The Lawrence Chan Blog

I have diverse interest in many things from science and technology to martial arts and ancient health practices. Obviously, discussion of these topics should be done within my own blog as oppose to keeping them here. Hence my blog is created so that I can have a venue to express my creativity and thoughts on my other interests. For those of you who share similar interests, you can check out my site TheLawrenceChan.com

Due to the sheer volume of articles I have written about trading, many of which are trading related yet not technically in line with what DaytradingBias.com is offering, they have to be split from my blog into yet another site. Hence for my non-technical writings about trading, videos I have curated from various sources that I think are useful for traders and my reviews of trading related products, you can find them at the site Essence of Trading

The reason why I picked the Tai Chi picture above for this page is best explained by my article Tai Chi Traders in a World of Chaos at Essence of Trading.

Below are the old blog posts that were originally posted here. To avoid broken links from other sites, I have decided to keep them here.



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Short Term Schedule Changes

2014 Oct 31 Fri 4:56:38 | by Lawrence

Due to family emergency, I will need to spend most of my time away from trading and writing in coming few weeks.

I will not be able to reply to emails quickly so if there is something related to daytradingbias.com that you need immediate attention please email sales@daytradingbias.com for faster response.

I have just posted a very long article on the principles in engaging gaps. It is something complex and I was sitting on that for a while with adjustments made here and there. I guess it is better to post it first so that premium members can spend some time with the concepts and provide some feedback on the topic before the trading signals are added.

Thank you everyone for your understanding.

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Time To Slack Off 2014 Update

2014 Oct 28 Tue 11:39:53 | by Lawrence

3d small people - rest on a chaise loungeLast week my trading goal for the year was reached. It happened so early partly because I have a modest goal this year. The main reason, however, was the swing play for the market correction worked out nicely. At this point, it is time for me to slow down with trading and spending more time on other priorities.

I will likely minimize my trading activities until year end which is what I do every year once the trading goal is reached. My focus will switch to updating and adding services for premium members. It is something I planned to do but never have enough time spent on the project. Will be good to see progress and improvements on the site before year end.

For those interested, there were Time To Slack Off 2013 and Time To Slack Off 2012 which discuss about different things including why it is important to reduce position size after having a winning streak.

In retrospect, I failed my goal of cutting down my trading time because I had the extra time and I choose to glue myself to the screen. I guess it is something I am comfortable doing while pushing further automation is something I can do but tedious enough that I keep delaying it. In 2015 further automation and reduced screen time will be of highest priorities.

This year and the one before I had more time for trading because my SO was in bad but stable condition. This window of opportunity gave me more time to focus on trading but it is coming to an end. Her condition has worsen much over the past two months so I have to plan my schedule accordingly.

Readers and members who know me for a long time already know about my situation. My SO has terminal cancer and has been fighting for her life for many years now. It is something I prefer not to discuss here because it is off topic for a trading website. Since it is going to affect my schedule in unexpected ways I think it is fair to tell everyone what the reason is.

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Ebola Has Been Spreading … So Are Email Virus

2014 Oct 15 Wed 19:20:18 | by Lawrence

Today at the Toronto General Hospital there was this sudden alert sound went off. I thought to myself what kind of emergency that they need to catch everyone’s attention like that. Then a very serious voice came through the PA system.

I cannot remember the message exactly but it went like this:

“This is an emergency broadcast … all staff with outlook access … do not open the email with the invoice file. I repeat. Do not open the invoice file … this is an emergency …”

I could not help smiling. Definitely brighten my day.

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Major Surge In Traffic to DaytradingBias.com

2014 Oct 9 Thu 16:14:00 | by Lawrence

I was told we’ve got significant inflow of traffic hitting DaytradingBias.com since S&P turned lower from September.

It is not just some more people. I am talking about a lot more people. Many times more people than we used to see on a daily basis several months ago.

No one care to check out our daily forecast on forex and daily forecast on stock markets before. Now these pages are viewed by thousands everyday.

Isn’t this a perfect proof that stock market is in fact driven by fear and greed?

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The other day I wrote about Google and its complicated relationship with its adwords clients and adsense partners. That was just the start of our effort to revise and streamline the website. Simply put, I have hired a team to update the website so that several goals I have in mind can be reached. One of the few things that has to be taken care of is streamlining the ad placement on the site. And I’ve learned something  very interesting about this money making frontier.

Lessons Learned About Ad Placement On The Net

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First thing I’ve learned is that we’ve been doing the ad placement on the site completely wrong. Obviously we may have a pretty good looking design but it is not friendly towards ad placement on the site. So, that part is changing behind the scene almost everyday.

Second thing I’ve learned is that there are quite a number of ad networks out there like Google Adsense. We’ve been told to sign up with many of them and place all their ads on the site to see which ones will pay us better. Hence, all the ads you see on every page now. Hopefully, within a month or two, we have some statistics on hand so that we will choose the ones that pay best and go from there.

Third thing I’ve learned is that none of the ad networks has been upfront on how they pay for the ad placements. All of them are vague on how they count the number of ads shown and if there are certain number of clicks on the ads have happened. From what I gather, this non-black and white approach seriously marginalized the publishers of content on the net. Only those with very high volume website traffic can have a more equal ground to communicate with these ad networks including Adsense.

What Is Real

The ad networks are guarding their formulas because they have to deal with something the old-time ad agencies do not need to – fraud. In old days, ad agencies can tell from the number of copies a publication has printed will be the number of ads placed there. Even though many copies may be going straight to the trash can, the number is still a piece of hard evidence. Fast forward to the internet age, there is no such thing as hard evidence. There is really no good way to tell if the ad was really shown to a human. A click may not be a real click at all. If the ad networks fail to identify the fake ones from the real ones, they suffer the consequence.

This is where the reputable high volume websites get their leverage as they are trusted by the ad networks while all the small time bloggers are treated as suspects regardless. There is no such thing as innocent until proven guilty. There is no balance of power between the ad networks and the individuals who want to make a living through blogging or whatever content they choose to create.

This is why we have not seen that many new super star bloggers like before. The feedback loop is now mostly broken. Majority of new bloggers who are not ad placement savvy will not be able to make enough money to drive them to push harder into the next level. The pay rate is so low comparing to several years ago that someone has to have 5 to 10 times the traffic to generate similar amount of money from ad placement on their blog or website.

In short, another money making frontier normalized into regular business eco system again.

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2014 Sep 30
Day Traders: The Heroes In Crumbling Financial Systems

Bloomberg published a story about CIS, a successful day trader in Japan. You can follow the link at the end of the post to read his story. It reminded me of another famous Japanese day trader BNF who was made famous back in 2005. You can read about h …

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2014 Sep 27
The Secret Goldman Sachs Tapes: A System That Has No Accountability

As reported by many major websites including Bloomberg and ZeroHedge, the explosive information of these tapes told us one thing – the system is broken. There is no resolution to this problem. You cannot fix something that is completely broken. Th …

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2014 Sep 21
iStock Photo: An Isolated Issue or Bigger Trouble Ahead for the Dotcom 2.0 Companies

Lately, the company iStockphoto we’ve chosen for photos and art works to pair with our articles, has made fundamental changes to their pricing structure. At this point, we can no longer justify using their service for our purpose. Worse part of …

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2014 Sep 16
More Changes to the Site

I’ve decided to add two sections to the site. One for emini and one for forex. This should make it easier for our members and visitors in navigating the site easier as many find that the current organization of premium section with categories of i …

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2014 Sep 14
Cell Phone Minutes Wasted, Time Wasted And No Answer From BMO

I am still waiting for BMO on my cell phone here to see what is going on with one of my credit cards. It was declined earlier today but it was working fine yesterday. 2 hours 45 minutes into the call and I am still stuck in the queue. Could this be …

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