A reflection on action research “storytelling”

What follows is a 1st person, stream of consciousness  reflection written to my mentor & committee chair.  

I describe  what it was like to record a 10 min video “telling the story” of  some preliminary findings emerging from my action research cycles into curriculum and adult learning. 

The video is hosted  at YouTube.

It will be shown at an international conference in Athens, as part of the Collaborative Action Research Network (CARN) annual conference, as part of a bundle of reports from the Future(s) of Education project, an international  participatory action research network.  

Dr Alana:  

i am just glad to get it out of my head  

i had a real out of body experience recording that one;  

i  am a very effective briefer in person, because i can read the audience pretty well.  

i have recorded hundreds of mini lectures etc for my business and for use here at the college on various topics.

i have never, ever needed more than a single take to record, decent and sometimes even inspired voice-overs  until  last night and that briefing.  

I literally needed about 30 takes to get thru it; most i stopped when less than a minute into it because the tone just didn’t feel right

 i think it has to do with being a fish out of water, and the difficulty i felt in trying to tune my story for an audience i couldn’t see, but more importantly didn’t have empathy for

because the audience characteristics still feel fuzzy to me, i couldn’t call up the right tone, voice, persona to apply  

 this caused me to have almost a split personality in the moment, when i am ordinarily dialed in

 i had a “talking part” and a “look ahead part” that is concerned with shaping the transition to the next point/slide  

but now i had a disconcerting 3rd part that was trying to anticipate the possible reactions of an unfamiliar, and hard to imagine audience  

this is what made me feel so out of sorts

 until i “wore out” the last, 3d part and was able to trust in just telling the story, and accepting the vulnerability of knowing that i couldn’t know the audience, i found i just couldn’t get thru it.  

this is the same phenomenon I spoke with Prof Mike Wesch, the digital anthropologist at Kansas State University, and world thought leader on social dynamics in social media: the camera eye represents the unlimited, unfathomable infinite future of all possible audiences across time and space who can be looking in on the “telling moment”.  

in a sense, its like coming face to face with the unblinking eye of God and wondering what she is thinking  

 it is trust that lets us get thru that moment, the accepting of vulnerability, that creates the empathy that hopefully fills the story, as told, with hope.  

that’s a clumsy way of trying to express my meaning of the risk and vulnerability to “telling” and why it can be such a powerful learning moment, and why we need to model it, embrace it, encourage it, and support it. 

Your “producer’s draft” was exactly what i needed to be able to get out of my own comfortable fishbowl; 

you gave me a bridge to the audience that i could not create on my own.  

this has become an interesting reflection to me already  

please put the video on the website, and any or all of this reflection as you deem suitable  

have a great time at the conference!

Reflecting on the source of qualitative judgement

Profitable ETF Trading Strategies: Stalking your way to success

One of the more neglected topics in trading systems development is the concept of stalking. Traders, particularly early in their career will tend to spend  lot of time, if not ll of their time, focusing on the entry, reasoning that if they can get that part right they will have some control over the market’s inevitable follow thru, which must go according to plan, because of the predictive power of their perfect entry technique. 

If, as a trader, you are able to survive this philosophical approach to the market, based on certainty, control and predictability, you will move along to other aspects of a complete trading system, like the exits, position sizing, trade management of open positions, portfolio heat, overnight rick management, re-entry and matching system performance to specific market conditions. 

These are non-trivial issues in the development of an effective system. Stalking the trade however has to do with the period before the trade is engaged, and offers you opportunities to leverage what may be your greatest edge as an individual trader, if you have discipline and patience to do it properly. 

I believe that stalking is intimately and directly connected to your deep understanding of the edge your trading system has. The better you understand your system and your edge, and the market conditions that favor its use, the better position you will be in to stalk effectively. 

Think of a pride of hungry lions on the hunt. Their stalking consists of knowing their market (their prey) and where they will inevitably congregate in large numbers (watering holes and  grazing lands which represent their trading opportunities). Effective stalking consists of taking advantage of their natural strengths in the market conditions that favor their methods. 

Liosn will sniff the air at a hint of a suggestion of the possibility of their prey. They will scan widely and contuously and begin fllowing the scent until they can vector in on their target and begin their hunt in earnest. Their stalking gets them reliably into the right position to begin the hunt.  That’s what your stalking must do for you.

Your stalking should include some early warning signs that let you know the market and trade conditions that favr your system are starting to emerge from the market mosaic. You can start posturing yourself for action early enough to conduct trade framing and execution rehearsals, and contingency planning, so that if the favorable conditions continue to develop you will be able to take the trade in stride, with full preparation and risk management in hand. 

Depending on the nature of your system and your edge, your stalking may take a different form, but it will always incorporate an early earning system, preparation planning and rehearsals if you want to achieve best results. 

Patience and discipline are the essential qualities of mind that you will need to exploit your deep understanding of your edge.

Profitable ETF Trading Strategies: Finding your best mental state for trading

In previous articles I have described my concept of the “zero-state”, and the combination of personal satisfaction and improved bottomline performance I get when I trade from that state. 

In this article I want to describe some other mental states that traders I know find useful and consider the implications for your own journey of self discovery and trading mastery.  It is my hope that you may discover that it works for you or that the journey of discovery may awaken you to other states along the way that you will find equally satisfying and useful. 

After all, trading from an emotion free state (like my description of the zero state) may not be the best mental state for you. For example, I know traders who find it necessary and useful to achieve a state of emotional alpha male competitiveness in order to enter the ring of combat, which is how they perceive the markets and interpret their role. 

Without being mentally prepared for the combat they anticipate, and therefore see, they will be undercutting their own effectiveness in the trading arena. 

Another effective trader I know has a need to see himself as a pure mechanical businessman and must take a different approach: that of disinterested observer;  He gets so disinterested that he cannot even watch the trades unfolding lest he start adapting his rules in mid trade. His analysis showed that this was not adding value, and so his mental state needed to be as far away from engagement as possible. 

These were  just 3 examples of different mental states being suitable for effective traders, which implies that there may be as many unique states as there are traders, which means that you must use introspection and self knowledge to discover what works for you psychologically as well as needing to examine trading strategies that suit your personality, time frame, risk profile and working hypothesis of market behavior. 

How will you know? Know thyself, consult with trusted others, but above all else, make sure you are trading with real money in very small position sizes to assess the effects of market, system, money and self on your total trader’s performance system. Without that essential step you are postponing the day of judgment. The sooner you get into the game, the sooner you will engage in real learning.

Profitable ETF Trading Strategies: Experiencing the Zero-State

For me, achieving the zero-state is a necessary precondition for trading at my peak. In other essays I have described it as a place where adjective pairs of mental states cancel each other out, leaving only a moment of pure being.

It is the space between the words that we know, a moment and a place of freedom, where all notes may be struck, the moment precisely before the next action occurs.

For a horn player, it is the moment where he has gathered his breath and is prepared to initiate the note, the pure balance point between inhale and exhale.

For a diver it is the moment of motionless serenity between ascent and descent.

Imagine a Cartesian coordinate semantic grid system with adjective pairs arrayed about the origin, with each word having its precisely paired antonym and where the midpoint of the ray that connects them is bisected at the origin. That spot in the semantic meaning gris is where I seek to trade from in order to have my trading takes its purest expression in both action and no-action.

When I trade from this moment, this place, my results generate neither joy nor sadness, and simply are what they are. This allows me to enter the next trade with no emotional charge.

It is also keenly important to my style of trading where I am looking for the hesitation point in a channel trade or in a breakout, where price remains poised between fear and greed, where bulls and bears are in timeless balance and the next leg of the move will begin just as the last leg ends.

When I am able to stalk the price to that moment of harmony, that zero-state where momentum transitions I am able to refine my entry to very tight level levels and find initial capital preservation stops that are absurdly close, which enable me to minimize open risk and move to “no lose” trade conditions very quickly.

 When I know that barring an interruption of connectivity or market discontinuity I will never do worse than break even,  this is an immensely freeing psychological state to be in as a professional trader and yet it’s value for me is in the spiritual nourishment and satisfaction I experience having a brush with Truth and Perfection in a small way for a fleeting moment in my life.

In judo we speak of a moment in a throw where you and your partner are equally sure that the other judo player is throwing you with exactly the same force and skill as you are throwing them. In that moment the throws stop, time slows, and you are suspended in a moment of pure being.

What I like about trading is that as I approach the zero state my equity curve smoothes and my trading practice is rewarded

Profitable ETF Trading Strategies: Trading From the Zero-State

One of the most important qualities of the professional trader is the ability to manage your psychological state.

Psychology is such an important component of shorter term trading that it can make all the difference between success and failure.

In my own trading, the essential state of mind I must be in to trade at an optimal level is what I call the “zero-state”.

For me, it represents an emotionally neutral state that is neither happy nor sad, neither overconfident nor fearful. The adjective “calm” starts to come close to what I mean but there is an important difference. “

Calm” is part of an adjective pair, whose partner has precisely the opposite meaning. “Stormy” is usually given as the antonym. For me, this moment is one that may not be contained in a conventional adjective that describes a state, because I associate adjectives as being part of a word pair, with its opposite on the other side of the continuum whose exact center I think of as “zero”, as on the number line.

Conceptually, the Japanese term “mu” comes fairly close to this idea, having been variously described as neither yes nor no, but a state in-between that does not acknowledge the question being asked as one that may be answered by wither yes or now, with the answer existing in a different plane of reality.

Serenity is a word that describes a state that comes even closer than calm, because it suggests for me something more like a timeless eternity of “no-emotion”, where I am not connected to the outcome in a personal meaningful way.

For me the pure form of the act of trading is to achieve a timeless correctness, to take actions or to refrain from actions in perfect balance with the needs of the market t that moment, to be nothing more or less than that which is required ideally.

In Cartesian coordinates the point (0,0), is called the origin and is central to all subsequent mathematical operations. It is the point from which all action begins and where excursions are grounded for reference. It is the ultimate reference point that links together individual cases .

Profitable ETF Trading Strategies: How science can improve your trading

Trading by its very nature is filled with uncertainty. Any human endeavor that has such a strong psychological component must be uncertain, until such time as human nature itself undergoes a fundamental change. 

It is uncertainty which helps make a market for assets. It’s what helps drive the discovery process to uncover the relative value different parties place on an asset. It encourages risk-taking behavior in real time to anticipate the short term future direction of prices. 

Uncertainty and psychology don’t necessarily make it easy on the trader to act with confidence and commitment. On the contrary it provides opportunities for self-doubt indecision, and will often keep you on the sidelines when your rational mind and trading system may signal you to act. 

Traders that set aside the uncertainty of the moment and act with conviction based on sound trading principles and thoroughly vetted trading strategies have a definite edge over those who are coming from a weak place. 

One of the mental disciplines that I have found to be very helpful has been to adopt a trading approach that relies on a scientific metaphor to focus my mind and free me to act in a sound manner. Here is the technique’s basic approach. 

Once yo have a reason to believe in the soundness of a basic strategy, define the boundaries of the idea and circumstances in which you have an edge. 

It may be in a price level, in a chart pattern, in a combination of indicators that have yielded statistically sound returns in certain market conditions that are now in play. 

Find the specific price levels that give you clear evidence that:

1. the idea is beginning to work

2. the idea is failing

3. the idea has fully manifested itself and the profit target is realized 

These specific price levels allow you to define your initial risk, set the triggers for entry, initial capital preservation stop, and profit target to harvest your reward for action. 

By clearly defining the terms of your trading idea you have established a hypothesis that can be tested based on the pure evidence of price and eliminate some of the counterproductive self talk that leads to inaction. It allows you to let the trade decide its own results, and gives you a case study that can add to your knowledge of the system’s performance. 

By trading it at a risk level that allows you to dispassionately separate yourself from the results you allow the trading idea to stand on its own merits and remove the variable of your own discretion from the mix. 

This approach is not a natural way to think about the market, but it can do wonders for your discipline and your bottom line if you have reasonably robust trading strategies.

Profitable ETF Trading Strategies: 8 attributes of quality research

There are plenty of snake oil salesmen in the financial advisory business, but there are by far many more conscientious professionals prepared to act as good fiduciaries for you. At the same time there are many people willing to take on full responsibility for the design and implementation of some or all of their own investment program. 

This article describes the characteristics of quality financial research, to help you identify the difference between quality and snake oil, using the standards of scholarly research to inform our decision-making. 

What distinguishes quality research in any field from pure opinion has everything to do with rigor, the design of experiments, and a respect for the difficulties in pursuit of the truth. 

If you can see the following qualities in the research of someone who proposes to provide you advice or financial services then you can have more confidence in achieving your financial goals. 

Quality research should be: systematic, controlled, empirical, amoral, public and a critical examination of the world, informed by theory, and framed in a hypothesis. 

Here are some brief insights to get you started down the path of critical thinking: 

1. Systematic: the research program should be unhurried, thorough, comprehensive and organized. There should be evidence of an attention to detail and a commitment to completing the testing no matter the time or complications in performing the work. 

2. Controlled: care should be given to establish the difference between correlation and causation; in the identification of cause and effect and in identifying dependent and independent variables. 

3. Empirical: we want to see evidence from the real world, that is replicable, verifiable’ in the case of back-testing we want to ensure that only the information available at the time is used in hypothetical decision-making in order to be truly realistic. 

4. Amoral: we want facts and conclusions to succeed or fall on their own merits, and in pursuit of truth; not simply to support a biased opinion. 

5. Public: we want to see all the details of the research and they should be independently verifiable; we don’t want to see black boxes or special testing circumstances unavailable for inspection. 

6. Critical examination: real scientists are concerned about overstating their claims and are in search of evidence to disprove their hypothesis, rather than looking for reasons to agree with their suppositions. A scientist is concerned about finding the hidden flaws in their own reasoning and hypothesis, because of the implications of their conclusions. 

7. Informed by Theory: we want the world to conform to reasonable processes; this bias helps protect us against statistical anomalies and data mining 

8. Framed in a hypothesis: we want to see how the experiment can allow the hypothesis to be disproven in a clear-cut, meaningful way. We want the ideas to be testable and falsifiable in unambiguous terms.

These ideas are strongly related to a conceptual approach to trading which establishes price levels at which we can state clearly that our idea is either working or failing, which gives us explicit criteria for entering and exiting.

Profitable ETF Trading Strategies: You don’t have to be “right” to make money

What happens when you have placed your trade and you immediately have second thoughts as you watch the market moving against you? 

It is a normal trading experience to have a position that has moved in your favor a certain distance but has begin to stall before it reached the price that you were expecting it to reach, or which you have established as a reasonable price target. 

As soon as you see the price start to reverse and move against you, you are presented with the age old problem of whether or not you should cash the partial win or remain disciplined, and true to your trading plan and let the price go where it will. 

Psychological studies have repeatedly found that we are affected emotionally about three times harder but our losses than our gains. So, to see a profitable position move against you into the red is especially painful because you have experienced the loss of profits (which you will measure from the highest high of the trade) compounded by the triple pain of a loss. 

Unfortunately all traders who have experienced this decision  have also seen what it feels like when they have taken the partial profit and then witnessed the position reverse once more and zoom upwards to new highs immediately after exiting their position.  The emotional response to missed profits hurts just as much as actual dollars lost according to psychologists. 

Because of the way our brains are wired the instances where we chose incorrectly stand out more in our memories than all the times we made the “right” decision. 

After this has happened to you a number of times, you start to second guess yourself, and you can get gun shy about any decision you make, to the point where you cannot rationally approach the subject. It is common for traders in this psychological state to look for a perfect exit rule that allows them to be “right”, to give them an insight into the “correct decision”. 

The truth is that no one has the perfect solution to this dilemma; no one can be “right” all the time. 

The good news is that you don’t have to be “right” to have an effective exit strategy. 

What you need are psychologically acceptable rules for exiting and for re-entering positions. This means they must be acceptable to you! 

By having a good re-entry plan you no longer have to worry about missing the great move that kept you in a position that was moving against you. This gives you the confidence of capturing the profit in hand before it disappears and becomes a tangible loss. 

By being effective in preserving capital and profits, and by being able to re-join a winning position you can stop worrying about being “right” all the time, and simply concentrate on making money. 

Profitable ETF Trading Strategies: 3 Tips for developing a market classification system that fits your style

In previous articles I have described why a market classification scheme is a high payoff strategy for improving your trading results. I now want to describe a few things for you to consider as you look to take advantage of your edge in market classification. 

Focus on the following issues to make sure that your research efforts can be applied to your style and objectives. Remember that you are not in search of eternal truths for all times and places, for all traders and styles. You are just trying to make a reasonable, risk-adjusted return on your invested time and money to achieve financial freedom, This will take you down different paths than those of the pure academic, and with the intent of adding value to your bottom line. 

1. Focus on your time frame for trading, especially if you are looking initially to supplement your income and have not yet made the leap to full time, professional, independent market trader for a living. You will have constraints placed on your time by the competing demands of work and family and there will be some styles that are simply not within your reach. No sense trying to develop a classification scheme for a style that will not fit you.

2. Identify interesting markets and targets for you to specialize in.  You want these to offer you the kinds of volatility you can trade yet are within your tolerance for excitement. As a trader you must trade on volatility, the fluctuation of price around the idea of “fair value”. It will be important for you in the early years to focus on markets that you find appealing and interesting and about which you will develop a feel and an expertise that will give you an edge. It is these markets where your classification scheme can be informed by both art and science. 

3. Look for a blend of art and science in your classification scheme. Find elements of the market’s behavior that may be expressed as rules, like seasonality volatility cycles, time frames that seem to repeat, typical patterns and express those quantitatively. Find those patterns and themes that seem to emerge in the course of your trading to add an element of qualitative description to your scheme.  By blending the best of both worlds you will have a market classification scheme that leverages the 2 primary domains of your cognition: art and science, qualitative and quantitative reasoning. 

Your classification scheme will help you to interpret price into useful meaning which can be placed into favorable risk-managed action.