Tradesight Messenger 2.0 Release

This is something that is a long time coming. It takes a lot of money and programming effort to do something like this. We’re about to launch an all-new website, and the Messenger is part of that launch. In fact, I wanted it done first.

I’m going to walk you through how to use this new Messenger, what is improved in it, and talk about some of its “special features.” I have to say that I personally think that it is pretty darn cool.

The biggest complaint that customers have about Messenger 1.0 is that they have to have a web browser open to view the full message. This is no longer the case. Everything can be viewed quickly (much faster) and easily in Messenger 2.0. This includes the reports themselves.

The biggest complaint on MY end about Messenger 1.0 is that anyone can log in with a username from multiple computers. In other words, you can share the Messenger with someone else with your username. This is no longer the case. The Messenger only works on one machine at once. If you log in at home and then go to work and log in, the home version stops getting new messages. It’s that simple.

The nice bonus about this new Messenger 2.0 is that it isn’t just about Tradesight calls based on your subscription, although that is what you are paying for. Instead, it also is about news. You’ll see what I mean.

So, I’m going to walk you through step by step how this Messenger works. The old Messenger 1.0 no longer works, so please follow these exact steps to get rid of it permanently.

1) Right-Click on the Tradesight Eyeball in the lower right corner of your screen (in the system tray). Hit Exit.

2) Start…Programs…Tradesight Messenger…Uninstall.

3) Reboot. The Messenger should not come up.

OK, so you install the Messenger from this link:

http://www.tradesight.com/rss/TradesightMessengerInstaller.exe

Just Run it and let it install. Then, you can run it from your Start…Programs…Tradesight Messenger folder. Keep in mind that this new Messenger does not automatically start each time you turn on your computer. You have to start it manually, or you can put it in Start…Programs…Startup, and then it will start each time.

When you run the program for the first time, note the new Tradesight logo and eyeball splash screen. We’ll talk about that when the new website comes up.

You’ll get a Messenger that basically says that no Feeds were found because no username is entered. Just hit Yes or OK.

Now, the Messenger is in front of you. Hit Edit…Preferences and put in your Tradesight username and password under the General option. Hit OK.

You should now see the Feeds for the subscriptions that you pay for, plus something called “Financial Feeds.” More on that later.

Let’s go through some options first.

Hit Edit…Preferences again. You’ll see several items, including General, Tray, Cache, Archive, Browser, and Online Connections. Let’s talk about each of these.

General: There are really only two things here that matter. Your username/password for Tradesight needs to be entered. The “Play Sound Notification with new feed entry” box, which is checked by default. This means that when there is an unread message in your Tradesight feeds, you get a sound. If you don’t want the sound alerts, uncheck that and hit enter.

Tray: Several key options. “Send to tray on minimize” should always be checked. This means that if you hit the minimize button in the top right-ish corner of the Messenger, it will shrink the Messenger to an icon in your system tray. “Send to tray on close” is also checked. This means that if you hit the red X in the top right corner of the Messenger, it will also disappear and still keep running in the system tray. If you UNCHECK this and hit enter, then hitting the red X will close the program completely. “Send to tray on startup” is unchecked. If you check this and hit enter, then when you run the Messenger, it starts only in the System Tray. My suggestion is to leave all of these alone.

“Maximum number of news per notification popup.” The default setting is 5. That means that if you have the Messenger shrunk down to the system tray, a little pop-up will appear when new messages are found, but it will only show up to 5. You can change the number. “Number of seconds to display a notification group” is the number of seconds that the pop-up window will last when new messages arrive. I actually use 10 on the first setting and 5 on the second, but the defaults are the opposite because not everyone uses/has many feeds. Make changes and hit OK.

Cache: Mostly ignore.

Archive: Mostly ignore.

Browser: The default is that everything opens inside the Messenger for you to see complete messages. If you still want to exit to a separate window, you can change this and hit Apply.

Online connections is for people behind Firewalls.

So those are the settings that you can change.

Now, beyond that, in the Messenger, you should see a list of Feeds. When you click on a Feed, you’ll see the last “x” number of messages for that feed. Unlike the last Messenger, it separates things out by Feed. The messages themselves to the right include Date, Time, Title of Messenger, Feed, and soon, Author. If you click once on the message title to the right, you will see the Headline (i.e. the Trade Call or title) appear below. You will see a link underlined in blue below. Clicking on that will bring up the complete message in the Messenger. You can also double-click the Message up top.

Now, how do you set messages to update? Easy, but you have to do this manually the first time.

Right-click on each feed and hit Properties. Change the Update period to “Every Minute” unless you want it to check less often. Hit OK. Do this for each of the Tradesight feeds, and they will check for new messages each minute. Once they are set, you don’t have to do this again when you run the Messenger again as long as you hit File…Exit once and then come back in. This saves the settings.

You’ll notice that if you make the Messenger full screen, you can view complete reports in the Messenger itself instead of ever opening a separate web browser. The only issue is the recorded forex sessions, which we are working on how to cover.

Essentially, the Tradesight Messenger is what we call an RSS/Atom Reader. Therefore, we realized that we didn’t need to stop at your secure Tradesight feeds.

So, we added a bunch of real-time news feeds.

These do not update by default. You have to turn them on. If you want to turn on none, some, or all of them, that is your choice. Here is a one-by-one description of the feeds in order.

Reuters Business News: Standard Stock stuff from Reuters.

Under CNN:

Economy: Separate articles about the economy and economic numbers

Fortune: Articles from Fortune magazine

Markets: CNN’s market comments, about seven per day

Sivy on Stocks: A specific analyst’s advice from CNN on certain stocks

Under Financial Times (one of the top global financial newsletters, and certainly a big one for finance):

Asia-Pacific: Headlines out of this region

Captial Markets: Headlines for global stock indices

Currencies: Headlines for currency and forex stuff

Equities: Headlines for global stocks

Europe: Headlines out of this region

Investors Notebook: Stock recommendations from their service

US: Headlines out of this region

Under PR Newswire:

Conference Call Announcements: News on earnings calls

Earnings Forecast: Changes in earnings projections

Investment Opinions: Trading ideas from them

Under The Street:

Mad Money Lightning Round: Links to Cramer’s Mad Money Lightning Round in case you don’t watch the show

Mad Money Recap: Links to Cramer’s recaps in case you don’t watch the show

Stop Trading: Links to Cramer’s Stop Trading segment

Under Yahoo Feeds:

Bonds: A feed of information about the Bond market

Currencies: A feed of information about forex/currencies

Earnings: A feed of information about earnings releases

Economy and Government: A feed of information about economic data releases

Money Center Banks: A feed of information about banks

Upgrades/Downgrades: A feed of information about upgrades and downgrades

US Markets: A Yahoo feed of information about the US markets

So, you can activate any of these by right-clicking and hitting Properties. You can activate a group of Feeds under one title (like Financial Times) by right-clicking on the Financial Times item, hitting Properties, and changing the Update to “Every Minute” and checking “Adopt Recursively for all favorites.” This will turn all of the feeds under Financial Times on to update every minute.

Note that the Financial feeds, several of which get new articles every minute, don’t qualify for the sound alerts. Only Tradesight calls do.

In general, we fell that this Messenger provides a lot of information in a cleaner format where you can choose what you want and not have to wait for your IE or Firefox to open and get the complete message. Heck, you never even need to go to a website separately to view reports if you don’t want to.

Enjoy, and I’m looking for any feedback so we can change things.

Rich’s webinars have received terrific feedback over the years, and Rich has decided to do something a little different with his next topic. He’s created a two-part seminar. The first piece is a fundamental overview of the topic that will give traders the broad picture, while the second piece gets into the technical action and will take place a month later.

Intermarket trading, or switching between asset classes, has seen strong growth in recent years and is expected to continue. In this new series, Rich will focus on intermarket cycles and trends. The emphasis of the work will focus on understanding the rhythm of market cycles and the global implications in the marketplace.

The first part of the webinar (Saturday, April 5, 11 am EST, $50) will focus on an in-depth introduction to intermarket concepts. This webinar is expected to last approximately an hour and a half, although Rich’s webinars usually run a little long.

The second part of the webinar (tentatively set for Saturday, May 3, 11 am EST, $249, $199 for Platinum subscribers) will cover the technical analysis of intermarket cycles. This webinar is expected to last over three hours.

The topics covered in the first webinar include:

Intermarket correlations of stocks, bonds, curencies, and commodities
The business cycle and it’s influence on different investment alternatives
Disinflation/Deflation–why Japan exported disinflation in the 1990’s
The relationship between Commodities and USD: Important global implications for FOREX and stocks
Why Copper is the PhD of Commodities
How REIT’s fit into the investment cycle
Global market influences
Anticipating when big money platers are likely to move money from one asset class to another

At Tradesight, we teach a top-down approach to trading markets, but we also teach that all markets can be traded equally, and in fact, that no single market is always the most interesting. Rich’s webinar is a perfect topic for those that have always wondered when to concentrate on different markets. Even if your primary concern is one asset class, Rich will certainly help you recognize how to time the better moves in that arena based on a more macroeconomic view.

If you are currently a member, please e-mail kim@tradesight.com. Give her your username and tell her that you are interested in attending the initial event on April 5. If you are using your credit card on file, just send the 3-digit code on the back of the card along with your e-mail.

If you are not currently a Tradesight member, please e-mail kim@tradesight.com, and she will arrange for payment.

Instructions on how to get into the webinar will be e-mailed the day before the event, and we will record the webinar. Attendees can view the recording at any time in the future, as usual.

Details on how to sign up for the technical portion of the webinar will be available later in April.

I want to thank those of you that took the time to fill out the poll about the Tradesight service. It wasn’t for nothing. Although I had a daily newsletter for my customers as a broker going back to 1998 (so ten years ago), Tradesight itself began in mid-2002. We’re almost six years into this thing, and one thing that I have always tried to do was improve the service in the way that my subscribers wanted.

I got a few e-mails and even comments from people after they took the survey that they were concerned about skewing the results because they only belonged to one service. The way the software works, I can filter the data and crosstabulate it in a variety of ways, so that isn’t really a concern. In other words, I just filter through the people that are stock subscribers and see what they had to say about the stock service, etc. It was just easier to get answers from everyone than it was to try to have the survey software make your answers determine what question was next. So if you only subscribed to one service and decided not to take the survey because you didn’t think it applied to you, that actually wasn’t true, and you can still take it for a few days before it shuts off.

We ended up with about 160 responses, which is not quite a quarter of total Tradesight subscribers to various services. It’s definitely enough to give me an idea of what people are thinking.

In the next couple of months, there will be some changes to the site, and some of the final decisions have been made based on the results of these. I always suspect certain things, but I like to see the real numbers as they come from real subscribers. The comments at the end were also very useful and added a few ideas for me.

Just to keep anyone that is interested in the loop in terms of the decision-making process, I’m going to go through the whole survey, with the breakdown of questions and answers by percentage, and discuss what changes might be made to react to demands. If anyone reads this and either didn’t take the survey or has additional thoughts, feel free to e-mail me anything you’d like to see.

One thing about the survey in advance…I’ve done surveys before, not just about Tradesight. I actually have a scientific interest in the polling process. A lot of these questions have three choices, which I prefer to 2 or 4, and I also prefer to make you choose one possibility instead of “all that apply.” In some cases, it matters which answer got the largest response. In other cases, it says more which answer got the least. You’ll see what I mean.

Unless I state otherwise, the results below only count people that “are or had been subscribers” to the various services. In other words, I’m ignoring the comments about stock and etf from someone who only had the forex service as they don’t really have anything to contribute there.

And final note before we get started…several people asked about the Swing report and why it wasn’t discussed here. Understand that the Swing report was created for two people: students just learning the markets and people with an extremely hands-off trading style that just want to get a few of the nicer patterns each day to select from. If someone could make 10-20% a year just trading the swing report picks without having to be in front of the machine all day, that’s it. You aren’t going to make 5o or 100 percent trading those picks unfiltered. What I mean by that is…the swing report is just picks, and there is nothing in the service that advises you to take them or not according to anything else going on in the market: market direction, market volume, time of day, sector, etc. There is no doubt in my mind that someone could do much better with those picks if they considered market direction at the time of the trigger, volume, etc., but then someone who is watching the market like that also wants more picks and will make more adjustments intraday. Keep in mind that the Swing report, if you just go off of the numbers, doesn’t even account for adjusting a single stop intraday, which of course, if not what someone watching the market should do. There are less than 10 US Swing report subscribers, although there are many overseas. It also isn’t a report for our target subscriber, so it doesn’t come up. Most people that come to Tradesight are looking for more than the Swing report provides.

OK, let’s begin. The first questions related to the stock report. I will ask the question and give the answers with the percentage of people that gave that answer.

What is your impression on the general feel of the stock reports?

Lots of information in a well-defined layout (72%)
Too much information for what I really need (9%)
Not enough information (19%)

This was just a basic question to give me a starting point about the report. I wasn’t looking for anything shocking here, and I didn’t get it. This is a question about which answer gets the most, and the “status quo” answer definitely overwhelmed at 72%. We certainly aren’t going to put less in the report, so I hope 9% of people just scan to what they want to see. For the other 19%, keep reading, but if you have specifics about what you’d like to see and didn’t put them in the open comments at the end, let me know. 72% for the status quo answer is pretty strong, so we know we’re going to be “tweaking” more than “overhauling.”

In regard to the daily picks, which statement would you agree with:

I want more picks with different patterns (19%)
The number of picks on average is good (41%)
I’m more interested in daytrading and not the daily picks (40%)

This is a question about breaking the answers into two’s. 60% of people either like the picks in the report or want more picks in the report based on the daily charts. 40% are really just interested in daytrading mostly. Or, you could group the bottom two answers and get from that that 81% of people don’t really want more picks in the reports because they like the number of picks on average and/or really just want intraday calls during the market. That’s actually a very interesting number. I would have expected more people to ask for more picks in the report.

We’re still just getting started, so I’ll save some of the commentary. Tradesight originally started out as a service designed to spot key longer-term patterns and trade them on an intraday basis. I don’t believe in overtrading. However, Rich definitely joined our group as someone with a more active approach, and Ran and Mark do a lot of daytrading, so we definitely try to cater to the needs of the more active trader. Let’s move on for now.

Do you use the option play in the trade call?

Yes (15%)
No (85%)

I can already tell you one change that we were going to make. Right now, there are some people that take only the Swing report, which has 4 of the top picks off of the main report each day. Since the Swing report is designed for people looking to trade for more than just a daytrade, I’m going to stop listing the options play in the Stock report and instead just list it for the four picks in the Swing report. On average, those are the better patterns anyway, which means those are the ones that should be considered for options. The Swing report is available for free for anyone with the main Stock report (just ask to have it added), as it doesn’t have any extra information up until now, but will now have the options play.

Do you use the sector information provided for each pick?

Yes (56%)
No (44%)

It’s rare that I spend too much time considering a sector when I trade. If I find a daily pattern that I like, I’m more concerned about the overall market direction and volume than the sector that the stock is in. This piece was at risk of getting cut from the main report, but since over half of you claim to use it, we will continue to list the sectors.

Which of the following fields do you want to see with each pick:

Trigger, first target, swing target, stop (as it currently shows) (40%)
Trigger, target, stop (18%)
Trigger, stop (35%)
Just the trigger (7%)

This is another tough one for me. I don’t use the numbers given in the table really outside of the trigger. I set my stop based on the intraday action leading up to the play typically, but I also watch the market and make decisions. The typical first target for a pick is more for swing traders and is closer to $0.50, usually based on a line off the pivot series. I don’t wait for that either…I take partials near $0.20 on anything except the expensive stuff like GOOG, RIMM, AAPL, etc. There are two ways to look at this information. Just barely, the status quo answer got more than the others. Or, you could view it as 60% of people are asking for less here, presumably because they don’t use it directly anyway and rely more on what we do in the Chat room/Trading Lab.

In light of a later question, I think it is apparent that people are looking for something a little different, so there will probably be a change in what goes in the table. However, just like the options call, the Swing Report will continue to show these numbers for the top four picks, so you can expect to get the “swing” targets and stops for the best patterns still.

How often do you read the recap of the prior day’s triggers?

Every day (75%)
Sometimes (18.75%)
Never (6.25%)

Enough said, and you should be reading the recaps. That’s how you learn how to trade and see what happened. You can’t just look forward, you have to analyze backward.

If one thing were going to be changed/added, which would you prefer:

More detailed reviews of prior day’s trades to talk about how to play them (38%)
More market analysis in terms of the indices, including more indices (53%)
More picks of different patterns and styles based on the daily charts (9%)

This is somewhat interesting. I get two things from this. First, overwhelmingly, people would rather see the recaps of trades that occurred to learn from them (which explains why 75% read them) over more picks. I think this is extremely positive in viewing Tradesight as educational material. Second, the top answer was more broad market analysis. We have just the thing for that.

In the coming weeks, no start date set yet, we’re going to expand the market overview section of the stock report. Here is how it will work. Right now, I make a few extra comments on Sunday because it is the start of the week, and then I basically throw up the NDX, S&P, SOX, and BTK daily charts every day so you can see where we are at. Instead, we’re going to do this. For the Monday reports (written over the weekend), I will get far more detailed about what I see. Then, for Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, Rich will give in-depth overviews of the things that he sees in the indices that he thinks are the most important. That doesn’t mean he’ll cover the NDX and S&P every night, although those charts will likely go up. But it means that you will get a flavor of what he’s really concentrating on heading into the next session. For Friday, we’ll probably just put up the charts again because it is the last day of the week. This should be a huge addition for many of you and help you prepare better for the market.

What is your view of the futures:

I plot the Levels and use them to guide me in the markets (43%)
I plot the Levels and trade the futures daily (9%)
I don’t follow the futures (48%)

Totally interesting. The obvious point of interest here is that almost half of Tradesight subscribers don’t even follow the futures. I just don’t see how people trade the markets without doing that, but evidently they do. I’d love to get a crosstabulated sheet on how success people are that do and don’t follow the futures. I bet it is night and day, but there’s nothing that I can do about that. It gives me some ideas about bringing a heavier futures trader into the mix at some point in the room. We’ll see. That’s not in the plans for this next month.

Which statement do you agree with:

I prefer to have the picks sorted by analyst and long/short (as it does currently) (69%)
I’d rather have the picks sorted by type of pattern (7%)
I don’t care how the picks are sorted as long as I get them and the chart related to them (24%)

This one caught me off-guard a bit, I must say. I think the fact that these picks are in “order that I like them” is fine, but also somewhat arbitrary. My plan was to change up the list so that we could check off whether the patterns were “cup and handle,” “head and shoulders,” “base breakout/down,” etc., and then have them grouped together. That way, if people prefer a certain type of pattern, they can find those easily rather than having to go through the charts (which you should still do, but in the interest of getting you that information quicker). Also, we’re about to go back to the stock report being required for you to get into the Chat room/Trading Lab so that we can get away from calling these things by number. I’d rather let people talk about them by symbol and rank them in the list by pattern. I am surprised by how many people really prefer the current scheme. I still might try to change it and see what people think. From an education perspective, I think it would be more interesting to group the plays by type of pattern with Ran’s and mine in the same list instead of breaking them up. We’ll see.

What statement do you agree with most about the Messenger calls for the stock service?

Fill it up with a lot of daytrading ideas (64%)
Use the Messenger more for updates and leave the daytrading calls for the Trading Lab (13%)
A little bit of all of it is good, but I don’t want the Messenger popping up all day (23%)

Interesting stuff. No doubt people want more in the Messenger, but over a third of subscribers don’t want to see it be the source of more calls. This is one of those things that you really only see on my end when you talk to subscribers who don’t have time to pull up a chart every time a trade is called because they are at work. There are a number of subscribers in the US that take the stock service and not the Trading Lab/Chat room because they are at work during market hours and can’t keep the room up and running at work. Having the Messenger pop up all of the time bugs them too. Now, to the next Messenger question…

What are your thoughts on the Tradesight Messenger:

Great tool, easy to use (73%)
Great idea, but I don’t double click because it loads a browser window each time (20%)
I don’t even have it installed (7%)

Not installed! Don’t get me started. The second item was what I was worried about, so we’re looking at new RSS Readers to deliver the content differently. That way, you can get the entire message in the Messenger and not have to open IE or Mozilla each time. The other issue with the Messenger is that your computer checks for new messages every 60 seconds. That means that if I post a daytrading call that is about to trigger, it could take a minute to pop up in the Messenger. That really isn’t ideal, as the trade could trigger in that time, which is why I’ve said over and over that active calls need to be made in the room. Our analysts are trading, and I can’t expect them to type something in the Messenger every time when something is moving fast. In addition, you might not get it until after it triggers a minute later, and there’s nothing worse than getting a call just in time to see it running.

However, and I can’t promise anything yet because of the cost of delivery, but we are looking at some technology pieces to replace the Messenger that would be more “instant message”-like, which means that the message would pop up on your desktop instantly instead of inside of 60 seconds. Either way, Messenger changes and improvements are coming. At the very least, the need for IE or Mozilla should be eliminated. Even better if we can make the delivery instant.

Which analyst would you like to hear more in the Lab?

Chris (9%)
Rich (16%)
Mark (2%)
Ran (22%)
All are fine as is (51%)

It’s an interesting set of numbers. Hard to read some of that except to say that half of the people are fine with the amount that each of us talks in the room. I’ll comment more on this later.

Which statement would you agree with most:

I’d like to see more constant discussion in the Lab about calls (54%)
I’d like to see more constant discussion in the Lab about the market in general and the indices (25%)
Don’t talk much unless you have a call to make, I’m watching and listening to too many things (21%)

We’ll get back to this one. Interesting though, and something that I don’t think a lot of people realize. Almost a quarter of the people that are in the Lab/Chat at any point don’t want us to talk constantly. That’s not close to a majority, but it is a significant number that I don’t think the other 75% of subscribers really understand.

Which do you prefer for daytrading calls:

Type them in the room (36%)
Type them in the Messenger (42%)
Just call them out to save time (22%)

This goes back to the Messenger conversation above and the reality of the analysts time. I can’t keep analysts in the room if I require that type in the middle of their trading, which is why the room is so useful. For example, I can talk in the room while clicking my mouse to trade. I can’t trade and type at the same time. If I forced the analysts to type everything, they’d leave. Having said that, once we get the new Messenger in place, we will try to make a more conscious effort to get things into the Messenger since it will hopefully send data out in real-time.

This one is fascinating to me.

How many trades do you run in a day (count trades, not partial entries and exits):

1-5 (63%)
6-10 (31%)
11-20 (6%)
20+ (0%)

I think that’s fascinating and somewhat of a huge positive, in the sense that Tradesight subscribers are picky. They are selective. I’ve been trading for 17 years now, and I’ve watching hundreds and hundreds of people come and go. It is rare that the most active ones last. Having said that, considering so many people ask for us to “fill up the Messenger with daytrading ideas,” I’m a little confused that such a low percentage run over eleven trades a day. There is a bit of a disparity there, but it’s a darn interesting response.

Do you log into the Trading Room:

All day every day (62%)
A few hours each day, typically the open (25%)
A few hours each day, typically the closing half (0%)
Just sometimes when I’m looking for certain information (13%)

So there it is. Just over a majority of people that use the Trading Lab/Chat room are there just about all of the time. That leaves close to half that don’t.

Which statement do you agree with most:

I use my own decision-making to manage my trades, so don’t tell us how you are managing as it confuses me (4%)
I mostly use my own decision-making, but I’d like to hear some discussion of management to see if your style interests me (53%)
I want you to walk me through most trades from start to finish (43%)

I can tell you one thing right now. It isn’t possible for an analyst to walk you through every trade from start to finish. The absolute key here is that analysts are trading themselves, and they get busy. Here is, in my opinion, what separates the lazy trader from the trader that is taking this seriously. We have five years of educational reports plus daily reports with charts that discuss every trade the triggered and what happened, plus the main six hour course that I offer, plus Rich’s extremely detailed and informative two courses on daytrading. Somewhere in all of that, you have to be able to get everything that you need to know to make trade management decisions. It isn’t going to always come with every trade in the heat of the moment. First of all, it would be annoying to the people that are in the room that already know what they are doing, or the people that are trying to get information from several sources and don’t want to hear us constantly chattering. When I get deep into several trades, I know I end up paying more attention to what I’m doing with the trades. If I’m just in one, it’s easy to comment on it. That says nothing about outside distractions. My phone seems to ring constantly anymore, and due to the business of Tradesight, I have to answer the calls.

The goal should never be that you want the room to tell you what to do with every trade. Some trades, sure, to confirm what you are thinking yourself. I can’t stress this enough, and I can see it in the comments that people posted at the end of the survey. The people that took the most time to learn how to trade to the point that they have become successful did it OUTSIDE of market hours. The Trading Lab/Chat room isn’t there for that on a constant basis. It would annoy and distract too many subscribers if we tried to talk all day about every trade, and frankly, none of the analysts would stay around if they had to. Just like anything in life, the work to learn what this is about starts with the subscriber. Spend the time using all of the material that you have access to and you’ll do well. I should have asked a question in the poll “Have you gone through the educational weekend reports?” and had the answers been “A lot, a little, not at all.” I have a bad feeling that over half of the subscribers would have picked “not at all,” and that pretty much says it all to me. I do know this. The extreme majority of stocks that are discussed in the room are called orally, put in the Messenger, or typed in the room ahead of the trade moving.

Which statement do you agree with most:

I wish a lot of subscribers typed what they were doing in the room (44%)
I want people to make few comments so I don’t have to read a bunch of text while trading (56%)

This is one of the biggest dilemmas that we have faced since the start. We’ve done a few things to try to get people to participate more in the room, but the reality is that most people don’t even want others to participate that much. It is a fine line for sure.

Which statement do you agree with most:

I’m paying you to make calls, so I don’t want a bunch of typing from subscribers (14%)
Some straight-up calls from subscribers would be nice (46%)
This room is full of professionals, so I’d love to see more people interacting, including myself (40%)

In my mind, this answer versus the prior answer is sort of a conflict. Here, 86% of people want some or more or a lot of participation from subscribers. I’m not even going to try to come up with clever ways to handle this anymore. We’re going to have a week in which we ask subscribers to contribute more. If people like the result, hopefully they will continue. If they don’t, then the room will be largely a Q&A between the analysts and the subscribers. I will let everyone know which week we would like to see an attempt.

Which statement do you agree with most:

What I like most about Tradesight is that I get different styles from different Analysts (75%)
I wish all of the Analysts approached the market close to the same way (4%)
I’m just starting to realize that the Analysts are different (21%)

This is a good answer, and I’m happy to see that the middle response was so low. A long time ago, I used to get subscribers that would want me to “train” Rich or “train” Mark to think like me. How boring! And it would mean that in certain environments, we’d have nothing to do. I still learn from the other Analysts, and that’s what Tradesight is all about.

I remember nine years ago when I was a subscriber in a room similar to Tradesight. I was new to parts of trading, still just getting used to futures. I spent a lot of time in that room not understanding everything that was said. That’s why I was there! To learn over time from these people. I’m not paying them to tell me when to click the Buy and Sell button. I’m paying them to teach me how to trade so that either I don’t need them eventually, or I just use them for confirmation of what I was doing.

In regard to ETF subscribers, there were two questions. The top answers by heavy margins were that people preferred to see the weekly ETF reports review all trades from the week, and they wanted “multi-day casual setups that play out over time.”

Finally, the forex service. The forex service has been pretty much the same in terms of the calls and reports over the last four years. We have added pairs to the Levels. We have tried different solutions for a place to discuss the forex markets in real time. Originally, we had just one Trading Lab/Chat room for stocks and forex, and there was a lot of overlap. We talked about forex in the evenings and talked about stocks in the day time, but forex traders would also be in the room during the day and it got confusing. Eventually, I just recorded my thoughts in audio/visual presentations each evening and posted them in the room. Then, FX Ticker came along, and I liked the idea of having the discussion about forex be in their Lab, with other people that viewed the market differently (specifically Clay from Aime).

Well, now we’ve come full circle. Due to the costs of the FX Ticker News Tool, the site is closing down, and Tradesight is bringing everyone back into our service. This is actually a good thing from my perspective. When it isn’t the “Tradesight” room, I feel like I am stepping on toes to keep hopping in the room all of the time, so I took the evening slot. Now, this is what we are going to do.

The Tradesight service is going to include the reports, the archive, the calls (whatever new Messenger we develop), and a separate Tradesight Trading Lab from the stock room. In this room, we will have up to five analysts that can stop by at any time. That will include myself, Clay from Aime, Mark Likos, Ran (who will now stop into the room every night during European hours, such as 4 am EST through 8 am EST), and Clay’s Aime analyst Jerry. I’m even going to spend some times in the morning in the forex room as well as the stock room. Since it is our show now, I expect to ramp up the coverage and the level of service. Let’s go through the survey questions as the forex folks answered them.

Do you plot the forex levels every night?

Yes (85%)
No (15%)

Good number, but I’m still amazed that 15% of the people don’t. I assume they just show up to take the headline call each night.

Do you read the reports every day?

Yes (89%)
No (11%)

Good number again. No comment on the 11%.

If you had to pick just one, what is the best part about the service:

The Levels (33%)
The Calls (31%)
The Education (35%)

You might think that this doesn’t help, but to me, this is perfect. It means that service evenly balances providing everything that I want to provide to people. Some people might think I’d rather see the answer be heavily in favor of the Calls. That’s exactly NOT what Tradesight is about. The calls are samples. Those that have taken the 6-hour forex course know that. I think this survey response is confirmation of that, which I like.

What statement would you agree with most:

I like the casual approach, finding a couple of key setups per day (36%)
I’d like to see a few more calls each day (33%)
Let’s get active with a lot of calls (31%)

I certainly like that the top answer got the highest response. If it isn’t clear by now, I just don’t think overly active traders are very successful in any market. I can understand trying to pull out a few more calls, and hopefully, that is what you’ll get as Ran gets a little more active and I come in and take a deeper intentional look in the mornings. I would expect more calls. For the 31% that said “Let’s get active with a lot of calls,” it’s never going to happen. This is why so many people lose at forex.

We’re in the process of making changes to Tradesight Forex. If the service included the Levels, 5 Analysts, 24-hour coverage, the reports, education, and calls, which statement would you agree with:

Too much (21%)
Just right (72%)
Not enough (6%)

Good answer. We’re doing the right thing, and I think it will finally push the service over the top. By the way, we will still have guests like Larry Pesavento in the Lab.

Is news important to your forex trading?

Yes (38%)
No (62%)

This isn’t a specific enough question that it is asking whether people try to trade on news or just like to know what is going on. I like that it is under 50%, and I hope that the majority of the people that said Yes aren’t trading the news, as that isn’t anything I would want my subscribers to do.

Is an economic Calendar important in your forex trading?

Yes (74%)
No (26%)

Good answer. ‘Nuff said.

This one goes back to all people that took the survey (although I also know the results broken up by various subscriptions).

In regard to Tradesight in general, which statement is true:

I would pay a lot more to get a lot more calls and analysts (9%)
I would pay a little more to get a little more (21%)
The price is right for what I get (48%)
I would prefer to pay less and take out certain items (22%)

Now, I will give you some more interesting notes. The forex only subscribers were far more heavily-weighted toward the last two options. In other words, the people that pay $60 for the forex service would rather not spend more or spend less (not sure exactly what I could take out). Meanwhile, the stock people skew in the other direction. And, if I take the people that are subscribers to stocks, ETF, forex, and the Trading Lab, the “I would prefer to pay less and take out certain items” goes to 3%.

It’s hard not to come to one conclusion. The more successful traders that have studied the Tradesight way over time and apply it to several markets have come to appreciate that value that we offer for what they get. We actually have no intention of adding a bunch of stuff and offering it to you for extra fees. I just wanted to see what people would say.

In terms of your trading, where does Tradesight information rank:

It’s my primary source of trading (58%)
It’s one of a handful of key sources (36%)
I glance it over along with a lot of other stuff (6%)

Another good response. If I take forex-only people, it skews more toward the bottom two options. All other groupings of people go along these lines. I really had no idea what to think about this, but I do love the fact that over half of our subscribers trust us as their primary source of trading information.

On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate Tradesight overall?

Now, 1 person gave us a 1. However, the rest of their answers were largely positive, so I wonder if they assumed “1″ was the best. I probably should have been more specific. 2 people gave it a 3. 1 person gave it a 4. Out of the other 155 or so people (lol), it broke down like this.

6 (6%)
7 (19%)
8 (27%)
9 (31%)
10 (14%)

The other 4 people rounded out to the last few percent.

I don’t expect to get 10’s because that would mean that there isn’t room for improvement, and there always is. However, 73% of respondents gave us an 8 or higher, so that’s pretty positive where I’m sitting.

So, in conclusion, the changes to the site that will be coming up include the following:

New homepage (for sure)

Forex service is adding the Trading Lab and Clay and Jerry and Ran starting February 1

Reports, specifically the stock report, will see their formats change a bit, probably around March 1. This will include deeper commentary about the indices coming into the session, with Rich providing some of that commentary. In addition, the call format will change, and we’ll see what people think. I want to focus more on what the pattern is and not on numbering the picks and worrying about information that people don’t use much.

The Tradesight Messenger will change, probably around March 1, and hopefully go to a more direct delivery without the need to open a browser window. This might lead to more use in making intraday calls. In exchange, we will stop filling up the Messenger with any comments about adjusted stops.

There is a possibility that I will be adding an economic calendar to the site.

Thanks for taking the survey, and as usual, thanks for being the best subscribers in the world.

Chris Mercer
President
Tradesight.com

Several people have asked me about the comments in the end of year report and the ETF service, which I described as being the easiest of the services to follow as long as you have the Messenger installed to watch for the calls. The reason that I say this is that the purpose of the ETF service is to approach the broad markets (which takes a lot of the risk and volatility of individual stocks out of the mix) from a broader perspective (which takes the choppiness of daytrading out of the mix) and focus on setups that play out over multiple days. It also allow for very controlled risk.

We started the year with a call that shows a very good example of what I mean. Here was the SMH (ETF of the Semiconductor index) coming into the first three days of the year:

What I see in this image is that there were two key breakdown points, one at $32 and one at $31, which are the two lines. We also know that the market often makes strong moves at the beginning of the year, particularly to the downside. So this gives us a nice setup that should take a couple of days to play out, if it even does, and the chance to use the two entries to help minimize our risk.

My plan is to take the play short if it breaks under $32 for half of my full size and risk about $0.40. That means that I am essentially risking only $0.20 equivalent on the initial piece. Here is the opening day of the year:

I go short at A with a stop initially over B.

Now, let’s look at the 5-minute chart as we get to the second day of the action (Thursday):

First of all, I like the fact that it came close to the $31 level on Wednesday at B and didn’t break it. Then, I add the second half of my trade at C when it breaks $31 on Thursday. My average cost ends up being about $31.42, and I lower my stop to D, just above that level, based on the chart.

So at this point, I have a full-sized trade with only a few cents of risk, barring an overnight gap up in the market. Now my strategy is to exit the trade in pieces over time. I had decided based on my own calculations (which I posted to the Messenger) that my ultimate goal would be $29.20, but I covered the first 1/4 of the trade at point E on Thursday on this chart:

I then covered more pieces on the gap down Friday at F, then again at G, and the final piece at H. The lower for the day was $29.19, one cent under my projected target. On the average of the trade, I made $1.50 on a full size position, with little risk to start and none as the trade size increased.

This is the type of stuff that I focus on in the ETF report. It isn’t about making tons of calls…it’s about hitting high probability stuff and keeping low risk on each trade.

Every year, it comes down to this. Let’s have a look back at the market, analyze what happened, talk about how trading was throughout the year, and discuss the macro-economic ramifications of it all on the markets. It’s never a short report, so buckle up, maybe print it out, and let’s get to work.

We will cover all markets here, but the main report of Tradesight remains the stock market, and from a macroeconomic perspective, there is much to discuss here. Forex stuff will be covered later in the report.

As a reminder, if you read last year’s end of year report (click here), we talked about the VIX and how disappointing it was that the Volatility Index remained in the low teens for so long, something which general means that market action and range is limited. Also, NASDAQ volume plays a key role. So before we head into the index charts, let’s start with a look at how those were in 2007.

In 2005, NASDAQ volume averaged well under 2 billion shares a day, which makes for tough trading. In 2006, it averaged around 2 billion shares a day, which was good. Here is a look at 2007 NASDAQ volume day by day, with the 2 billion share line drawn:

You can see that the majority of days were over 2 billion shares. In fact, if you ignore a few of the very low ones (holidays), over 80% of the year saw better than 2 billion NASDAQ shares. That’s a great number for trading purposes. Now, here’s the VIX:

Much different story than 2006. The VIX not only came out of the low teens early in the year, but it held up above 20 for most of the second half of the year, including a spike near 40. Remember that back in the 1990s, a spike to 40 on the VIX usually represented a bottom in the market in the short-term. This is a panic scenario where most of the bulls have thrown in the towel. So where did the spike to 40, which was in August, occur versus the NDX? Here’s the NDX for the year:

You can plainly see that the market rolled in July and the NDX went from 2050 to 1800 in a few weeks, which was a 10% drop. The low day was the place that the VIX almost hit 40. Unlike the last five years, I think the VIX is showing that it has meaning again. It also is showing us that intraday volatility is better than it has been. We’ll get to what that meant for us in a bit.

Since I just put up the NDX, let’s talk about it. It started the year at 1756 and closed at 2084. So, the tech-heavy NASDAQ gained 328 points, or 18.6%. There was obviously a lot of good volatility, up and down movements, and we already discussed the great volume.

In general, this means that it was a good trading year for us, particularly once again for our intraday trading that we do in the Trading Lab each day. We profited constantly from stocks like AAPL (our daily bread and butter), RIMM, and GOOG. AAPL spent the second half of the year with more than 4 points of range each day on average, and AAPL is such a consistently technical trader, it’s hard not to make money. Looking back on my stock profits for the year, over 35% of them came in AAPL alone, and if I had a way to really check, I would bet than most of those gains were in the first two hours of the trading day. Just something to keep in mind.

One thing that makes the NDX move interesting is taking a look at the two key sectors that generally benefit the NASDAQ the most. The SOX was actually down sharply for the year, especially late in the year:

And the BTK was rangebound at best:

I think when you see those charts, you have to recognize the role that AAPL:

GOOG:

And RIMM:

Played in the NDX move by themselves. I think once again, this puts these particular stocks in a place where they are open to selling as we head into 2008. The gains that they posted by September and October led to a situation where people were unwilling to sell them late in the year and lock in capital gains for 2007. I would start by watching AAPL’s earnings, which are due in just over a week, and expect a decline following the earnings, if not sooner. The one thing that could boost the stocks from here would be a split announcement.

So the SOX and BTK suggest that maybe, despite the volatility and volume, the NDX chart is not representative of a broad gain in the markets for the year. Was it an ideal year for swing trading (holding positions for several days in a row)? If you look at the NDX chart, it looks like it could have been. But the SOX and BTK don’t look so interesting. How about the biggest, broadest index of them all, the S&P 500? Here it is:

For the year, it started at 1418 and closed at 1468. This is a 3.5% gain in the broad market. The high to low range was just over 150 points, and 80% of the year was spent in a 100 point range between the two lines. This is opposed to the prior year, where the S&P had 220 points of range and a 13.4% gain from start to finish.

In other words, the broad market this year was unexciting and contained. INTRADAY TRADING ACTION was back to the way that we like it. This makes the calls in the Trading Lab much more valuable than the calls in the reports on average. There were very few days that we couldn’t find something to do in the room with our main trading stocks, but daily chart pattern setups were less useful than in the prior year because the market never really got legs overall.

Another interesting note about the year is the bond market, which had turned down earlier in the year (rates on the rise) and has since reversed and closed at highs (rates at lows), presumably due to the flooding of liquidity by the Fed to offset the mortgage concerns. Here’s the Bonds:

That is the biggest surprise of the year to me, as I expected rates to rise throughout the year. But, I wasn’t anticipating the record interventions by the Fed.

So from a stock trading perspective, I think that you look back at your results and should expect to find that the intraday trading results were much better than anything that was longer term.

I’m not a big fan of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, but I’ll put it up here just to have it:

Two other comments related to stocks. One of my favorite sectors of the market to trade is the small cap sector. We’ve had some enormous years in this arena. When this sector is working, there’s nothing like finding stock after stock breaking out of great patterns and running from $5 to $6 in a day or two. It adds up quickly. However, here is the Russell 2000, which is the main index for the sector:

A very disappointing year for the Russell, and easily the worst year for the small cap stocks in the last six. It closed red for the year, but it never really had any significant runs. The best period was September and early October.

The other comment is about the report that generated probably the highest percentage of winners this year, which was the ETF report. This is more of a swing trading-based report, which means the calls are designed to play out over several days and basically just plays the indices. The QQQQ strangle calls in that report, which are made monthly, did very well this year, with only two complete losses and three plays that doubled or better. Overall, between 75 and 80 percent of the ETF calls worked. The other bonus of the ETF calls is that many are “pieced into,” which means that you start with small size and add as the trade works on a broader scale. That means that even if you do get stopped out on the initial trade, the loss should be tiny. The whole year is not about the ETF service as light volume and flat periods make it tough, but there was plenty of great opportunities at various times.

Was there anything this year that just plain doubled? Yep. Oil. Straight run from about $50 to about $100. Yuck:

The connecting point between the stock market and the forex market to me is the US Dollar Index. Here is a look at the year in that index:

Now, to compare this to 2006, the US Dollar Index spent most of the year in a 4-5 point range. The range here was over 10 points, and after about April, things really started to move. This gives us a clue about how the forex market was to trade for the year, but we’ll talk about that in a minute. Let’s look at the Dollar Index in weekly form going back further so you can see how much more range there was here, especially in the second half of the year, versus something like 2006. 2005 and 2004 were good years, but I think we will look back at 2006, especially the second half of that year, and view it as one of the most extended doldrum periods in the forex markets:

And here is a look at the US Dollar Index over the last decade, which is interesting:

I think that the more important macro view, and I’ve said this in the past, is to look at all of the data on the US Dollar Index, going back to 1985. Here is that monthly data:

I’ve marked two points on that chart, and I think they are significant. The chart begins on a serious decline and bottoms out at A. Point A represents the switch in our government policy from deficit-spending to balancing the budget, which occurred throughout the 1990s under Clinton (point A actually marks, to the day, his election). Point B represents the switch back to deficit spending via tax cuts and increased Federal budgets (the change occurs in a policy shift marked, obviously, by the election of the current President). Pretty hard not to see the connection and the impact on the Dollar. I bring this up because we are entering an election year here in the US, and the outcome of that election will have an impact on the US Dollar more than anything else. This could lead to a significant change in direction on the US Dollar Index, and we will be monitoring this heavily.

Having said that, the forex markets ended 2006 in one of the longest, slowest periods that I’ve seen. I am a firm believer in the idea that markets cycle and that there are slow periods in any market, probably several lulls in a year. The basis of my trading system in the forex markets is not to try too hard to force winning trades during the lulls, as it is virtually impossible to pull winners out of a market that isn’t moving consistently. The general concept of the system is that the market tends to go through 2 or 3 lulls lasting 4-6 weeks each year, and you just ride those out and keep your losses limited. 2006, however, brought us almost 6 months in a row of a slow period that really didn’t start to come to an end until early 2007, as mentioned above. The rest of the year, however, saw very little in the way of slowdowns. Ranges, which had dipped remarkably in the second half of 2006, came back strong. We now have computed average daily ranges for the major pairs, and some of them have shifted a bit since last year. Here are the numbers we will be using as averages in 2008.

EURUSD = 115 pips
USDJPY = 90 pips
GBPUSD = 145 pips
GBPJPY = 190 pips
USDCHF = 110 pips (significantly lower)
AUDUSD = 90 pips
NZDUSD = 85 pips
USDCAD = 80 pips
GBPCHF = 145 pips
EURJPY = 165 pips

Before we dig into some of the individual pairs, I wanted to comment on two things. First of all, August, which is typically a slow month in all markets, including forex, was exceptionally big this year. Easily the best month of the year in forex. Just goes to show you that you just never know when the good periods will be. Also, the daily chart of the US Dollar Index is particularly useful to watch from the perspective of a Demark count. Here is the index again this year with the 9-bar counts, and notice how many times the high or low occurs on the ninth bar:

So, let’s dig into the pairs. Once again, the GBPUSD was the best trading pair, with good average range and lots of overall movement:

The high to low range for the year was 2000 pips, which is terrific.

Here is a broader perspective on the GBPUSD, the weekly chart going back much further:

Not much else to say here except the trend continues.

The EURUSD had a very directional year overall:

The range here was again 2000 pips, but it occurred with several back and forth moves. As a reminder, the prior year’s range on the EURUSD was 1200 pips, but over six months found the pair stuck in a 400 pip range. This is SIGNIFICANTLY better from a trading perspective.

The USDCAD closed out the year near par after dipping to a level where the Canadian Dollar was worth more than the US Dollar:

The AUDUSD actually had some great movement in the second half of the year, along with great daily ranges, which makes it very interesting because it is cheap to trade:

Not much overall excitement in the USDJPY:

The GBPJPY, which had been a favorite for a long time because of the so-called “carry trade,” came back sharply this year with lots of wild movement. This is a head and shoulders formation overall, which could lead to an ugly downside move if it breaks:

So that was the year. The last six months were great for forex, the whole year saw great trading volume and good volatility reading for stocks, but a lot of that is deceptive because the broad market went nowhere, the traditional tech sectors like the SOX dropped, and the small caps had their narrowest year of the last decade. As I always say, markets cycle, and the reason that I trade everything is because I want to be able to move to where the action is. Fortunately, there was plenty to be found in 2007.

What are the keys to 2008? With all of the talk of recession and the credit crunch that is occurring right now, I would expect some volatility. Most important, I think stock players need to be ready to play the short side a little more than they were forced to in 2007. I’m looking for better range out of the S&P. For the forex markets, there will definitely be continued volatility due to the credit crunch, but the second half of the year, especially August and beyond, is an unknown. All eyes will be on the US elections, and unless there is a clear leader between the parties in advance, the currency market will probably slow down a bit, waiting for an outcome. I would also prepare for the possibility of a 3-way race this time, and that might create even more uncertainty for the currencies late in the game after the summer conventions.

Either way, we look forward to 2008. Thanks for being the best subscribers in the world.

Can you believe it has been one year since Rich’s first webinar on the Demark methodologies? That was a very well-received webinar by Tradesight subscribers. Well, Rich has been hard at work over the last few months planning his next webinar, and he’s ready to go. This time, he’s going to focus on a variety of intraday trading techniques.

The webinar will last around three hours, and it will include the following:

1) Discussion of risk control in intraday trading

2) Discussion of proper position sizing to maximize profits and reduce losses

3) Identification of different trading environments and strategies, including:

A) Gorilla Breakouts/Breakdowns
B) Trendline Breaks
C) Gap and Go techniques
D) Measured Moves
E) High probability gap fills
F) Intraday Fibonacci

4) Time Frame Discussion, including:

A) Exponential moving averages
B) When to shift time frames from 5 min to 15 minute

5) In depth look at Volume Weighted Average Price

6) Overview of Reciprocal Range Plays

7) Trading Lab Discussion of key intraday setups, profit potential, and money management

This extensive webinar comes from more than a decade of experience in trading since he graduated from the New York Institute of Finance.

The webinar will begin promptly at 11 am EST on Saturday, December 8, 2007. It will last approximately 3 hours. The cost of the webinar is $299. Tradesight Platinum subscribers can receive a 10% discount. To sign up for the webinar, simply contact kim@tradesight.com for details.

Those who cannot attend live at that time but pay in advance can receive a link for the recording of the webinar that week.

Don’t miss this opportunity to improve your trading, brought to you by Tradesight.com. It’s All Very Clear.

Chris Mercer
President
Tradesight.com

A lot of people think that August is a horrible month for trading. Historically, volume can be light during the month. However, it is one of my favorite trading months. With many of the “professional” market players gone, stocks trade more smoothly. Although this August doesn’t look great, August is also one of the most positive months on average historically, making for many clean long ideas that play out over several days. August is historically also good for the small cap stocks.

With earnings behind us and August ahead of us, Tradesight is pleased to announce that we are going to do a 3-day special event for anyone and everyone. Details follow.

When It Is: August 1, 2, and 3 (Wednesday through Friday)

Where It Is: In the Tradesight Trading Room and includes the main Tradesight Reports

What It Is: Three days of access to any services that you want with the exception of the forex service. That includes the stock report, small cap report, Trading Room, and/or the Futures Levels. In addition, Rich, Mark, and myself are each going to pick a day and concentrate on a topic in the room. The event order is as follows:

Wednesday: Rich Derrick’s focus on Diagonal Trendlines. Rich will comment throughout the day on key trendlines that he is watching and what he’s waiting for. The goal is to help traders monitor intraday action looking for potential energy plays.

Thursday: Mark Likos’ focus on Directional Pattern Recognition, including what this means in terms of the strengths and projections for a play. Mark will show certain patterns, discuss them, and encourage attendees to find similar patterns to match his so that the overall plays can be evaluated.

Friday: Chris Mercer’s mental focus on market direction and volume. Chris will do constant (every 10-15 minutes) updates on market direction using the Tradesight measurements, plus market volume, and discuss how this should be impacting your thinking on certain trades in terms of support and trade size.

Please note that the other analysts will continue to type and talk all three days as usual, but the focus each day will be comments by the speaker in charge.

It is very likely that the amount of commentary provided will almost be distracting and certainly would not be accomplished regularly without bothering room attendees. These days should be viewed as solid educational days to get inside the mind of a trader and his approach to the market during the session. Obviously, there is no way to know in advance if these days are going to be active or dull. Questions will be taken all day, with the possibility that the Analysts take a 60-90 minute break for lunch during the doldrums.

Who It Is For: Everyone and Anyone

How To Sign Up: This is going to be a real administrative process, so I ask that everyone follow these instructions carefully.

1) If you do not plan to use this at least for one day of the event, please do not register.

2) If you have ever had a Tradesight username or trial username, please use that. Don’t sign up again.

If you are forwarded this e-mail from someone, please sign up for the Free Trial on the home page of the site to get yourself a username and password, which you will create.

If you have forgotten your username from long ago but know that you have one, send us first your name and e-mail address and we will attempt to find you in the system. There is a high chance of error if you try to register more than once with the same e-mail, so let us try to find you first.

3) If you are currently a Tradesight subscriber with Trading Room access, you are already set up for the event. The only reason to register if you are a subscriber to the Trading Room is if you want to also have access to reports that you don’t normally have (i.e. small cap, futures, etf, etc.), which we will give you for those three days. Otherwise, just show up as usual and don’t register for anything.

4) Send an e-mail to august@tradesight.com with the Subject line “August Event” (no quotes) in the title. You will receive a notification that we have received your request.

5) In the body of that e-mail, please provide us with the following information in an organized manner.

a) Your Tradesight username.

b) Whether you are currently a subscriber, currently in trial, a prior subscriber, or a prior trial user.

c) Beyond the Trading Room, what services you want to have access to for those three days. Choices are Stock, Small Cap, Futures, ETF, or All. The Trading Room is automatic in the request as that is where the action and presentations will be. If you are already a subscriber to Stocks and Trading Room, as an example, but you also want access to the Small Cap report and Futures Levels for those three days, simply list the ones that you want to add, don’t list what you already have. When we go back later and turn things off, we will be turning off everything in that list. Again, there is nothing about Forex for this event, so it is not an option.

d) You should be turned on after the stock market Tuesday in preparation for Wednesday. Try logging into the website Tuesday night to get the reports that you have requested. You can install the Tradesight Messenger at that point. If you are already a subscriber with the Messenger installed, you would need to uninstall and reinstall the Messenger to get all of the new feeds. The Trading Room is found at:

http://tradesight.ivocalize.net

Your username and password are the same for the room as they are for the site and the Messenger.

Because of the amount of work that will be required to set this up, you MUST send us a registration by Monday night at midnight EST. We will turn off the august@tradesight.com e-mail at that time. If you have a friend that you would like to notify of this event, please do it over the weekend so that they have time to get registered properly.

And again, we ask that you only register for this if you plan to make use of it. Given the likely number of people that will attend, this is going to take a lot of administrative work to set up.

At any rate, we hope to see you there and look forward to providing a useful event for your trading in the month of August.

Sincerely,

Chris Mercer
President
Tradesight.com

I am taking a multi-month break from seminars due to the coming arrival of our second child. However, for those that aren’t interested in waiting, we have several seminars that are ready to be viewed over the Internet. This includes the following:

Intro to Futures ($50)
Intro to Options ($50)
Options 2 ($99)
Rich Derrick’s 3-hour Demark and Market Timing Seminar ($299)
Chris Mercer’s Complete 6-hour Forex Seminar ($699)
Chris Mercer’s Brute Force Trading with Clean Charts Seminar ($699)

Use the Contact Us page to get details on how to sign up for any of these seminars. We will have something new and ready to go for late in the year.

Hi all-

About two months ago, I finally gave the long-awaited Brute Force Trading Seminar with Clean Charts. More than a year in the making, I felt that after I gave it live, there were two or three portions of the seminar that didn’t really fit, including the brief coverage of options. That segment was too rushed inside of the six hour time limit and didn’t really fit. I also felt that there were some chart pattern and “trading practice” areas that needed more coverage.

I have since upgraded the seminar, and I will be giving it this weekend, Saturday, May 5, at 9 am PST/noon EST.

Those that purchased the seminar two months ago are free to attend again or get the updated recording. However, this is a second chance for others to take this complete 6-hour stock and futures trading seminar live.

You will be able to get the recorded links of the seminar to view at a later date at your own leisure. You can receive those links if you attend Saturday, or even if you can’t attend because of a time conflict.

In addition, we’re adding a special secondary option. Back in November, our own Rich Derrick gave an in-depth 3-hour seminar about the Demark studies and bar counts. Anyone that signs up to take the Brute Force seminar this weekend can get a link to Rich’s Demark seminar for $150 additional. That’s 50% off of the original live presentation (note that you will only get Rich’s recording…he is not giving the presentation live again for a while).

So, if you wish to attend or take the recording of the Brute Force seminar, it is available for $699. Please contact us by Friday to get signed up for this extensive 6-hour course. For an additional $150, you can get the links to Rich’s seminar.

Hope to see you there.

Sincerely,

Chris Mercer
President
Tradesight.com

Hi all-

I just received a call from FX Ticker today outlining the launch process for the site, which is about two weeks behind the original plan. That’s not exactly bad considering how technology works, but it has forced them to roll this out a little differently than they originally wanted. We didn’t get to test out our part of the site as much as I would have liked prior to the launch, which is why they are calling it a “soft launch.” They aren’t going to be advertising it much initially while everyone involved gets used to working on the site. As much as it seems like a simple site, there are really a lot of pieces behind the scenes. I wouldn’t want to be their admin guy.

What they wanted in place before they put the site up was all of the pieces of their news and premium services. As I said, I was hoping to get a little more practice before they made it publicly available, but they have just gotten the final pieces of their news situation put together. Essentially, their asking us to view it as a “beta-site” for about a month, meaning we’re all going to get used to posting there and stuff like that.

First, a few people have asked me “Why are you allowing the Tradesight Forex service to go down to $25?” It isn’t as simple as that. Mark and I are essentially being “contracted” by FX Ticker to post exclusive content on the site in terms of explanations of trades and general market commentary. So instead of just looking at the service in terms of a subscription product for us, we’re now looking at it as a much cheaper service that could therefore interest many more people that we will be exposed to through FX Ticker at a lower price point, plus a contract to put stuff on their site and keep an on-going discussion of the forex markets. I will say that this step is the first in a process that will hopefully lead to 24-hour (or at least 16-hour) coverage of the forex markets from a Tradesight perspective. I’ll leave it at that for now. Obviously, we wouldn’t just drop the price 83.2% (from our end, you need their $29.95 premium service too) for no reason. The plan is to provide the Levels in many pairs and cover the markets in terms of how the pairs are playing out against the Levels from the Asian market, through the European session, and into the North American session. We might even do it in multiple languages.

OK, so back to the launch. We’re asking for everyone’s patience on this because it is a complex beast. It looks like by Friday late in the day, they will put the site up at www.fxticker.com. The site will include the following:

1) Global Economic Calendar
2) A few streaming-but-delayed free news headlines that relate to the forex markets
3) Multi-topic bulletin board to discuss forex platforms, forex trading, etc.
4) There will be a lot of on-line free seminar from industry professionals of all sorts
5) Polls
6) Free market educational commentary

And the Premium service.

What you’ll do is this. Once the site is up, register yourself with the site. Pick a username and password (doesn’t have anything to do with Tradesight, so don’t worry about making them the same). After that, you’ll see a box on the home page when you are logged in that offers the Premium Service. Click on that, go through the shopping cart, and make the Premium purchase for $29.95. I actually referred them to our billing company because they were having problems with the software from another company, so the shopping cart process should look familiar to most of you.

Once you have the Premium subscription taken care of, you’ll get three things.

1) Access to the Premium tab on the website at FX Ticker when you are logged in.
2) A coupon code for Tradesight Forex via e-mail.
3) Permission to use their really cool news tool.

Now, the delay this month from what I understand had to do with the news tool itself, and so what you’ll get for the first month or so will be a little different than what they ultimately will get you later in March. Basically, for now, once you are a Premium subscriber, if you go to the Premium tab on the site, you will get real-time economic and forex only news scrolling on the page (like you would see at Briefing.com) . This news feed is supposed to be great, and they are tweaking it over the next two months to get better. They don’t want earnings and stock market information. Just the type of stuff that forex traders would care about, delivered instantaneously. I’m hearing economic data headlines will hit even faster than Briefing, especially once the full pop-up tool is available in a month. If you have Briefing but mostly use it for economic data and not for news throughout the day, this will replace that.

In about a month, they will give you a download link to install a tool that will show in your system tray. Instead of waiting for a web site to refresh, this tool will delivery these forex-specific headlines in a pop-up manner (like an Instant Message program) straight to the lower-right corner of your desktop. If you click on the headline, it goes to the full story, but for many people, the fast headlines will be enough, and the beauty is that you don’t have to sit on a webpage to get them. It’s pretty neat stuff. In my opinion, it’s useful for people trading ANY markets that want quick economic headlines.

Once that pop-up tool is delivered, then the Premium tab on the website will be a page for deeper market projections and analysis that is somewhat forward-thinking from both Tradesight and AimeFX (some of you met Clay in the Chat room last week).

So the site will have two tabs for forex commentary. The regular, non-Premium market tab will just be for review commentary (i.e. “US Dollar is stronger, really working best against the CHF” or “Here’s an example of a Demark bounce off of a Break level” with the chart). The Premium tab will have stuff like our beginning of the week overview of the US Dollar index, etc.

If you are an existing subscriber, once you have the Tradesight code from FX Ticker, e-mail it to kim@tradesight.com and we will make adjustments to your account over here. It may take a few days, but we consider that you should have the $25 rate effective whenever you get us the code for your existing account, and we will prorate and credit the difference shortly as we said in prior messages. If you are not a Tradesight subscriber and have been waiting for the FX Ticker launch to sign up with us, then you should be able to take that code, go to www.tradesight.com, hit Subscribe Now, and use that code in the shopping cart so that you will be billed $25 instead of $149 for the service. Again, if you sign up this weekend and something goes wrong with the billing (i.e. it charges you $149 instead of $25), we will obviously fix it. We thank you in advance for your patience in helping us work through this.

To be clear, if you are a forex-only customer or forex is part of your regular subscription and you are charged $149 for the service on March 1 and then get the code to us March 3, you will be credited back about $115 proration for the rest of the month of March, as we said before. We simply cannot start the new pricing under contract until FX Ticker “launches” and makes the premium service available.

Final note. This has gone out before, but I just want to remind everyone. Our new pricing is 100% effective the day that FX Ticker “soft launches,” so I wanted to run everyone through the pricing once again as forex is now 100% on it’s own and not in the platinum package.

Here we go:

Forex service $149 ($25 with FX Ticker coupon as long as you continue to subscribe to FX Ticker Premium)

That’s separate and then:

Stock service $199
Small Cap $50 as add-on to stocks or $75 by itself
ETF $50
Futures Levels $50
English Chat/Trading Room $59

Those services without Forex add up to $408. If you take them all, you get a discounted “Platinum package” price of $379.

To be clear, obviously the bulk of the discount here relates to the forex service itself. Platinum subscribers were already receiving a deep discount at $460 versus about $550 for each of the services individually before. So someone that is just taking Forex goes from paying $149 to paying $55 (including the cost of the FX Ticker Premium and the news tool). That same discount applies to someone that had two services, let’s say forex and futures. Someone that had the Platinum Package goes from $460 to about $430 (with FX Ticker Premium). The savings are less because the discount was already in place and the other services are not being discounted more. But, it is less money and you do get the news tool as well. And then again, many of you will be able to cancel Briefing.com with this.

So, hope that clears everything up, and I hope you enjoy FX Ticker. I saw the site late last week and it looks very clean. I do plan to make it my stop for an Economic Calendar and news, and Mark and I look forward to contributing to the total site with content. Please be patient with the process as we have a lot of people to get adjusted in our billing system. Just know that Tradesight’s new pricing goes into effect as soon as FX Ticker puts their site up, and we will make your Forex service adjust to the new $25 price effective whichever date you give us the coupon.

Good trading, and thanks for being the best subscribers in the world.

Chris Mercer
President
Tradesight.com