its like golf, its just you and the club and the ball.
When you are enter a trade you have to have rules, the first and foremost of is, when do I get out. Its said that "you have to look down before you look up" in trading, and that means that every trade you get into you need to know when you will bail if it goes against you.
If you don't decide that ahead of time when you will get out you will have no discipline about staying in the trade if the winds turn, which they do most of the time. Most of the time after I enter a trade it ticks down for a bit, because things move. You have to decide before you get in when you are going to pull the ripcord. This is much harder than it sounds, because things happen fast. Discipline also gets you out when you have a profit instead of staying when the party is over. Some trades only last a few minutes and then they are done and you don't want to stay too long or you will give back all you got. Trades move at different speeds, of course. Some boil and move $1 in 30 seconds, others take an hour to move 25 cents. The former are like a set of spinning blades and can result in large wins and losses and the latter are less scary but require more patience.
Learning discipline is to train the mind. To train the mind is to mold the self.
I'm still very early in my own learning, less than two months of really serious effort. I've lost several thousand dollars, part of tuition, but I've also gotten steadily better. I know exactly why I lost money today. I was only wrong a couple of times, mostly I got sloppy. You can expect to be wrong a percentage of the time, its built into life, and you can never expect not to be wrong. That isn't the goal. You can, however, learn to make the right decisions and respond correctly to the situation. The correct response in a particular situation may be to take a loss. I'm actually feeling more confident about trading futures -- the e-minis -- these days.
There are four things you need to day trade.
- Discipline
- Experience
- Strategy
- Knowledge
Knowledge
You acquire a lot of knowledge early on, and its about basic things like what the mechanics of trading are -- the role of ECN's, how to work your software, what a P&L is. In terms of the stock market itself you need to have heard of a lot of different companies and understand sectors and the companies in them. You don't need to know who the CEO of XYZ is or anything, but knowing that Akamai (AKAM) is an Internet company and that Proctor and Gamble (PG) is a food company or that Goldman Sachs (GS) is an investment bank is important so that you understand who the real solid companies are. There are a lot of ticker symbols out there that you can trade, but only a tiny percent are really suitable. Fortunately this universe is fixed in size, and although companies come and go you will find yourself in a world of familiar names after a period of time. You won't learn this unless you read real business papers like the Wall Street Journal and watch CNBC for many hours on end. This has to be interesting to you on its own or you'll never learn it. I like reading about business, to me its like sports. Its the human condition in a certain wrapper.
Experience
The experience of day trading is, like most of life, unlike anything else. Its its own world, ultimately part of our world, but its little corner. There is only one way to get experience, and that is by doing it. You can paper trade some, and should so that you can get a sense of the scope of how things move, but when there is real money on the line that's when you find out how emotional you will be. Hopefully you will have learned how to avoid risking too much -- part of knowledge -- and you will have enough time in the trenches to turn the corner. I'm in a trading room with an expert who is a teacher and mentor, and he says that it can take from 3 months to 18 months to develop the necessary skills and knowledge. I've logged hundreds of hours watching stocks intraday now and its becoming less intimidating, and I'm starting to see some patterns recur; certain kinds of action and movement and what a good decision is for those. I'm still a newbie, in diapers really, even though I've traded stocks for over 20 years. Day trading is its own world and very little of the knowledge I learned from other parts of the stock market applies.
Strategy
It would seem that its ultimately about strategy, and yet this part turns out not to be the most mysterious. Here is a simple strategy based on momentum. Find stocks that are making new highs or new lows and jump on board with them. Of course that's a broad stroke. How do you find these stocks? The software should have a screen that displays them. How do you pick good ones? Select names that have good volume and that may be part of a theme for the day. How do you know if the action is good for this strategy? Watch it to see if its in motion -- if the price is changing quickly on heavy volume. When do you get out? Watch for how it behaves at a round number, a pivot line, a fib line or if its approaching a round number of dollars like $5 or $10 in price change.
Now of course that's a lot of information and it would be impossible to start new and understand that -- what's a 'fib line'? Nonetheless, its a strategy, and its a pretty basic one. Day trading uses a playbook, certain kinds of responses to certain setups. There are not an infinite number of them, there may not be more than, what, a dozen or so? After all, a price can only go up or down. How many variations on that can there be?
Discipline
This is where the rubber meets the road. You can have everything else lined up and not show good discipline and get wiped out. Discipline gets you in and makes you stay in or get out. There is some board game out there with a simple set of rules and it states that 'takes a few minutes to learn and a lifetime to master'. That's the role of discipline in day trading, and its all about you and your mind. In that respect its like golf, its just you and the club and the ball.
When you are enter a trade you have to have rules, the first and foremost of is, when do I get out. Its said that "you have to look down before you look up" in trading, and that means that every trade you get into you need to know when you will bail if it goes against you.
If you don't decide that ahead of time when you will get out you will have no discipline about staying in the trade if the winds turn, which they do most of the time. Most of the time after I enter a trade it ticks down for a bit, because things move. You have to decide before you get in when you are going to pull the ripcord. This is much harder than it sounds, because things happen fast. Discipline also gets you out when you have a profit instead of staying when the party is over. Some trades only last a few minutes and then they are done and you don't want to stay too long or you will give back all you got. Trades move at different speeds, of course. Some boil and move $1 in 30 seconds, others take an hour to move 25 cents. The former are like a set of spinning blades and can result in large wins and losses and the latter are less scary but require more patience.
Learning discipline is to train the mind. To train the mind is to mold the self.
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Blood Sugar was 147 today
For me that's not bad. One of the things that I was told about diabetes is that its a progressive disease, my sugar readings have slowly gone up over time. The new med that I'm on (JNJxxx or Glimiperide) is very effective. Before I could qualify for the trial I had to go on Metformin only, and my morning sugars were 220 or so. One doc told me that normal progression is to add one new treatment every decade, and I'm in my 50's so hopefully it won't get too bad as I age.
Getting diagnosed was a pretty hard slap in the face with respect to my lifestyle around food, which pretty much was to not pay attention and eat as much as I wanted to. Its been a tough road to learn discipline, but I've made solid progress. Before I went on this one and started losing weight I had already lost 35 pounds over a couple of years by making changes. Those changes are the reason that I am confident that I can keep it off after losing it.
Getting diagnosed was a pretty hard slap in the face with respect to my lifestyle around food, which pretty much was to not pay attention and eat as much as I wanted to. Its been a tough road to learn discipline, but I've made solid progress. Before I went on this one and started losing weight I had already lost 35 pounds over a couple of years by making changes. Those changes are the reason that I am confident that I can keep it off after losing it.
Monday, October 25, 2010
Buying some Euros
Bought the EUR/USD at 1.3947 for an overnight trade.
Currency trading is very cool. It goes on worldwide, 24 hours a day for 5 days a week. Most of the volume happens in the morning in the U.S. when the U.S. and European traders are active. Its the largest market in the world, dwarfing all the stock markets. Trillions of dollars flow in the currency markets. Its a market that is too large to be manipulated in the way that the stock market can be.
When you trade currency you always buy one thing and sell another. You buy Swiss Francs and sell Canadian dollars, or whatever, so you are always long one thing and short another. These are called the "pairs". The largest pairs are the ones between the Dollar, Euro, Yen, British Pound and Swiss Franc. The ticker is always ONE/OTHER, in this case EUR/USD for Euro and US Dollar. When you buy EUR/USD you are going long the Euro, when you sell EUR/USD you are going short the Euro.
Trading occurs in units called "pips", where each pip represents one tick of change. The prices for most pairs are expressed as 4 decimal points of value, e.g. 1.3947 for my EUR/USD pair. 1 pip is the 4th decimal place of value. This means that one Euro is worth $1.3947 cents, so you trade in hundredths of a penny in this case.
You can buy or sell as little as $10,000 worth at a time, and you get 50 to 1 leverage, which means a $10,000 trade only costs $200. The standard size trade is $100,000 at a time, which costs $2,000 to place, using the magic of leverage.
Leverage lets you get extraordinary returns -- and losses. In an IRA or 401k there is no leverage and you think in terms of making, say, 8% a year or better. If you are an active swing or trend trader you probably have 2 to 1 leverage and you'd like to make 20% or more a year. If you day trade you have 4 to 1 leverage and you think about making an income, with returns that work out to a a couple of hundred percent a year on your capital. If you trade futures you have 10 to 1 leverage, and currency (or 'Forex') trading involves 50 to 1 leverage. Currency and futures are how fortunes are made -- and lost -- trading.
I'm just dipping my toes into this so I'm starting with the $10,000 sized lots. With that size of trade each pip is $1. In the time since I've placed this trade the price has moved to 1.3957. That is 10 pips of movement, 1.3957 - 1.3947 = 10 pips = $10 of price movement.
Now remember, that trade cost me $200 and its already moved $10. That's a 5% move in about 10 minutes! For comparison's sake if I had a CD that paid 2% I could earn $4 on $200 in a year.
At 1 am early this morning the EUR/USD was 1.408, or 133 pips higher than my position entry. If it returns to that value tomorrow I would make a 66% return on my $200, or $133. Of course, if it dropped that much I would lose 66% in a day.
That sort of movement (100 pips) is very small. Its a very small move amplified by leverage.That sort of return is part of the allure of currency trading.
Currency trading is very cool. It goes on worldwide, 24 hours a day for 5 days a week. Most of the volume happens in the morning in the U.S. when the U.S. and European traders are active. Its the largest market in the world, dwarfing all the stock markets. Trillions of dollars flow in the currency markets. Its a market that is too large to be manipulated in the way that the stock market can be.
When you trade currency you always buy one thing and sell another. You buy Swiss Francs and sell Canadian dollars, or whatever, so you are always long one thing and short another. These are called the "pairs". The largest pairs are the ones between the Dollar, Euro, Yen, British Pound and Swiss Franc. The ticker is always ONE/OTHER, in this case EUR/USD for Euro and US Dollar. When you buy EUR/USD you are going long the Euro, when you sell EUR/USD you are going short the Euro.
Trading occurs in units called "pips", where each pip represents one tick of change. The prices for most pairs are expressed as 4 decimal points of value, e.g. 1.3947 for my EUR/USD pair. 1 pip is the 4th decimal place of value. This means that one Euro is worth $1.3947 cents, so you trade in hundredths of a penny in this case.
You can buy or sell as little as $10,000 worth at a time, and you get 50 to 1 leverage, which means a $10,000 trade only costs $200. The standard size trade is $100,000 at a time, which costs $2,000 to place, using the magic of leverage.
Leverage lets you get extraordinary returns -- and losses. In an IRA or 401k there is no leverage and you think in terms of making, say, 8% a year or better. If you are an active swing or trend trader you probably have 2 to 1 leverage and you'd like to make 20% or more a year. If you day trade you have 4 to 1 leverage and you think about making an income, with returns that work out to a a couple of hundred percent a year on your capital. If you trade futures you have 10 to 1 leverage, and currency (or 'Forex') trading involves 50 to 1 leverage. Currency and futures are how fortunes are made -- and lost -- trading.
I'm just dipping my toes into this so I'm starting with the $10,000 sized lots. With that size of trade each pip is $1. In the time since I've placed this trade the price has moved to 1.3957. That is 10 pips of movement, 1.3957 - 1.3947 = 10 pips = $10 of price movement.
Now remember, that trade cost me $200 and its already moved $10. That's a 5% move in about 10 minutes! For comparison's sake if I had a CD that paid 2% I could earn $4 on $200 in a year.
At 1 am early this morning the EUR/USD was 1.408, or 133 pips higher than my position entry. If it returns to that value tomorrow I would make a 66% return on my $200, or $133. Of course, if it dropped that much I would lose 66% in a day.
That sort of movement (100 pips) is very small. Its a very small move amplified by leverage.That sort of return is part of the allure of currency trading.
WTF?
I used to write a lot about Life with a capital L, but then stopped. For a while I thought this was because I didn't have any more things to say -- it had all been internalized. However, I realized it was because I had already written all the words I had about Life with a capital L. I still think about Life with a capital L but I don't have any more written words for it.
This blog is about my journey with two things.
Diabetes:
Some years ago I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes and have been on a journey of food control and weight control. Its currently pretty well under control, with an A1c of less than 7, but I learned about a new compound that is in phase 3 trials, code name JNJ28431754, which had as a 'side effect' weight loss and used a different mechanism for blood sugar control.
Now, of course, with a phase 3 double blind trial you don't actually know whether or not you're getting the test compound or not. In this case there isn't a placebo, they either give you the compound or Glimiperide, a drug already on the market for diabetes. This trial is not to determine effectiveness, its to determine relative effectiveness. While I don't know if I'm getting the active compound what I can state with certainty is that whatever I'm taking has the qualities of a stimulant, including appetite control and lots of energy. I've already lost 3.5 pounds in a month. I'll talk about exercise, food, weight loss, blood sugar, meds, etc.
Day Trading:
After the Great Financial Adventure of 2007 I began to more actively trade stocks, because if I didn't do it no one else would; no one will ever care as much as you about your money. Most of the trading that I did was 'swing' trading, wherein I would hold something for anywhere from a few days to a few weeks, but rarely more than that. Its about capturing short term movements. However, day trading has always been alluring to me as a mountain to climb, so I've starting doing that. I'll talk about that learning process and share it as I go along, with whatever results there are. I'm trading equities, futures and forex. Sometimes I'll hold things overnight but mostly its intraday.
I'm writing about these because I have words for this, its a story that is current and living. I'd like to think that this story will end when I'm thin, have an A1c of 6 and make 6 figures day trading. We'll see how that turns out ;-)
This blog is about my journey with two things.
Diabetes:
Some years ago I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes and have been on a journey of food control and weight control. Its currently pretty well under control, with an A1c of less than 7, but I learned about a new compound that is in phase 3 trials, code name JNJ28431754, which had as a 'side effect' weight loss and used a different mechanism for blood sugar control.
Now, of course, with a phase 3 double blind trial you don't actually know whether or not you're getting the test compound or not. In this case there isn't a placebo, they either give you the compound or Glimiperide, a drug already on the market for diabetes. This trial is not to determine effectiveness, its to determine relative effectiveness. While I don't know if I'm getting the active compound what I can state with certainty is that whatever I'm taking has the qualities of a stimulant, including appetite control and lots of energy. I've already lost 3.5 pounds in a month. I'll talk about exercise, food, weight loss, blood sugar, meds, etc.
Day Trading:
After the Great Financial Adventure of 2007 I began to more actively trade stocks, because if I didn't do it no one else would; no one will ever care as much as you about your money. Most of the trading that I did was 'swing' trading, wherein I would hold something for anywhere from a few days to a few weeks, but rarely more than that. Its about capturing short term movements. However, day trading has always been alluring to me as a mountain to climb, so I've starting doing that. I'll talk about that learning process and share it as I go along, with whatever results there are. I'm trading equities, futures and forex. Sometimes I'll hold things overnight but mostly its intraday.
I'm writing about these because I have words for this, its a story that is current and living. I'd like to think that this story will end when I'm thin, have an A1c of 6 and make 6 figures day trading. We'll see how that turns out ;-)
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