Investment Capitalist

Moscow, including Russia). We have written Russia off as "investor non grata". The country doesn't understand, nor wants to adapt to a Capitalist system. Iran will have the bomb before Russia will have freedom. Rapidly declining population in Russia combined with the US State Department's sudden volte face granting young, single and beautiful Russian girls under 30 a Visa within weeks means the sole superpower is going for the jugular. By robbing the country of their fertile female population at a time when Russia is expected to be in crisis within 50 years, well, you can figure out the rest. Visa approval rates are at an amazingly high 97.8%. From 2001-2007, that ratio was below 3% and it was impossible for any female to get a 30-day tourist visa. Now by default they're granted a "multiple visit" Visa good for 3 years with a single condition they leave the US every 6 months and return whenever they want as long as that Visa is valid. It doesn't matter where they go, they could do a U-turn at the Canadian or Mexican border. Capitalism is going in for the long-term kill against an adversary previously given the chance to become part of the international system as a major player. This is not the same Russia that went through Perestroika and took down the Wall. On the contrary, there seems to be an institutionalized and politically motivated move towards a more confrontational Russia controlled by a powerful Oligopoly. Do the talking heads on financial news channels, roughly 18-30 hours behind on their reporting, tell you any pertinent fact which result in juicing your returns? Or do they instead "advertise" trades after the fact to give their hedge fund friends a market to close their trades in? The market made it's ABSOLUTE LOW the exact day when the Obama Stimulus package was passed. Has the so-called Exchange Stabilization Fund been active before the elections? Wall Street is about seeing "through" everything. There's nothing at the surface to help you understand why markets behave as they do. Market's are irrational because nation-state actors are volatile and always changing. The irrationality comes with the swing of the pendulum and the behavioral responses from market participants speculating out 6-12 months, creating an always moving target for price equilibrium. Thus making markets inherently irrational, and this is a logical conclusion defined within an irrational world. For the more short-term oriented trader, the so-called "audio services" most retail day trading arcades provide, that claim to be "real-time squawk boxes" merely read headlines as they cross the wires, and do so selectively. Real hedge funds hire analysts and interns to monitor multiple news wires in real-time, trained to seek specific types of information deemed valuable by the firm's principals. When they see something cross the wire, they instantly announce it via overhead speakers to the firms traders in almost real time. There is no technical lag getting from Point A to Point B or an arbitrary selection of data shared by a few voices whom day traders become used to but barely even know, and yet they don't bother to do any fact checking. We all started somewhere and there were times when the third party audio broadcast would literally announce a pertinent data set completely wrong, causing the market in that security to move in the wrong direction on huge volume for about 4 to 7 seconds until they corrected it as a "mistake". In that moment, one wonders if anyone gamed the system knowingly since it's so easy; and impossible to paint as market manipulation because it's just an audio service with disclaimers that their analysts are human and therefore imperfect. So who do you think has the edge? Your day trading arcade or that hedge fund that's about to pound your group by being on the other side of your trade? Welcome to the Street. Welcome to the world of the Investment Capitalist. It's time for a gut check: Does your firm broadcast services like "Trade the News" or "Briefing.com Basic", and combine it with 2-3 dozen LCD Television sets all tuned to a single channel: CNBC? If you answered yes, then your market color has been dark, and your net worth even darker as it heads in the wrong direction, regardless of how hopeful you might be to turn it around one day and start getting paid the %'s promised to you. If you're in the hole and have been there for over 4 months while the deficit continues in the wrong direction, do the "dishonorable thing" and walk. Nothing is honorable on Wall Street. It's where Sharks eat retail traders and Whales consume Sharks. Anything you do, any firm you choose, any trade you make are all considered a part of who you are, and if you came onto Wall Street or into this profession with a moral compass, you're lost. The only way to succeed on the Street is to leave your moral compass at home for the family and bring your strongest firepower, willing to instinctively lay waste to your best friends at work, your colleagues, your acquaintances; if it means generating a profitable trade. Deception has been a powerful tool for the victors for centuries and if you have a hard time swallowing this, then you're a lost cause and belong in a more orthodox profession, like engineering. Even business flirts with the necessary evils of Wall Street but depending on what your company does, as long as it's not a trading firm of any sort, you can navigate along the fringes of questionable ethics (e.g. "Don't Be Evil" by Google). Moral compasses aside, if you believe having access to Whales who possess deep insights and uncanny abilities to aggregate and interpret market color for the sole purpose of making money day in and day out; who establish and constantly fine tune their investment themes based on filtered streams of information which can be acted upon within any time-frame, http://www.InvestmentCapitalist.com is one of many ideal sources, as is Seeking Alpha. But these should not be your only sources! You must build a list and keep a daily log of what they're all saying, looking for areas that overlap. That's where your market color is and how you'll gain that ever-so-slight edge over your competitors. Hence the adage "The difference between success and failure is less than a second". Most importantly, Investment Capitalist does not, will not and never has charged a subscription fee for any of its research. Of course, not all of our proprietary research is disseminated to the public, because as is the case for most successful firms, we are wrong more often than right. However we have strict risk management protocols in place, many of which are automated and cannot be altered. As such, we can manage losing trades better than most retail or part time investors. So we try to share only data that scores very high on our probability scales as a way of preventing readers from diving into something head first only to break their neck. Our founder dictated this as a rule because he started very young, at age 17; when no body was willing to guide him, mentor him or even provide counsel. This is his (and our) way of paying it forward. Moreover, he enjoys this and quite frankly, so do we. The greatest good a man can achieve is through selfless and often random acts of kindness. If you want to take the selflessness even further, do it anonymously so you can't be given credit for any of it. Global macro, short to long term market cycles and event driven trading opportunities, provide the astute trader with the potential at earning a very comfortable living. Some could even reach "rock star" status if they work hard enough. Sights that charge subscriptions are for has been traders unable to pull a dime out of the markets from trading, and I can name more than a few worthless websites (but I won't) that are nothing but hidden and rapidly executed "pump and dump" schemes which no one picks up on because they may have made a little money, or know other members that have, but the real gainers are the owners of the firm, providing the research not only to paying subscribers, but also to their entire floor of traders, AFTER they load up on the position with a few rapid hot-key's. Simple physics takes care of the rest. The first to hear it are those in the direct vicinity of the trader making the public call, hence they're in with big size right behind the head trader. The 2nd group to hear the call are those at farther ends of the floor who must log into the audio broadcast over the internet, thereby experiencing a short, 2-4 second delay. These traders get in with smaller size but are much more numerous as the "junior traders" with smaller trading lines and much less risk allocations. Nevertheless, their aggregate size is equally significant. And lastly, guess who finally hears the call after anywhere from 8 to 30 seconds depending on where they work/live, their broadband connection, network traffic, and a plethora of other uncontrollable variables? Sometimes the delay is so long that the original trader is already unloading his position for an average gain of $.80 to $1.50 per share on 15k to 20k share when the traders at the end of the pipeline are just beginning to buy, so guess who they're buying from? The same guy that told them to get long, who's now selling at the market. You can bet that those at the end of the line are moving as fast as they can to get in after observing the stock is already spiking when they hear the call, not realizing the simple rule that if you already see the move taking place, you're too late. So what do these poor coat tail traders do? They purchase $3,000 to $10,000 training packages from the same firm who made them believe they need it by triggering losses in their account because they failed to disclose two key details: 1) They buy before making the call, and 2) There is a delay of unknown length for everyone logged in using the internet. Information travles at the speed of light over massive fiber optic networks, however, the delay is in what's referred to as the "first and last mile", or the initial broadband line from the source and the last piece leg of broadband to the destination. This is where all the delays occur, but even on fiber optic phone lines, your voice doesn't appear on the other end without a delay, so imagine what happens to packets of data as they convert from analog to digital for the trek, then reconvert from digital to analog as they reach their destination. All while charging several hundred to thousands of dollars per month for the service and for "training" you could learn on your own with an investment in a few books from Amazon as well as the Financial Times. Don't pay to get market ideas unless you're paying an institutional broker by sending him order flow in exchange for his trade calls, which are far more valuable than retail subscription services. Believe me, I know. If you do, then you're in the wrong business. There's no difference from taking it off a newsletter or taking a tip from your golf buddy in the locker room. If you notice, you're always losing money while the "head traders" somehow always make money. If you complain, they blame you. Their approach is a shotgun approach. In other words, they'll put 24 trades up on the board, and 5 of them will hit big. Somehow, they were able to catch all 5 from the bottom to the top, rather presciently while the others are rarely ever mentioned again. Those five are even used for marketing and bragging rights. Investment Capitalist hopes to offer honest traders, investors and portfolio managers a source for actionable trading ideas. No promises and definitely no expectations of frequent posting. We will only post if we have something to say. If you want immediate access to posts coming from the site, please subscribe to our RSS feed at www.investmentcapitalist.com/feed

ECN's, rebate structures, "lit" and "dark" pools of liquidity, the infinite number of execution algorithms designed to make an institutional trader fat and lazy but only serve to alert predatory algorithms that an order is being worked passively in the market. The predatory algo takes liquidity and flips it to the passive algo for a quick few cents and continues to do this until the average “fill price” on the ticket starts to veer too far from VWAP, risking the fat man’s job. Investment Capitalist always has an eye towards the future and an ear-to-the-ground while consulting on the present. Watching developed economies while visiting emerging and frontier markets to get a look and feel for what is really happening, not what the IMF is reporting. In case you haven’t heard, the Nasdaq and NYSE aren’t the only games in town. Founded by a hedge fund manager who moved from Southern California to NY, then to Miami, then to Spain, and back to Southern California; and now lives in all those places, including London, while traveling all of Europe at least once per year. The site was launched as a hobby but has rapidly become the focal point of thousands of Institutional and Buy and Sell-Side Traders looking for real color on the markets. With a pulse on developing technologies in Bio-Pharma, Computer Sciences, Technology, Commodities, Supply Chains, and "Elephant" footsteps that are repositioning in the markets, Investment Capitalist loves to share this info with those that care. Also, as a Global Macro fund manager with an academic background in Philosophy, you will often read opinions of international situations grabbing headlines that are far from the mainstream and certainly not part of the herd. Visit the site or read a few posts on Seeking Alpha. Readers will always find unique insights, often surprising, sometimes hilarious and almost always dead-on. Lastly, the we have fairly strong opinions regarding "pay to play" proprietary bucket shops. We try to do our civic duty by making sure those not playing by the rules are visited by the SEC. If you have any questions about where you trade, it's best to ask an expert before you find the door to your "former" office locked.

guest lecture turned into 6 months of guest lecturing once a week and also helping this professor write "When it Rains in Brazil, Buy Starbucks". Being a professor and not a trader, the chapters devoted to actual trading were not publishable, at least in my opinion. So I volunteered to re-write those particular chapters, which is why he thanks me in the book, but when his publisher at McGraw-Hill saw the edits and inquired about their source, they immediately asked me to write a book of my own on trading. According to the Professor, they gave me the same deal they would give someone that's already been published and the size of the advance in line with their track record. So I took the offer and wrote this book. 18 months later, when it was finished, I didn't want it published. It was everything I knew about trading, which was about to go on sale for $40 on Amazon and I would get $2 royalty for each book sold AFTER my advance was covered. I was so physically and mentally crushed when it was done, that I decided it would be foolish of me to release the book, so I bought the rights back and kept it for internal training purposes. I think it was the smartest trade I ever made. I was too young to write a book (22), and had to really reach deep down to come up with 101 individual trading disciplines. That kind of work was to close to my heart to become red sticker item at Barnes and Noble. Plus, I hate books published by McGraw-Hill (financial books). Any financial book published by McGraw is written for beginners. I would never purchase a book from McGraw, not then, and not now. I think in many ways, I saved my career and my reputation in the long run.