Matthew Schlegel

New job & Forex trading

Sun, 18 Apr 2004 05:44:48 GMT

Ok, I know I'm a slacker for not posting more often, but what can I say...

Anyway, since the last time I posted, I have gotten a new job, and started actively trading the foreign currency exchange (forex) markets. We'll start with the new job first I guess.

I started at Internet Advancement, Inc. (http://www.internetadvancement.net) in early March as a MySQL database admin. Now, that is certainly not my first choice of professions, but at least it is a job and income. It has progressed further than that now so that I am now the Sr. Network Engineer as well as their DBA. Hopefully I can pass on the DBA title to someone else over the next few months so that I can focus on the fun stuff - the network. :)

It is a very unusual company in that they don't seem to do interviews at all for any position. At least I havn't noticed any interviews being done, and I didn't exactly interview for the position. One of the owners of the company goes to my church (New Beginnings Church - http://www.mygodisgood.com) and that is basically how I found out about the job and got it as well. I did go down to the office for several hours the week before to "demonstrate" my network engineering knowledge, but that was rather haphazardly done on their part and there is no way they could have gotten a real feel for how much I knew from it. I think this is one of the bigger contributors to the fairly high turnover in the company, particularly in the sales department. I guess that is one of several projects on my list of things to do to improve the company.

On a completely different front, I recently purchased the book "The Master Swing Trader" by Alan Farley. I highly recommend it for anyone investing in most any trading type market, including stocks, bonds, mutual funds, options, futures, and, most importantly for me, forex markets. The book primarily deals with stock market investments, but the concepts and techniques are easily adapted to most any trading market.

For anyone that isn't familiar, the foreign exchange (forex) market is a loosly connected global market between thousands of banks where currency exchange is done. This is what the banks use to convert their dollars to euros, or yen to dollars, and any other form of currency exchange. There are also a lot of companies that provide access to speculators to this market. Most of these companies internally match orders between their customers or they will take the opposing side of the order to provide an instant fill, and pass the risk for the trade out to the market where it gets matched in near real time. This isn't a small deal either - several trillion dollars a day are moved through the forex markets - thats a *lot* of liquidity. The one other major advantage of investing in the forex markets is leverage. With most forex "brokers", you can use at least 30 to 1 leverage. When you consider that buying stock on margin, you can generally only get up to 2 to 1 leverage, the power becomes very visible. With OANDA (http://www.oanda.com), the "broker" I am using, I can use up to 50:1 levage. Now the increased leverage does increase risk as well, but it also increases reward considerably. Finally, the forex markets are open 24 hours a day, 5 days a week. They close at midnight GMT friday and reopen midnight GMT sunday.

I had started papertrading off and on several months ago with fairly limited success. I reset my paper trading account to $1000 capital about the beginning of February and through a couple of bad trades managed to bleed it down just below $900. Then I decided I'd just wait until I got my hands on the book again (I had borrowed it from the library a couple times). After getting a little ways into it again, I started paper trading again. It took me about a week to build my paper trading account back up above $1000, which I had determined as the value I wanted to attain before I started trading real money again. I definately like the increased confidence I've had as a result of having the information fresher, and it really is amazing how some of the patterns just jump off the chart too. I'm only about 1/5th of the way through the book and already I'm considerably more accurate in picking trade entries. Anyway, I started trading real money again on thursday evening, and on one trade lasting about 20 minutes including chart setup time, increased my account balance by about 1.5%. I didn't get a chance to trade friday, just because of market closing time. However, I am fairly confident that I can manage to find at least one suitable trade setup daily, especially as I get further through this book and better able to see some of the more complex patterns as they evolve on the charts. Overall, I'm very much liking forex trading.

I'm currently in the process of building a database and related scripts for tracking my progress in detail. Eventually this will be turned into a website so that anyone can make use of it easily.

Evergreen State Fair

Sun, 31 Aug 2003 06:23:11 GMT

Ok.. I know I said I'd post an entry right after the fair, but I've been trying to come up with a good spot to put the pictures to show off. In any case, the fair was a lot of fun. I didn't go on any of the rides this year, as money is a bit tight. They had a civil war reenactment this year. Well, it was really more of a marching demonstration, but it was interesting anyway. I actually got around to watching the pig races this year. Its amusing what you can get animals to do for food.

I have determined that I definately need a new digital camera, probably a good digital video camera that does stills too. Won't be too long.

My business has been doing quite well. I just finished up the paperwork for another sale tonight and helped some friends of the family buy a brand new caravan earlier in the week. The best part on the caravan is that they won't be making the payments on it - the company I am representing does that - talk about cool! Enough spamminess though. :P

I also finally got around to writing a good playlist manager for xmms. I still have some additional features to work on, but the base code works as is. Uses MySQL for a track database and tracks things like total number of plays and does requests and some stuff like that. It also forces a minimum of 6 hours between repeats of the same song, even if the song is requested again (it could be manually put into the song queue if desired, of course). One of the reason I did it in the first place is so that I could have chains of songs that would play in a specific order no matter which song got selected. I don't have many that need it right now, but it is a plus. And with the requests feature, I can pick several songs I want to hear and still get them in a random order. I'll be making it available as soon as I finish cleaning up a few things on it.

First Sales

Wed, 20 Aug 2003 04:45:33 GMT

I mentioned earlier that I was getting a new business rolling and I have now actually succeeded in making the first two sales! Ok, so they were to family that was already very familiar with the company I am representing as an independant sales rep (No, its not amway and its not multilevel), so it wasn't really a hard sell. My parents just bought a brand new 2003 Grand Caravan Sport and they are using the rebate money to buy a CarDEAL payment coverage plan from me. I know, whats that? Well, take a look at www.cardealnow.com.

In any case, I don't want to use this as a personal advertising board, so I will try to restrict my comments regarding the business to the occational report of a sale.

Outside of the business, I havn't had a whole lot going on. We had a couple of campouts at the house earlier this month for our Awana clubbers. Had a lot of fun with that.

This weekend I'm heading out to the Evergreen State Fair where 'When Pigs Fly' is this years theme. There is always a lot of interesting stuff there, so I should have a good journal posting to do when we get back. As long as I don't forget, I'll take the digi-cam and all the flash I have handy and get some pictures too. Then I'll force myself to get some sort of a gallery site up and running. >G<

Spam..

Sun, 03 Aug 2003 04:28:48 GMT

Ya know, receiving junk email is bad enough. Its even worse to end up getting the bounce messages from some spammers bulk emailing activity. My mom received over 450 bounces from some spammer using one of her addresses as the from address in their spam. Not much that can be done I suppose, but I have a hunch that spammers days are numbered. Many states already have some pretty tough junk email laws, its just a matter of taking advantage of them - an activity I intend to pursue before too much longer. I'm not generally a lawsuit seeker, but when it comes to spam, I'll sue in a heartbeat so long as I can track down where it came from!

Customer Service...

Fri, 01 Aug 2003 06:39:48 GMT

Its funny, but in a competitive business like domain registration, you would think that a company would be *very* focused on customer support and making sure that any problems were taken care of rapidly and accurately. You would also expect this to be even more the case when the prices charged are tripple what most of the competition charges. After all, they need a pretty strong added value to get customers at the higher price, right?

Well, apparently greatdomainia.com doesn't see things that way. I have been working to get my churches domain name, mygodisgood.com, transfered from greatdomainia.com over to godaddy.com. My origional motivation for moving away from greatdomainia was simply price related. There wasn't really enough value to keep me with greatdomainia when the referral bonuses I received were so small. Really not a big issue anyway, and I certainly would not be upset with them if that was all.

However, I have had nothing but trouble trying to transfer domains away from them. Out of the 3 domains I've transfered (or tried to), only one has gone without a hitch as expected. The first one I did was my koalamud.org domain, and that was done about the same time as the .org TLD changes, so I had some trouble relating to that. Overall that one wasn't too bad, though. Second one went through without problems. The third one, mygodisgood.com, has been nothing but problems. First off, both of the other two domains I transfered away were transfered in the last 30 days of their registration period. This is important as they claim the reason that the first transfer request was denied was their terms of service prohibit transfers in the last 30 days. Fine, whatever, maybe I missed those changes to the terms when I transfered the domain. Unfortunately I don't print those out, and so I don't have a copy of what the terms were when I transfered to greatdomainia. Oh, I found this out after sending two upset emails to their support address, getting no response, and calling them. Apparently their replies bounced against the RBL rules (I hate to think what my spam load would be without that frontline defense), but they couldn't be bothered to call the admin contact number listed on the domain.

So, the proposed solution at that point is to let the domain expire and then reregister it with godaddy. Sounded like a fine plan at the time, but they neglected to mention that they have a "grace period" of an additional 15 days that you can renew with them without loosing the domain, etc. That in itself wouldn't have been an issue if the domain had been left in the GTLD servers. They also neglected to mention that the domain was pulled out of the GTLD servers while in its grace period. So, here we find a supprised ex-customer caught with the problem of the website being offline, with no way to fix it, because despite the grace period supposadly ending wednesday, the domain is *STILL* in whois with regitrar-hold status attached, completely blocking me from getting it registered with godaddy and back online.

As a result, I sent another email to greatdomainia support telling them to refund my transfer fees, extend the registration to october, and release the domain for transfer. Should they fail to comply with those, or fail to propose another method of compenstating me for my troubles, they can expect to see a lot of trouble attracting new customers and, if I can accomplish it in any way, a lot of lost customers. I *really* don't think that their taking a loss of $20 or so for the trouble they caused me is going to hurt them and its much easier than taking the pain of further lost business as well. In a business with so many competitors, negative issues on BBB and similar reports are *not* good.

*Anyway*, enough venting for now I guess.

Boats...

Wed, 30 Jul 2003 07:27:09 GMT

It hasn't been until recently that boats held more than just a minor interest for me. Boats are still below airplanes as far as interests go, but I can certainly see owning at least one boat now, which is something I never really had a desire for before. My interest in power boats is pretty slim, but I can definately see myself owning a large sailboat in a few years time, and by large, I mean a minimum of 40'. In any case, I did find some interesting multihull sailboats that look like they would be promising.
Farrier Marine

As for airplanes, I'm quite fond of the Piaggio Avanti P-180. I love canard aircraft, and since the Beechcraft Starship hasn't been in production for a long time, the Piaggio is one of the very few canard planes in production. I've also been thinking about building a kit-plane. Thus far, the Velocity XL-RG is my kit of choice.
Velocity Aircraft

On a different note, I find it odd that it is so difficult to find archery supplies in the Everett area. There is one archery shop that I know of, but they don't, to my knowledge, stock some of the things like paper targets of the regulation variety. I know archery isn't as widely followed as, say, guns, but it is definately a blast. I find it much more challenging, and thus much more satisfying, to put an arrow in a bullseye from 30 yards than it is to do the same with a gun. Guns are fine and all, but theres just something special about the older style weapons...

Fun stuff

Mon, 28 Jul 2003 06:32:26 GMT

Came across an interesting link today. I'm sure most people have played in real life at some point, but now you can play on the PC. Silly? Sure, but it is somewhat entertaining.
http://www.nowwashyourhands.com/slaps/

On a different note, most are probably not aware yet, but I am getting a new business off the ground. Without going into too much detail, I'm acting as in independant sales representative for Wellspring Capital Group, Inc. They have several products that allow people to save a considerable amount of money. So, the net effect is that I get to make money by helping people to reduce their expenses, thus allowing them to have a better quality of life. Anyway, the main reason I bring the business up in the first place is that I talked to several people at church this morning about what I have to offer through Wellspring, and am finding a lot of interest. Not that it really supprises me, of course - who wouldn't want to save money, right? It is definately encouraging though. I'm guessing that it may take me a week or two more to actually close a sale, but I have a hunch that once I get one done, they will start coming much easier.

Went down to the marina today, nothing major, just saying hi to a friend that was out there working on his boat. Still has a bit more work to do before he gets it back in the water, but he does have to get things finished up before the end of the month to keep his slip. Not sure on the details of that, not being a boat owner myself (yet).

I'm now somebody...

Sun, 27 Jul 2003 04:59:43 GMT

.. or am I? Well, the word is that to be somebody, you need a live journal, so here we go. Will this make me a more interesting person? Probably not, but oh well. Maybe it will help me keep track of what happens though.

In any case, here I am.