The Lawrence Chan Blog

Answering one of the many odd questions I received, “How heavy is the sabre you mentioned in your post about your exercise practice?” What they are referring to is a piece I wrote last year, Back to Rigorous Exercise Regime and Planning for Next Year. Obviously these readers must be some kind of exercise or martial art enthusiasts.

The feature image of this post is my practice sabre. It weights about 10 pounds, custom made by one of my Tai Chi teachers for his own practice. The whole thing is cut from one piece of metal all the way to the handle. It is tip heavy meaning that by design the front part of the sabre is two times as heavy as the handle end.

The sabre is just the base for the add-ons. I have magnets each weighting from 2 to 5 pounds that can stick on the side of the sabre to increase the intensity of my training. When I was younger I can manage my practice effectively up to a total weight of about 30 pounds.

It is a fun toy to play with as the sabre does not have a sharp edge like a real sabre. Similar to the dumbbells we use in weight lifting, dropping this onto your feet can cause serious damage. Hence it is important to not overload myself with weight that I cannot handle.

A normal practice sabre weights about 2 to 3 pounds. A real sabre made with steel is usually about 3 pounds. My friends who are very into body building cannot effectively manage this practice sabre with the simple posture of just lifting it horizontally with arm extended sideway. It is not because their arms are not strong enough, it is their wrists are not trained to handle the dead load coming from the extended centre of gravity away from the body.

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Talked to many people lately who said they are now interested in buying a safe to put in their homes. Some of them heard the news about Japanese people have bought so many safes that many places are out of stock. Some of them learned that in Europe the trouble caused by the refugees has been getting worse. Overall, many people here started to feel the insecurity in our modern society, finally. But does it really help to install a safe at home? I seriously doubt that, at least not the way these folks think a safe will do for them.

A Safe Is Not There To Protect You From Real Criminals

Many people who are thinking of buying a safe in North America got the wrong idea what a safe is really useful for.

In short, a safe is there to mainly deal with disasters like fire, flood or even earthquake so that your valuables, not just expensive jewelleries or money, like important documents, are protected. A lesser important duty of a safe is to guard against casual theft as the inconvenience to open a safe or to carry the damn heavy thing would reduce the chance of the thieves from wasting time on the safe due to the elevated risk of being caught as more time and effort has to be spent at the crime scene.

If you really care about the stuff you put into the safe, you cannot have it standing around like a piece of furniture. Even hiding the safe does not really help. Real robbers can simply put your life in danger to force you to disclose all the money and valuables you have. They can force you to open the safe for them. They do not even need to do it themselves.

But this last situation has been the exact motivation driving normal people into thinking of getting a safe so that they can feel safe with their valuables. This is false sense of security at best and false sense of reality at worst. If I were some ruthless criminals, I would target those folks with the best safes around since they are probably the ones who have the most valuable things for me to rob, isn’t it?

The Old Saying of Keeping Your Wealth a Secret Works Much Better

If you cannot afford 24 hours security guards, super ninjas and snipers protecting your house, the best option is to live a life without all the fancy things – hiding yourself and your family in a nice neighbourhood that would not draw attention from thieves and robbers is a good starting point. Not having fancy cars that attract attentions is another. But some people need to satisfy themselves with the keeping up with the jones feeling. Well, if that’s the case you should also accept the fact that you are subjecting yourself and your family 100 times the chance of being robbed and other risk. It’s a personal choice.

An interesting trick used by people coming from long lineage of wealthy background is the use of a decoy placed in a common location for such purpose. The decoy safe should have some money and other stuff enough to make the perpetrators think they find the jackpot. Essentially a way to buy yourself and your family a chance to survive the ordeal, hopefully minimize the harm done to you and your family.

Putting gold bars at home even hiding in places you think cannot be found is not such a good idea. By having the right kind of metal detector, your stash of gold will be found in no time. Once one stash is found, you can be sure the criminals will waste no time at all to start asking for more hiding places. You are essentially asking them to torture you and your family.

Ten Years From Now

The relative low crime rate in western countries and North America cannot last. As global economy contracts, more and more people will be forced out of work. Let alone potential natural disasters that are picking up speed lately. If the spiral down effect turns into a trend, it will be difficult to imagine in 10 to 15 years how bad things can get in major cities around the world.

It will be a big headache for governments worldwide. I do not see them being able to stop the trend from happening.

To keep oneself safe in troubled period does not start from buying a safe, some weapons or defensive gears, it starts from changing your mindset on how to stay out of trouble all together by being invisible to the criminals in the first place.

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To answer a number of questions all along similar line of thoughts, here are my answers. My current spam to actual email ratio is about 15 to 1. My spam filter could only catch 50% of the spam mail. The actual number of emails that I need to response to personally is now about 50 to 70 per day. I am sorry I cannot address all of you individually but I am sure you can understand. Here are the three most popular questions you’ve sent me lately and my detail answers to each of them.

What’s Next for DaytradingBias.com?

I have big plans in place in the beginning of the year but many things have been side-tracked and others just not working out as expected. However, the core objectives have not changed. Namely, I will continue to improve the real-time trading assistant tools with my proprietary trading setups so that it can do a good job in assisting traders to make sound trading decisions in the markets supported.

The introduction of combined trading models is in the card. These models are based on the combination of various statistical biases that lead to stability in performance. Rules will be fully disclosed in special reports to those interested in in-depth understanding the models.

Thus, lately my writing effort is all focused in the delivery of these more advanced research reports on my trading models. I will resume writing more on the site when my workload is reduced after the releases of some of these reports.

Can You Manage My Money?

The short answer to your kind requests for me to manage your money is no.

Long answer has to be done from several angles. First, legally I am not allowed to solicited for money management business because I am not likely being licensed as a financial advisor in your country’s jurisdiction. Second, you do not really know me on a personal basis to trust me with your money. After all, even though I am quite transparent with my work on day trading, I have not disclosed much about my role as advisor to my clients who trust me with their money. Third, these family offices with large portfolio of assets, for which I am responsible for just a small portion of their speculative capitals (even though the amount involved is still very significant), have confidentiality clauses binding me not to discuss my work under any circumstances. This means I cannot show you my trading performance which is unfair to any potential investor.

Realistically, by investing your time and effort into learning more about trading and the underlying structure of price discovery, majority of retail traders can derive their own solid trading strategies that fit their needs to grow their capital steadily. It can take years before one can get this accomplished. The path to success can be brutal but it is doable. The main obstacle that affects most of the retail traders is not that they have not acquired the secret trading techniques they think that is necessary. It is their unwillingness to give up their egos for which blocking them from being able to properly manage their risk with trading.

What’s Happening Personally?

Thank you everyone who wrote me personally after I blogged about my birthday week this year. I am doing much better now comparing to almost two years ago when my significant other passed away, both physically and mentally. I have restructured my life so that I can stick to certain schedule every day. I now limit the amount of time I spend on trading, research and writing. I am planning to take vacations from time to time (finally) although that has not happened yet.

My trading will become even more mechanical than ever. That’s due to a very good reason. As we age, our ability to response to very fast market conditions can slow down significantly. I know I can still handle fast markets very well but the time will come that I will no longer be able to catch up with the bots. Going all mechanical with at least some of the trading models will eliminate the human factors affecting performance. For the time being, the human factors are working in my favour as I can outperform my own models most of the time. Five years from now, I am not too sure that will still be the case.

Some of my clients actually suggested that I should create a benchmark entity for which I can showcase the performance. I am seriously considering to do that if I can resolve the logistic issues. This can help more people seeing what can be accomplished with a disciplined approach to trading. It is also a bold step for me since I am not used to put myself under the microscope for public examinations.

I think that’s all I have to say this week. Later.

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I have been exchanging email with Ron, an old friend from Netherland, lately and here is a short story of his path to establish his trading career.

Ron was part of the Dutch Air Force. Since then his career had been revolving around airplanes until he tried his hands on silver and gold contracts. That was year 1983. He never look back.

From that point onward, his main interest has been trading with his career in flight industry turning into his part time pursuit.

His approach to the markets may have changed over time but he sticks with simple principles that work all these years. Being able to control his risk in trading and gunning for slow and steady return, he is doing fine. This is perfectly in line with his experience in flying planes as being able to follow specific protocols is a must to ensure safety of everyone on board.

Sometimes a beginner’s urge to look for these superior edges in trading can be really harmful to their path to trading success. After all, having one working strategy in trading is better than trying to integrate many strategies that you have not mastered yet. At the end of the day, the ability to respect market risk, your trading capital and your obligation to perform can set one apart from the struggling traders.

Maybe one day I can convince Ron to tell some of his trading related stories.

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Last year when I was training my son on some classic exercise routines, the topic of how strong one has to become so that it is sufficient for normal and unusual situations was raised. I responded with an interesting set of answers. I am sure many people who exercise regularly would love to know about it.

Several classic martial art text actually explained very well what kind of ability one should achieve and maintain so that our bodies are ready for regular activities and also for unusual situations that are not necessary about fighting. The concepts presented in these ancient text are actually quite scientific from our modern point of view. I think we can call this another case of common sense approach to fitness.

Strength Requirement

Following are three examples of the many strength requirements mentioned in these martial arts scripts.

First, being able to pull yourself up with one arm for at least 5 to 6 times is one of the standard for meeting the requirement of being able to handle unusual situations. The reason is that should you need to, you can effective climb out of danger quickly. A good example is that when you are trapped in a building which is on fire or an enclosed environment, being able to pull yourself up with one arm means all the difference of having the extended reach that can decide your chance of escaping the dangerous place.

Second, being able to do one arm push up for at least 5 to 6 times is another standard requirement. The reason is the same as the first one. The combination of both push and pull strength gives you the ability to carry yourself out of many difficult situations with your arms only. This makes sense because we may not be able to use our legs for support or leverage.

Third, being able to jump on one foot to leap the distance of your body height is another interesting requirement mentioned in these ancient text. This one is quite simple to understand because it allows you to reach further than what your arms can do, making it possible to further open up more options to deal with complicated terrain.

Notice all these physical requirements are relative requirements. They are measured with your ability to support your own body weight and to overcome the distance based on your own height. In short, it is all about being able to optimize your ability in handling yourself.

What I Made My Son Do Last Year

Originally, my son could only do about 5 pull-ups with both arms. He was quite discouraged that it may take a long time before he can get to the point where he can do one arm pull-up. I told him muscle strengthening require the growing and toning of the muscle cells which takes time but we can speed it up.

So instead of my son doing just a few sets of pull-ups, we played a marathon pull-ups game to see how many pull-ups he could actually do in the next 3 hours and I would match him every time. The game ended up with more than a 100 pull-ups done by each of us.

This is a great example how our minds tricked us – my son thought that 3 sets of pull-ups was all he could do. But that is not true at all. By motivating him to take on me, he managed to do many times over his perceived limit. Of course his arms were toasted the very next day. This training, however, doubled his number of pull-ups per set once he has recovered in couple of days. Such drastic improvement was not possible before because his mentality did not include giving everything he has with physical training.

Now that he has the experience, his perception changed and this way of thinking also becomes part of his considerations in solving other problems. Namely, many things we thought are too difficult to deal with, may not be true, because we often underestimate our true ability to take on the task. By giving a goal with everything we’ve got and the mentality of keep trying until we have absolutely nothing left, we can often achieve something that seems impossible.

Wonder what kind of physical challenge we should try this year?

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