Since you are the biggest poster here, do you trade your advice. Ol DT used to posted here back in the day and claimed he never traded his weather advice (he was bat poop crazy BTW), are you different. I guess DT is busy battling his TDS nowadays.
Hi Vinny,
I told this story a few times and will look back for it.
I opened an account with 2K in 1992 and turned it into 600K By the 2000s, when I was posting all my 100 lot beans and 200 lot corn trades.
i had a satellite dish on my roof getting weather information before the market and before the internet.
I caught Greenmans attention as well as local here and we became friends, emailing each other every day during the Summer of 2002. In July of that year I made over 100k and traded 10,000 contracts for the month. Lind Waldock started a new phone number just for me and called it “the high rollers hotline” and I got lightning fast fills while I waited on the phone but they also assessed 150% the margin on me for orders above 100 lots-beans, and 200-lots corn. I appealed but lost the appeal. I used to margin out on most of my positions back then and never once used a stop. It was all based on beating the markets reaction to the updated weather forecast on my day trades.
I held some positions for a few days at the most.
I had all my money stolen by Jon Corzine at MF Global on Halloween 2011
I borrowed a ton of money and started a new account at PFG Best. When the MFG money was coming back, I put it in the PFG account.
Then in July 2012, PFG went bankrupt and I lost the money that came back and the borrowed money.
After that, I borrowed more money to start another account.
unfortunately, other private weather firms had established their own in house models that they use to be me and the market stop trading as reliably and we had some huge bills to pay so the first few years, when I made money I had to take it all out to pay bills and the account never grew Like it did in the 1990s And early 2000s.
The last few years, I’ve hardly done any trading but still have fun analyzing the weather markets.
I still do have an active account and still do plan to pick up my trading again.
Greenman and local were 2 of the sharpest dudes I've ever known.
You might remember stimpy. He's was very sharp too and also was the one that suggested I open the new account at PFG Best. They did actually have the best service but part of it was the owner was using all the clients segregated account money for services and for him to have a lavish live style.
He was giving the FTC and others a post office box address to him for all their audits and he would make up numbers, then send them back. Incredible fraud by him and incompetence by the FTC/CFTC. Stimpy felt pretty bad when they went bankrupt.
Corzine bankrupted MFG 8 months earlier because he had a massive over leveraged bond position on and kept getting margin calls. To make them, he raided the segregated futures accounts like mine.
It was discovered when MFG was trying to sell the firm and the buyer was scrutinizing all the numbers but they didn't add up.
Supposedly the CFTC and FTC have strict rules and regulations in place now, thanks to these 2 bankruptcies.
Too bad they didn't do that BEFORE then.
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/73933/#73981
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/73933/#73983
Re: Re: Re: Re: Why most traders fail
By metmike - Aug. 21, 2021, 6:29 p.m.
Great points Gunter!
Yes, Stimpy was extraordinarily bright. He and local (Mark Kinoff) were close friends for years.
Man, they hated Susan with a passion, mainly local as Stimpy seemed to try to stay out of it most of the time.
Joe K and Susan would go after each other all the time. Susan was the most prolific poster of all time.
There were some days when she would make many dozens of posts and they actually were pretty insightful.
Joe K also posted alot but stated some things that were not always right. He was obsessed with Wyckoff trading principles(he got alot of it from Gary Fullett). Wyckoff has come great stuff but Joe. K was convinced that's all a person needed.
Susan hated Wyckoff with a passion and ran it and him down all the time.
One year, Joe K was really getting carried away, shooting his mouth off and saying weather trading was crap and nobody could do it and totally knocking and being skeptical of all the weather trades that I was posting(back when I was actually posting trades).
I finally got ticked off and challenged him to send Alex his account statement for that year or any year and I would send him my statement for just that year so far and we'll let Alex be the judge of whether weather trading was crap or not.
So he wouldn't do it but I did anyway in June because I was getting ticked off at him.
My statement showed I made 120,000 thru June and Alex confirmed the number right down to the penny. Afterwards, local told me that wasn't the smartest idea in the world to send out a statement, even though I blocked off the account number on it. He and Joe were actually friends too.
And this didn't stop Joe. One time, I got really ticked off at Joe and said something to him on the forum that I felt bad about and realized it was all negative energy being wasted and figured out the best way to handle it.
I asked Alex for his email address and reached out and contacted him, with an invitation to be my friend and shared some personal things with him about me and my trading.
Joe was always doing things to an extreme. And he responded wonderfully as a new friend that changed his tune about weather trading(after he opened his mind) and wanted to also share with me all of his stuff.
He was subscribing to a couple of trading advice services and would send me those updates every day for many months. I found the info interesting and liked reading it but I was trading on my own thoughts.
Turned out that the real Joe K. if he's your friend will go overboard to do everything that you'd expect from a best friend. All you had to do was take the first step to sincerely extend the hand of friendship and he went from being an adversary to a friend because of just one email.
It's amazing how that would also work in so many other adversarial relationships.............if just one person, decided to extend friendship and show love instead of hate. It's natural for somebody to react to an attack by attacking back. It's almost impossible to attack somebody that is showing you love.
Minimizing hate in our lives can also clear our minds of unproductive thoughts and help us to be at peace and focus much better on being in tune with the authentic world and objective truths that define it......... and the markets.
It helps us to be more open minded, which allows things to get into our brains that hate rejects. This is how we learn. Hate requires closed mindedness and subjective judgmental-ism. Recirculating old things that we think that we know already.
Love lets all the good things in and results in good things coming out of us.
Hate it the most damaging emotion of all.
https://patternswizard.com/wyckoff-method/
https://www.wickedlocal.com/article/20150123/news/150127922
This is what I did before trading for a living.
I parted ways with the television world in September 1993 after I had started trading in January 1992.
The price of corn and beans in the Summer drought of 1988 and the price of heating oil during the record cold month of December 1989 are what got me interested in trading commodities.
In 1991, I got a library card from the 2 local colleges and read every book on commodities that they had.
I had the Chicago Board of Trade mail me a ton of historical price charts for corn, wheat and soybeans and compared them to weather patterns at the time, which I got records of.
I opened my first account at Ira Epstein because they were the only place that would take 2,000. All the other firms required 5,000.
At 1 point in the 1990s I had accounts at 4 different places at the same time because I was seeing which ones were the best.
I used Bower Trading(and became friends with the owner Jim Bower, who is a very sharp guy).
I can't remember the place but the broker was Dean Piper, I think. I was making tons of money on my own trading, then decided to close the account but he wouldn't do it. He offered me a position managing other peoples money and I had no interest in that because I was making more than I needed.
After several months, I had to threaten legal action against him to close the account. Turns out that when I would place orders, they almost always made money so he would do the exact same thing for all his other accounts that I did and was making a killing on my trading. That's why he refused to close my account for so long.
Wow, what a journey you have had. With your history I would never trust a broker.
Thanks for sharing your stories Mike. I"ve been reading this forum for many years. I learned a lot and enjoyed the interactions between some of the posters. It got pretty wild at times !
Thanks!
I used to joke that broker was the perfect term for that profession because when you use one of them, they just make you BROKER than you were before.
I know that there are good ones out there and I've had a few positive experiences with them but after I started making tons of money, I realized that these guys were giving advice and charging commissions for a living because THEIR ADVICE DIDN'T WORK. If it did, they would have been using their own advice and trading for a living like me.
Funny thing is that I sort of act like a broker here, providing information and analysis of markets. But the difference is that I do it because I like sharing FOR FREE!!
It still seems hard to believe that I turned 2k into a 600k account(and I took out around 300k to pay billis too).
The trading environment was so different then. I could never do that today.
In the 1990's the big traders used private weather services to get their weather information and it would take 30 minutes or so for the market to fully react after model runs from a key model change during a sensitive weather market(corn and beans).
Often, the market would react to Tom Skillings forecast (from Chicago) who would have updates on rain chances for the Midwest. Many people questioned whether he was a trader and using that to his advantage. He denied that but he has a brother, Jeffrey Skilling that was involved in the Enron scandal(that cost me 200k).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Skilling
Anyway, when I was working at the tv station still in 92/93, I would go to work early to look at the weather information. Grains opened, I think at 9:30 am back then and closed at 1:15pm. I had Accu-weather fax me the long range MRF earlier in the morning.
After I left that career behind me and had turned the 2k into 20k, I immediately spent 10k to buy my own weather information system at home. I had a satellite dish on the roof and got every weather product at lightning speed delivered to our sun room, with a loud printer that would chatter all day and night long.
What a fun life that was! You can tell, from the threads here how much fun it is for me to analyze weather. I do it on my own all day long for fun. This was one of the reasons I took over MarketForum is because I saw an opportunity to share that and trading stuff with lots of people........for free.
On tv as a main anchor you never see your kids because you get home after they're in bed. They watch you on the 5-6 news(and are in bed for the 10pm news) like everybody else. You're a weekend parent.
My new trading profession allowed me to coach my sons soccer, basketball, baseball teams. Become the chess coach at their school and start chess are 4 other schools(for the other days of the week).
Become den leader, then adult leader in Cub/Boy Scouts, teacher weather, chess and personal fitness merit badges and be involved in several other organizations, making tons of money using weather trading.
I would tell my wife all the time that this was insane. Nobody makes this much money trading. I had never read or heard about it. When Greenman and I were emailing to each other almost daily in 2002, he paid me one of the highest compliments ever. He said that I was the world's best weather trader. This came from one of the sharpest traders I've known.
I know this sounds like bragging but its actually just acknowledging how enormously fortunate I was to be in this position. And I decided to use the opportunity to share my great fortune and talents with others which has only amplified the enjoyment/reward. If you want to improve the quality of your life, find a way to become involved in a worthwhile organization that you believe in. You'll make the best of friends that share in that endeavor, while using your time together to make the world a better place. No amount of money can do that!
Admittedly, I get carried away on some topics here because I have an addictive personality but my objective is sharing and enlightenment, along with positive messages while making some friends that like to discuss stimulating topics.
Before becoming moderator here, I was not very involved in political discussions. MarketForum has caused me to become much more informed about that and many other topics.
When you are posting to share something, you give it much more thought than if you are just reading it quickly for yourself than going on to something else. It requires a different mentality.
For instance, if a bunch of other people are going to read this and your comment/opinion, you want to FACT CHECK what you are stating BEFORE you post it.
This has caused me to bust my own opinion on a topic hundreds of times before I ever state it here!
How many times have we read something that lines up with what we want to believe.........and believe it automatically? This is human nature. We might even feel compelled to pass it on right away because its expresses exactly how we feel.
I'm like that too, except that I try to fact check and double fact check it to make sure its authentic and not my cognitive bias at play. Many times, it wasn't what I was thinking/hoping.
We live in a world of extremely powerful communications technology that features alot of fake news, false narratives, propaganda and articles/posts from biased people trying to influence how we think. On social media, MSM, government......all over the place.
With AI making it even more clever and convincing, its getting tougher and tougher to tell what's real and what's not real.
What's true and what's not true.
You ARE making the world a better place ! Family, community, kids are all so important. I'm sure you've changed many lives for the better. Thank you ! By the way... I was in the chess club in high school. Some of us were allowed to play in study hall. I was just an average player, but had a lot of fun !
That's great to hear, bowyer!
You're just the type of person that I do it for!
I've had over 5,000 students, the vast majority are not great players.
However, they all learn how to play chess for the rest of their lives. Many of them have children and teach their children to play chess.
I've had several students from 2+ decades ago and THEIR CHILDREN in recent years.
The tournament that I run each year is NON rated so that inexperienced players can participate without becoming USCF members.
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/110108/
I'm also on the board of Scholastic Chess of Indiana, where we cater to more experienced players.
We had 6 teams from 4 of our schools competing in the State Championship last month.
Our North High School team finished in 5th place!
They are all self motivated/taught. I just provide them with opportunities to practice and compete, doing something challenging and growth stimulating that they love to do.
Our green North shirts say "sport for the brain" on the front.
Looks like a great group of kids ! You are making a positive impact on their lives in many ways. For many, this will be the highlight of their years in school. Thank you