Not Completely Useless

This is going to be a short post as I’m running short of time. However before you run off in a huff to abandon these hallowed halls of market madness for good let me assure you that I have a darn good reason which I’ll be happy to share with you after a quick equities update.

As the bell is about to ring let’s dive right in. The E-Mini is back at short term resistance which makes this a great opportunity to be SHORT until about 1907.5 where we’ve got a brand spanking new NLBL. If that one gives I think we may actually snap higher and I would want a seat on the bus. So the plan one more time in a nutshell:

• Short here. Stop near 1907.5.
• Long > 1907.5 with a stop < 1880.

Here’s the long term picture – you may want to zoom in there. Tepid support on the daily and we have a NLSL touch on the monthly. THAT one is important folks – if it gives – boy oh boy that would be a bad day for equities.

Alright, so let’s talk about my weekend project. As you all know I have been posting discretionary setups here for years as it’s something I greatly enjoy outside of my automated system trading initiatives. However one aspect of taking manual entries that has always annoyed me a little was all the legwork. Not just in maintaining the trades but also in keeping track of it all and sharing updates with my readers and subscribers.

So when I was redoing the site I had this crazy idea. Why not write a piece of code that would take snapshots of my charts and upload them to my web server? Those could then be displayed in a widget for everyone to see. So I dug in and finding the appropriate C# routines wasn’t very difficult to do. Once that was up and running I however realized that I still would have to constantly mark the charts so that readers would be able to see what’s going on. So I had even a crazier idea – why not convert one of my strategies to trigger on a manual cue and then choose a particular campaign management approach as needed?

Well, that’s exactly what I put together this weekend. The screenshot above shows a ES campaign which by now has stopped out. It’s not working perfectly yet – for one it just got stuck after I switched workspaces. Not a big deal as it’s running remotely and an update every few hours is fine. But I think you all get the general idea here. You’ll be able to see all open and some of the recently completed campaigns on your right in the open campaigns widget. I also will be able to hook this up to my Google spreadsheets account so that I can collect/track the stats. Very cool!

What bugs me a little is that the little widget icon apparently is only generated once. That’s kind of nice for knowing how it looked like at entry. However if you click on it then you get the latest update. I’ll try to figure out how to re-generate the little icon as well – so here goes another weekend I guess.

Any input would be welcome as always – I hope you all find this new site feature as cool as I do!