my journal 3

[Yamato]

Ok, pretty happy today, so to speak.

After seeing my USB flash drives disabled on my account at work, thereby having been treated like a dangerous criminal, I have received plenty of solidarity from a wide range of colleagues and minor bosses ("underbosses"), who dislike this scum who is heading the department.

I am not going to go down quietly. To anyone who asks me how I am, I reply that I am being mobbed by this scum. I can't help it. I am not going to say that I am fine.

So while I do feel a lot better now, I still wish for this guy to be removed from his position and for him to be totally miserable. And hopefully dead.

Here in Italy this scum and other bosses do not understand what is almost normal in northern europe: that people should be promoted and have a good career based on their work and competence and not based on their loyalty to a boss, on their kissing up, and their... servility.

In the meanwhile, the markets are going a little better for me.

 

[Yamato]

It's a Saturday, and I woke up wondering why all these commodities have been going down for months now, while the stock markets are going up, that this seems unusual, and how long can this still go on. Energy futures are going down, so are the grains, and especially the precious metals, and then also the Bund is going up and yet inflation is not going up - or so they say.

I've been wondering (hoping, too, because I have my positions) how much longer can this apparently manipulated situation go on.

Then I received an email from a friend, who runs my server:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money...reign-exchange-trading-investigation/3573499/

Probe targets rigging in $5.3T currency market
Kevin McCoy, USA TODAY 7:37 p.m. EST November 15, 2013
Investigators probe whether bank traders manipulated trading in foreign exchange markets

Financial market experts have long speculated that the $5.3 trillion-a-day foreign exchange market might be manipulated. Even though the system that pension funds, major businesses and institutional investors rely on to trade world currencies dwarfs other financial markets, it has no outside overseers.

"There's no policeman, really," said Marti Subrahmanyan, a finance and economics professor at New York University's Stern School of Business. "These things have sort of fallen through the cracks. Foreign exchange is really nobody's kind of baby."

Now regulators and law enforcement agencies around the globe are focusing on the market amid suspicion that traders at global banks colluded in electronic messaging groups dubbed "the bandits club" and "the cartel" as they tried to enrich themselves at clients' expense.

The early-stage action marks the latest expansion of probes examining financial benchmarks that affect trillions of dollars in business and personal transactions. Investigators have also focused on suspected manipulation of oil prices, interest rate swaps and the London Interbank Offered Rate, or Libor — used to set rates on mortgages, credit cards and loans...

So finally it made the news. I am going to read by myself the rest of the article now, and then I'll get back to my German language studying, by watching Austrian public television, ORF.

...Several media organizations have reported that investigators suspect bank traders manipulated the market by coordinating high volumes of trades in efforts to nudge currency rates up or down at the 4 p.m. fixing. The tactic is known as "banging the close."...

 

[Yamato]

Excellent tool to learn the language, even if we could criticize the message:

Nice song, with subtitles, translation. One remark: I can hear a strong rolled R, which is more common in songs, from what I read.

And indeed he is Austrian, the singer:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freddy_Quinn

Sein letzter Nummer-1-Hit war 100 Mann und ein Befehl, eine deutsche Version des Titels The Ballad of the Green Berets von Sergeant Barry Sadler.

Let's find the original song, The Ballad of the Green Berets, because it is not a song dating back to world war 2 as I was thinking.

Excellent:

By Barry Sadler:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Sadler

Barry Sadler (November 1, 1940 – November 5, 1989) was an American military veteran, author, actor,[1] and singer-songwriter. Sadler served as a Green Beret combat Medic with the rank of Staff Sergeant in the United States Army during the Vietnam War. Most of his work has a military theme, and he billed himself as SSG Barry Sadler, although his label credits read SSgt Barry Sadler.

Funny how a Green Berets song was translated into a German hit and then used as soundtrack for Nazi soldiers, their sworn enemy, and it sounds just as good with those images.

Interesting related video:

 

[Yamato]

Excellent lesson 3 by the people at magauchsein:

 

[Yamato]

Austrian TV weather maps

It's really fascinating how austrian television shows the weather forecast, by including the northern Italian region of South Tirol (where german is the official language, along with italian):
http://tvthek.orf.at/programs/71276-ZIB-11



You see, they always make sure to show the weather forecast for the province of Bolzano (which is also known as South Tirol). It's the only case I've seen where a public television includes in its weather map an area which doesn't belong to the nation.

For example, here's what we do with Corsica, which is surrounded by Italy, and where there's plenty of people who speak Italian, but it is not the official language:
http://www.rai.tv/dl/RaiTV/programmi/media/ContentItem-edb9b35a-3dd2-4611-99db-656254eb64b8.html



You see, it is totally ignored.

Another interesting related thing to note is that the german-speaking relative population has been decreasing along the years:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Südtirol#Sprachgruppen



In the last 100 years, German speakers have gone from being 90% to being around 60%. Italian speakers went from 3% to 23%. Another surprising fact is that the capital of the region, Bolzano, actually has a 75% of Italian native speakers. So this means that in the countryside there's a 90% of german-speakers.

 

[Yamato]

uvular vs alveolar trill (rolled R) in German

Very interesting post here:
http://www.antimoon.com/forum/t10425.htm

<< So why did Hitler pronounce that weird rolled r when German r is uvular? Can anobody explain it? >>

Rolled r's:
— were also prevalent in North-Eastern Germany (= Prussia, before the local German population was deported), and were stereotype for Prussian officiers,
— were back then much more widespread in Germany as a whole,
— and were prescribed in the academic language and 'Bühnensprache' (on theatre stages).

But Hitler's sideman Goebbels (who was from Rhineland) always used his native uvular r's. (I just checked on Youtube, his speech sounds a lot more modern than his master's voice)

For some obscure reasons the uvular rhotic is constantly gaining ground in France, Holland, Germany, Scandinavia. I also noticed that even in Bavaria or Austria urban educated classes tend to soften or eliminate the alveolar trill, which sounds increasingly old-fashioned.

It's hard to believe but maybe some day even the Italians or the Russians will switch to uvular r's!

Let's hear Hitler, and we hear immediately the rolled R:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alveolar_trill

Let's find some Goebbels:

He's absolutely right. Uvular R:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uvular_trill

Himmler instead, being from Munich, also has the same rolled R as Hitler:

In fact Munich is only 200 kilometers from Bolzano:




Best way to study a foreign language? Use it to do interesting things and the first reason I ever wanted to learn German was to understand what the heck these so-called "nazis" were thinking and saying. This is just awesome. I now will have (not yet but soon) the tool to decipher hours and hours of speeches. Much better than just watching one-sided propaganda american movies. I want to know what the thinking was back then -- not what everyone (the usual sheeple) is agreeing on today, now it's so easy to be on the side of those who won the war.

...

Got it!

I found a speech by Hitler to Finnish General Mannerheim, secretly recorded by the Finnish (without hitler's knowledge), so we can hear a different accent, and it is true, as someone had said on a forum, that he changed accents depending where and who he was speaking to:
https://archive.org/details/HitlerSprichtZuMannerheimsGeburtstag

And indeed in this recording he speaks differently and totally has a uvular trill instead of an alveolar one. Probably the alveolar trill is only used for speeches and singing, as it was for everyone else back then and to some extent now as well.

More of his speeches here, in most of which he uses the uvular trill:
https://archive.org/search.php?query=(creator:"Adolf Hitler") AND mediatype:audio

...

Lots of alveolar trill as well in this... "collection of Stormtrooper marches":
https://archive.org/details/DasIiiReichDieSaVolumeI

...

Sure enough, when hitler speaks at a brewery in Munich, the Löwenbräukeller ("Lion brewing cellar"), he speaks with the rolled Rs once again:
https://archive.org/details/AdolfHilterRedeImLoewenbraeukeller1942-11-08
http://www.loewenbraeukeller.com/de/loewenbraeukeller/1883-bis-heute/
(the official website, in its history page, ignores what happened during nazism, when, as wikipedia says: "it was used as a substitute site for the anniversaries of the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, after a 1939 assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler by Georg Elser rendered the original site, the nearby Bürgerbräukeller unusable")

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Löwenbräukeller
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bürgerbräukeller
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_Hall_Putsch

 

[Yamato]

U Boat War : Documentary on the Submarine Battle of World War 2

related movie by wolfgang petersen, Das Boot:

 

[Yamato]

excellent first german movie that I am watching:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almanya_–_Welcome_to_Germany

Interesting even while understanding very little german

Excellent scene at minute 44 (pedestrian crossing). That was exactly my experience in Luxembourg. Very surprising for someone from Italy.

 

[Yamato]

Kampf um Norwegen – Feldzug 1940

Awesome subject, great audio, great quality, and most importantly subtitles, both in English and in German:

I would watch this even if I weren't studying german.

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kampf_um_Norwegen_–_Feldzug_1940

Got it from here:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kategorie:Film_(Nationalsozialismus)

 

[Yamato]

great fourth lesson of the magauchsein - Global Experience course:

It keeps getting better. Clear pronunciation, subtitles, translation, hot chicks... interesting questions.

I found the perfect pastime to avoid overtrading, given that these positions I am in have been requiring months of patience.

 

[Yamato]

The latest episode of Eastbound and Down just went online online (for free streaming). This is the best server (I got it from here: all the others are too slow):
http://billionuploads.com/a4903ap8sqzg

Oh, and they also have the next episode, which is the last episode of season 4, and most likely last episode of the entire series (finally it's over, because I was addicted to it):
http://vodly.to/tv-9937-Eastbound-Down/season-4-episode-8

Once again, this is the best comedy television series ever made. Each episode is as good as an excellent movie.

Actually, on the last show there's a guest appearance by the greatest British comedian of all time, so don't miss it, even if you've never watched the show.

...

Oh, man. The last show is the best by all means. Comedic geniuses at their best. I couldn't stop laughing and almost puked from excessive laughter.

This is pure art, from the first to the last minute. And these people are incredible perfectionists. Eastbound and Down has nothing to do with those shows that have canned laughter.

 

[Yamato]

Top 100 German verbs

Last night, as I was going to sleep, while listening to Hitler's speeches, of which I found about a dozen hours here, I realized that I could benefit from specifically focusing on the top 100 German verbs. So today I resolved to find a list of the most common verbs in german and here it is, the list of the top 100 german verbs:
http://www.thegermanprofessor.com/top-100-german-verbs/

1. sein to be
2. haben to have
3. werden to become
4. können can, to be able to
5. müssen must, to have to
6. sagen to say
7. machen to do, make
8. geben to give
9. kommen to come
10. sollen should, ought to
11. wollen to want
12. gehen to go...

Yeah, if I can get to learn these verbs (meaning, Infinitiv Präsens, Partizip Perfekt), it's going to be a major help.

They have a similar list of the top words, but this is not going to be as useful:
http://www.thegermanprofessor.com/top-500-german-words/

From the little bits I could understand so far, Hitler, in his speeches (the recorded, long ones, because I didn't bother downloading the short ones) says quite often: "millionen", probably while talking about Germany's strength. Then he frequently says "frieden", in the sense of "peace". And he says "Heimat", which means "motherland". Then, almost in every speech (most of them during the war), he makes some reference to Churchill, says something about him, and this is almost always followed by laughter. I don't know what jokes he's making, but obviously he has a sense of humor, and I wonder if it is sarcasm or what it is. It's going to take a while to decipher all this.

I was wondering that... I was thinking that it'd be useful to approach his speeches by totally forgetting what has happened afterwards, and to pretend to be there with them. Because they don't look as delirious as they do today, with hindsight.

Also, I was wondering: what is the difference between America today and Germany then? Very little. Democracy? They don't got a democracy in the US, not a real one. Bush recently blamed everything on Saddam and Obama, and, from that, he went and conquered the middle east. Hitler did just the same on Poland and a few other bull**** excuses. He could not justify his total was otherwise. And seen from today, they are BOTH delusional. The only difference is that Bush didn't get defeated and so all the mainstream US propaganda is still on his side, whereas no one is left to speak for Hitler. The only difference between Bush and Hitler is mainstream brainwashing propaganda.

...

http://imusic.am/artist/27/256533

 

[Adamus]

Good luck with the German. Must be very interesting. I speak German but have never listened to any of his speeches since I figured they would all be about the need to send a whole load of "Juden" to the Gaskammer.

 

[Yamato]

History has always interested me. Lucky you for knowing German.

Taking a major beating on precious metals and grains.

 

[Yamato]

The latest episode of Eastbound and Down just went online online (for free streaming). This is the best server (I got it from here: all the others are too slow):
http://billionuploads.com/a4903ap8sqzg

Oh, and they also have the next episode, which is the last episode of season 4, and most likely last episode of the entire series (finally it's over, because I was addicted to it):
http://vodly.to/tv-9937-Eastbound-Down/season-4-episode-8

Once again, this is the best comedy television series ever made. Each episode is as good as an excellent movie.

Actually, on the last show there's a guest appearance by the greatest British comedian of all time, so don't miss it, even if you've never watched the show.

...

Oh, man. The last show is the best by all means. Comedic geniuses at their best. I couldn't stop laughing and almost puked from excessive laughter.

This is pure art, from the first to the last minute. And these people are incredible perfectionists. Eastbound and Down has nothing to do with those shows that have canned laughter.

You better watch that tv series, because one day later I am still laughing about it, about the last episode of the series in particular, but the series is good throughout it, every single episode is worth watching. It almost makes me cry to think that Kenny Powers isn't a real person and that all I've been watching is the child of the imagination of these comedic geniuses. But even when you realize that there is nothing else to it, it makes you cry to think how good these artists are and how in love they all are with their creation(s).

...

Yeah, I am still laughing. About Sacha Baron Coehn's appearance for one thing. Only a perfectionist can appreciate this show and realize when you're in front of a masterpiece, and I am one. Other people, regular people will probably laugh and say that it's good, but won't realize how good it really is. Eastbound and Down is indeed a masterpiece, and the last show was probably its best episode. They said that season 4 was the last season. I don't know. Probably it's best that way, but people will complain, once they realize how good this series was.

 

[Yamato]

Insane Illuminati Satanic Funeral Ritual on the News (First Lady) (Lyndon B. Johnson)

 

[Yamato]

Getting screwed pretty badly by the markets right now. It seems as though everything wants to go down forever and ever.

I am screwed. CL and NG aren't moving in either direction. I am fed up.

I can only wait though, so there's no risk of compulsive behaviors. All my capital is used up, so I can't add any more positions, and luckily I am diversified. At least that one, I got it right. No more doubling up on positions, like I used to do.

Grains went much lower than I had expected. JPY isn't bouncing up yet... and Gold and Silver, forget about them... manipulation is endless on those two markets. This is a matter of waiting years, not weeks or months as i had thought.

Endless waiting, bored, depressed, frustrated. I've been waiting for gold and silver to bounce since August and now they're back where they were then.

 

[Yamato]

"Kein Bier vor Vier"

Interesting but very hard lesson. The fifth episode was missing.

The girl speaks very fast. This is going to take more than 5 viewings to understand. One thing I've learned at least: the German saying "no beer before four", "kein bier vor vier", at minute 4:57.

 

[Yamato]

Ok, pretty happy today, so to speak.

After seeing my USB flash drives disabled on my account at work, thereby having been treated like a dangerous criminal, I have received plenty of solidarity from a wide range of colleagues and minor bosses ("underbosses"), who dislike this scum who is heading the department.

I am not going to go down quietly. To anyone who asks me how I am, I reply that I am being mobbed by this scum. I can't help it. I am not going to say that I am fine.

So while I do feel a lot better now, I still wish for this guy to be removed from his position and for him to be totally miserable. And hopefully dead.

Here in Italy this scum and other bosses do not understand what is almost normal in northern europe: that people should be promoted and have a good career based on their work and competence and not based on their loyalty to a boss, on their kissing up, and their... servility.

In the meanwhile, the markets are going a little better for me.

By the way, before I forget. My authorizations for reading my USB flash drives have been re-enabled. The technical assistance dude just fixed while on the phone with me, the usb flash drive symbol reappeared while we were watching, and he pretended that it had always been there and never stopped working and that it was just my imagination. It is complete bull****. They re-enabled me because I went and complained to my boss.

 

[Yamato]

Done with math, came back home, neighbor is running around and annoying me, we've got our math formula all figured out, I am pretty satisfied overall.

Our automation goes like this:
=IF(AND(new sharpe ratio>=18%,no.forward-tested trades >= 20),TRUNC(capital/50/average deviation),0)

As explained before this short formula includes two phases:
1) selection of systems that can trade: systems that have A) enough forward-tested trades and B) a good enough "new" sharpe ratio (average profit / average absolute deviation)
2) allocation of contracts to these systems based on capital: A) capital divided by fifty, then B) divided by the average absolute deviation of each system, so that each good system is given a 2% of capital for its average deviation.

That's all. Everything is now entirely automated.

Now I just have one more week to stick with my discretionary trades and all my problems will finally be solved. The maid is a whore, she just plays dumb and most likely she stole the jewelry, but we can't accuse her if we're not positive.

I got this post from here, March 29, 2013:
http://www.trade2win.com/boards/trading-journals/140032-my-journal-3-post2104192.html

A user got interested and he wrote me private messages, and he's saying that he's trying to apply my money management rules and formulas to his trading, but -- if I understood correctly -- he notices that his systems are decreasing their performance over time.

To allow him to study my systems and their performance I will list here all the forward-tested trades by some of my profitable systems, to see if he notices a worsening in performance in my systems as well, which is what he asked me, if I understood correctly.

Here's the file (I am not listing the dates of my trades, but only the years, or my systems can be reverse-engineered):
View attachment data.zip