Broker to Trading

For much of its existence the Internet, considered as a stream of content in a tech structure, was not about the money. Much like academia, from where it mostly came and existed for a long time, where money is a factor, projects do not happen without it. But content is not primarily determined by money.

Ways have been found to approach monetizing internet technology and content, that is a developing technology in and of itself. But it is still not primarily about the money, there is a difference between monetizing and business activity.

Monetization is dependent on the system you operate in, not on you or customers, so you cannot produce a static model of it, in the sense one can produce a set of statements, which is partly why it is hard to value internet companies like this, there is a systemic difference in the structure of their statements. It may still be possible to find a static structure in sets of statements as this blog has discussed, though.

I am a big admirer of Hollywood and I agree to produce those films many of which are big additions to culture, takes vast sums, which must be recovered, as this is a big, successful, important business. That is the point, internet content providers are not necessarily businesses.

They can be, in the case of e-commerce, but many are not. It is partly because costs are very low, unlike Hollywood. In Hollywood the big producers need protecting, but on the Internet, the small, the many producers who exist there need protecting. How to do that, is the real issue, in my opinion.

In a way costs are not low, the lower you keep the costs, the more work you must do, so you absorb the costs yourself, in your time and effort, however you can do this (but there is a good reason why web designers, programmers and so on get paid a lot).

In fact it is a place where costs can potentially be absorbed by the producer, without negating their ability to produce, in fact potentially enhancing this ability. That is hard, but it is a productive spur for the economy and future growth, I believe. It may be that real growth depends on such spurs, and that is a great reason for keeping the structures that exist now.

It is possible to see SOPA as a development in the move of the Internet to a business model. In makes sense like this. But the Internet is another kind of model, one determined by the system it operates in. Distributed, granular, accessible to all who can access it. To gateway it, attacks this fundamental nature of it.

That nature is pretty unique and there is no direct mapping between content production and monetary reward, yet, what we might term commerce. There is something approaching this in the convergence of sheers numbers of visitors and ad technology, but even here there is a lack of commercial certainty, if only how to get those numbers in commercially viable ways. If that is found, it may make for a static structure in statements.

But it may not be something which can be found, given the nature of the system it operates in. That is, the uncertainty may be a property of the Internet. To change that, what do we end up with. Many see nothing, and they may be right. It is that wildness and depth that attracts people to the Internet and that comes from its uncertainty. That is its moat and it is one all can profit in.

As an artist, you can work away on a great work of art, but it is very hard to get it to where it gets seen, that tends to be gatewayed, that gateway leads to the directness (and the $$$). Now, that visibility is not automatic on the Internet, but the system is not geared towards decisions being made about the content, to get it out there.

It is the place where, if you build it, they may come. That needs to be preserved. Because it is such a motivation for everybody, it is the source of that realization of the dream, equal opportunity for all. And such a potential driver of economic development.

There are none of the drawbacks that gateways inherently have, the Internet is not governed in any real sense because there is no need for laws to impose equality of access and so on, that is its power, it has it already. That motivation is some say the only new game in town these days, but it is such a game, and when it monetizes, like catching a dream, it does it like nobody's business.

It is the great development on the Internet to see how content, not commerce or technology itself, monetizes.

That story is being written, and it depends on the architecture for it being preserved. The Internet is the friend of those who produce for the sake of it, but would want those earthly rewards as well and that is a friendship for the very small and the very big, right, left and center, in equal measure.

But that is the foundation for a new economy. It is a matter of working with the uncertainty of the Internet, not against it.

Blog Posted by Broker to Trading at 1:38 PM

This is a blog post about the experience of forex trading with respect to market functionality.

What are the disadvantages of chopping up charting patterns, that is trading on micro structure, or small pockets of directionality. If directionality is not part of the way that the market computes value, then losses are.

But is it possible to smooth this process, to fit it into some elements of global directionality. This is partly what the site aims to do.

Chopping is a way to day trade the forex market, albeit highly risky as a human. But other approaches look for more stable directionality.

It might be critically suggested that such approaches are like building a scaffold on quicksand. Not unexpected, because the micro foundations are like this. So we look for something sufficiently abstracted from the micro structure of forex.

Possible options are a) to look for directionality punched in from highly directional markets. But this seems only to work at extremes, for example lockstep cascading in a crisis. And it only seems to work at times that are not predictable.

This may be a consequence of information passage: that which allows passage is not connected with the temporality of the market per se. This may be a problem with all attempts to find something abstracted from micro structure, if we assume temporality is a function of this. It as well seems to be subject to intense processing of the targeted market, aka high speed intense chopping arbitrage by the market.

Another option b) is to look for memory structures or structures of reference in the long term view of the market. This is essentially another smoothing of the market, over time. Now is this illusory or real. Is it the consequence of the respect with which these pricing levels are taken by participants.

I suggest not entirely, simply because each pair evidences different ways of respecting these levels. That is the respect of these levels may be essentially random. But the same issues with abstraction from micro structure remain, even of there is some stable structure ordering this.

However that ordered behavior I have noted in supposed directionless markets suggest to me that while the respecting of levels my be random, the capacity to find such a level may be ordered. That is the market itself may smooth. Which casts an interesting and positive light on the search for longer term stable structures in the market. That is, those scaffolds, correctly built, may be very stable.

Essentially one looks for conditions such that a level may be respected, for reasons other than that the level will be respected. But that is trading. One is always looking for reasons that something may happen, but without a real conviction that this will happen (having that conviction is arguably investing). That is the gamble and the source of many of those feelings of fear and elation accompanying forex trading.

But at the same time one does not feel this is gambling, that is one does not feel that there is no connection between your present trading event and the market. However that may be how the market operates, the causality is not in coherence with tradable directionality, except at random times.

That is why automated strategies are so attractive in this market. So the aim as a human trader is to be able to trade anytime. That brings us back to scalping. That is defining scalping as mind over matter, matter being the randomness of trading moments.

However of course that is how computers trade, it about more than being tirelessly in the market 24/7. So the perfect human trader, is one who thinks like a machine, but with much better processing power and something else no AI has, intuition ?

As for the fear and greed, if you logically justify everything you do and see, even if it is: 'I have insufficient data to make a conclusion', then they are not that influential in your actions.

In fact they can contribute to your enjoyment, as long as you pay attention to the logic. But you can then make a separation from the feelings urging you to trade and the logic telling you what to do.

Another option c) is to look for experimental ways that the market may function to impose structure over time usefully related to micro structure, which is part of the aim of this site. That is not to impose mind over random matter, but to trade with the function of the market.

Blog Posted by Broker to Trading at 2:22 PM

There are advantages and disadvantages to both social graphs and interest graphs. Perhaps an ideal network might want both. Interest graphs seem to be very compelling, if the interest is continually refreshed. Social graphs are compelling, do not need much refreshing, but the social element must be there. That is a network faces the issue of its graphs collapsing to the opposite graph.

But what we want is a melding of some kind. It may be possible to move from one graph to the other, but it seems it must be done gradually, without that collapse. That is perhaps because the user will find what compelled them is not there and lose interest. It is a matter of trust, that belief that the network will deliver that which has compelled.

A question is the symmetry issue. That is, is it easier to socialize an interest graph, than interest graph an social graph. First off, a social graph already has interest graph elements. It is a social interest, which is inherently compelling.

But there is more, there is all the stimulation of a person as a human being interacting. An interest graph can have this as well, but it is more biased towards perhaps interest, that which the user finds fascinating in life.

It is the difference between somebody telling you a story and reading about it. It is the same content, but highly different in terms of that which compels. That perhaps is a direction for fusion of these graphs.

The advantage for the network, is for an interest graph, to stabilize interest with social elements, and for a social graph to add granularity to the social graph, which can simply stop. In both cases, it can enhance loyalty, perhaps. That trust which brings one back.

So to fuse, for an interest graph we want to socialize those interest, to have a sense of the person. For a social graph we have the sense of the person, but we want a HCI structure which enables a sense of interest as well.

Of course social graphs always had that, but more enduring perhaps is the sense of those things in life people really care about. It is the difference between what want seems to want and what one really needs. That is an enhancing network, which helps people feel that which is really important to them. That is social and interest. And highly compelling, one might expect.

This leaves open the issue of moving to this place. Whether there is symmetry or not, is hard to say. It think there probably is, it is located at that point where interest and social converge. Getting there is probably no more difficulty or easier for either graph.

Blog Posted by Broker to Trading at 9:28 AM

This blog has touched on simulation a number of times. Why. Well, it seems that simulation is what the market structurally performs. When it operates as people want, when it functions, it simulates valuations. That is, it simulates a future valuation.

It does not predict or find a future valuation, and indeed all investors take part in this game. That is the market does not produce statements, which is what analyzing a chart effectively is a search for, that contain predictive information.

It may produce statements about the present function of the market, which by pattern matching on may simulate predictive statements. But since the market is not producing these statements, while valid at a given point, they may be completely invalidated at any time.

But it is real in this sense, that those future valuations seem to tie in with something real in the economy, the growth of the underlying assets, that is the potential for growth evidences in the analysis of their statements. But is that not pattern matching. An interesting question.

The point is it may not be, that is the power of financial analysis, and why it is a great search to find something like this in forex. At least we can see what it might be. That is, the creation of structure that can be valued. The value is a function of the interconnection and strength of the structure and as well the capacity of the market to functionalize this into its valuations.

So we can expect well ordered pairs to grow ? Perhaps. But the ordering comes from the economy these pairs reflect. And there is an issue with the quality of the structure, given what happened in the crisis. That could be seen as an issue with interconnection, that is some connections were simulated.

The liquidity of the market itself can be seen as providing a basis for this simulation. Less liquid markets do not perform as investors want, more liquid ones do. But we could expect that this would not improve the quality of the interconnections.

But it is not precise, it does not target individual companies, it targets aggregations of valuations. Could we see an evolution of the market that finds more accurate and precise targeted valuations. That is an issue with re-structuring the economy which brings us to forex pair valuations as well.

The reason we might want such an evolution is because the undoing of the market is the issue that these simulations are unstable, or create unstable structure.

They are effective in creating enormous asset surges. But they fall apart. So perhaps reinforcing the simulations may result in more stable simulations ? It may be we can never get away from simulation, as we are looking for predictive statements.

That is we find something specific in those bull-bear cycles, that we can extract from these cycles and work with. We can ask whether this is inherently unstable, but it may not be. We can say that the surge to high valuations is, it has been described many ways thus and we presently live in the aftermath of one such.

It is especially unstable because it is pure predictive statements created by surges of investor interest. They are not native to the market.

So we look for money flow + simulation = creation of structure. That is, we get a rising asset valuations simulated on the market, but more tied in with the underlying asset growth. That is we increase the stability of the structure and lengthen the temporal reach of this structure. The question we have touched on is whether that will curtail those huge highs.

The first thing is, that for many these are not highs, they get in, as everybody can and does, too late. But they may have an importance for the future growth of the economy and market, after the retracements, at least in equities, this may not be the case in forex.

Stabilizing those highs may be impossible, because they are forced predictive statements. But if we could find that which enables future growth, we could stabilize that. That brings us back to information passage.

Have a very happy new year, everyone.

Blog Posted by Broker to Trading at 12:39 PM