The Lawrence Chan Blog

I received quite a number of messages from various sources questioning the need to raise funds for daytradingbias.com. Some people even questioned my ability as a trader. It is amusing to see how people react to a simple donation drive. So here it is, my longer than usual talk about DaytradingBias.com.

Operates Like A Community Service

Members who joined since the beginning, like 6 years ago, know that the site was free. It was free for a long time.

As the site grows, members asked for trading tools like daily reports to assist them. I had to contract programmers to make that happen and hire people to maintain the servers. That was the start of premium membership. I keep the monthly fees at an extremely low price point at the time. My plan was to recover the cost slowly.

Those who became premium members since the beginning are still enjoying their low monthly fees. They support the development of the site, I am very grateful to them all. Let them keeping their monthly subscription at the original rate is my way to show my appreciation of their trust in me.

In short, it never was, and it never is my intention to make money from Daytradingbias.com. I have been happily supporting the site, organize and publish my years of research and of course, helping out member traders. If the goal is profit seeking, it would be operated in a very different way and premium membership will not be priced like the way it is now.

Financed Mainly By Trading Profit

Since DaytradingBias.com has so much work to be done in offering its trading tools and services to its premium members, yet I do not operate it with a for profit objective, so how do I finance the project?

Well, I am a professional trader for 25 years now. I also have consulting /advisor work done for hedge funds and financial institutions. The markets are treating me well so I can afford to finance a project like DaytradingBias.com and run it the way I like it.

The advantage of such approach is that the growth of the site will be more natural and has a stronger foundation. It makes the site less commercial and more community driven.

The disadvantages are lack of focus, slower roll out of new trading tools and reduced chance to breaking even. Since actual work has to be done to make things happen, the improvements to the site is limited by the resources I have access to.

An Expensive Personal Mission

I am willing to put in the money and effort to make DaytradingBias.com useful to beginner and struggling traders. Doing it at a small scale level is fine as I do not mind parting with a hundred grand a year from my trading profit to support the site. But now as the goals become bigger and the projects to be completed becoming more expensive, it becomes a real business decision issue.

I am a trader pretty much all my life and I watch my bottom line seriously. As a very discipline person, I have to draw a line on how much money to be committed to the site. After all, there are proper ways to finance and operate an operation like DaytradingBias.com.

After taking advices from other people who operate non-profit organizations, I have learned to produce a business plan for the site. I will have to watch its bottom line carefully. Projects have to be done on a priority basis so that I do not spend more than the amount I am committing to support the operation. The ultimate goal is to ensure DaytradingBias.com will grow properly into a force on its own.

For now, DaytradingBias.com is my personal statement. It is a personal mission with no monetary rewards. My reward is the gratification coming from emails and messages sent to me by traders who benefited from my work.

In a way, you can think of DaytradingBias.com operates like Wikipedia. When more and more people are using it, yet not many people are paying for it, Wikipedia has to seek for sponsorship and donation from the users. DaytradingBias.com is facing a similar issue now.

The Grand Vision

Eventually I hope that other well established traders are willing to share their expertise in trading at Daytradingbias.com. I am not talking about famous hedge fund managers or legendary traders. I am talking about traders who successfully profit from the financial markets consistently yet staying extremely low profile. It is these individuals that I like to gain contact with and have their practical trading approaches introduced to more retail traders.

To allow my vision to happen, I have to act by example to encourage others to come out and contribute to the site. I am showing by example that sharing my trading techniques and research results has not affected my trading performance. It actually improved my trading abilities because the reflection process allows me to improve clarity in my own trading methodology.

I see myself to play a smaller role in the future as Daytradingbias.com grow into something bigger and more diverse in terms of the markets it supports and the number of good traders joining me to make it better.

Support Us

There are several ways to support us.

Direct donation is one way if you find what we have done has helped you in improving your trading or giving you great trading ideas. Use the button below to support our fund raising effort.

Support us by becoming our premium member shows us your token of appreciation and you know that we are working towards better trading tools and services for you all the time. Join us!

If you do not need our services for now but you see our sincere effort can really make a difference, please spread the words for us. Your effort in getting more people to know what we are doing here will help us build a great trading community.

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Spent my spare time learning and testing various screen capturing software for weeks now. As I explained back in February, I was clueless on what it takes to produce videos. After working on it here and there a few hours a week, I am slowly getting better with the tools and the production process. I am now comfortable with making videos.

The big question now is what kind of videos I should produce for daytradingbias.com?

I have seen many trading related videos. Not that many, however, I find useful. I’ll rather do something meaningful than making boring comments. I guess it all boils down to quality vs. quantity.

So what do you think?

What kind of video you like to see?

Drop me a line to help me decide.

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I was talking to a friend the other day. He has made an interesting point that I find very amusing. He thinks that in the pursuit of a trading career, there are two main groups of people. One that will stick with free resources and the other will seek for expensive products and services. Based on his observation, the in between type is rare. Hence my focus to offer daytradingbias.com services at a low price point is not a sound business strategy.

Since my goal of running the website is not really profit driven, making the service affordable to retail traders is very important for me. My vision for the site has not changed – providing independent useful trading research and tools. As long as it can sustain itself, I am happy.

I have decided to give crowdfunding a try as an alternative to generate cashflow in addition to the traditional approach of offering products and services. Since daytradingbias.com is a pretty busy website frequent by many active traders, it makes sense to ask everyone to contribute a little to support the site. For me, it is a great social experiment to see if people find value from what I offer. It will be interesting to see how the campaign works out in the coming months.

Please help support the site and spread the words.

Thanks!

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I was quite productive over the past two weeks – I implemented the DIY Financial News Feed and completed my draft version of Art of Chart Reading. This was made possible when I no longer have to split my time over too many things within the day. If there is one single factor that improved my productivity, it is the reduced cost of multi-tasking.

I used to structure my email correspondence once in the morning and once in the afternoon only. Over time, I started to check on my email more and it has been a very bad influence on my work schedule. I now follow my plan strictly so no more interruption of my thoughts when I am working on something that takes several hours to complete.

During this reshuffling of my schedule, I have learned something interesting about myself.  Although I am a morning person, my best time at getting research results and better creativity in new ideas all happened late at night. It looks like I need at least several hours of intense focus on a subject before my brain can function at its peak form. This has slowly turned my sleep pattern into something like biphasic sleep.

At the end, I did not just optimize my schedule for productivity, I also optimized myself.

Going into end of May and last month of the quarter, my focus will turn to the release of the shorter term intraday trading signals for Emini S&P and the forex majors. Hopefully my effort to increase productivity will pay off.

Have a nice long weekend!

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Art of Chart Reading is finally completed this week after six long years. The original idea was just a quick reference for site members on the basic chart patterns that works very well across many markets. A simple project turned into a mission when readers’ feedback told me that most people do not understand how to read charts properly. I then realized that a framework on how to read charts is more important than just better explanation of the chart patterns themselves.

Since I am not the kind of people who can focus on a single task and like to jump from subject to subject when writing, the progress with this project has been slow. Hence completely this book means a lot to me because I have several more book projects like Defensive Money Management and Trading with Tick Index that deserve my attention as well. Now that I reorganized my schedule, I should be able to write more efficiently and make some serious progress with my book projects.

It will still take sometime to organize the materials and editing before Art of Chart Reading is available in ebook form.

I will keep you all posted on the progress.

To my fellow Canadians, Happy Victoria Day!

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