This is written for those who are serious about trading as a main source of income. It is not for Investors, not for Gamblers and certainly not for the Get-Rich-Quick-ers. It is for those who are interested in Position Trading, the crossover between Day Trading and Long-term Speculations or Investing.

Trading is a business. You cannot hope to survive year after year in the financial markets if you treat it with an otherwise respect. You need to spend total time and commitment for your business to be successful, just like any other conventional businesses. The only difference is that you and you alone are responsible for the ultimate success or failure of your business in all situations. Because, know that all judgements and decisions are made by you, yourself. Those engaging in this business should determine to learn and understand it to the best of their ability with informative data available. The critical success factor of the magnitude of your success will be directly proportional to the honesty and sincerity of discovering your own psychology and emotional controls, doing your own thinking and reaching your own conclusions.

Profits and Losses are aspects of trading as a business. Where consistent Profits tells you that you are doing things right, Losses, on the other hand, shows that you have made wrong business decisions. Losses are in fact, the Cost of business just like the operating goods and raw materials of a conventional brick and mortar business.

As long as your market positions are right, let it ride and ride along with it. It may grow into a very large profit, and as long as the action of the market does not give you any cause to worry, have the courage of your conviction and stay with it.

Remember that Profits always take care of themselves, but Losses never do. Capital protection should always be kept in mind. Without the capital to do your business, you would have no business, no income. Protect yourself, cut your losses short before the loss assumes larger proportions. We are pursuing a consistent and growing base of capital and profits, not one-time windfall killings which often than not is a reflection of the gambler’s fallacy within. You are your own insurance policy. The only way you can continue in business is to guard your capital account and never permit yourself to lose enough to jeopardize your operations at some future date when your market judgement is correct.

It is the traits of human to be Hopeful and equally so to be Fearful. The successful trader should always be hopeful when their trading positions are moving in their favour, i.e. profits increasing and just as fearful when their trading positions went against them, i.e. losses accumulating. However, the average investor confuses the two and often found themselves caught in reverse positions. That is to say, you should be feeling greedy winning, at times when you are fearful and doubly fearful of losses when you start to be hopeful!

Another quality that is required of you is Patience. Experience has proved that the real money made in speculating has been in commitments in a stock or commodity showing a profit right from the start. Ignoring this and plunging in your full line of positions or capital will result in heavy losses and stop short your career as a Trader. Have the patience to wait for the sure thing, the perfect time to begin your operations when the Trading System shows you. Beginning your operations too early is the influence of the gambler inside you, Greed, that is. But starting too late, after an opportunity has been shown to you clearly is just as equally Ignorant of you. You do not need to be in the market all the time, everyday. You are not Day Traders. Follow the Trading System strictly, your Guide; and your livelihood will be taken care of itself in the long run.

My theories and practical applications have proven to my satisfaction that nothing new ever occurs in the business of trading, psychologically speaking. Certain patterns of group behaviour will always continue to repeat again and again. As the saying goes, “Market can change, but human nature has stayed the same for centuries”. That is precisely the reason why we are able to consistently make money month after month.

The business of speculations is nothing more than anticipating coming events. One must form an opinion as to what the next move of importance will be in a given stock and attempt to profit from it

It is a game of probability, not an academic thesis of right or wrong answers. Markets are never wrong, opinions often are.

What you have read is an extract of the first chapter of the eBook,

     ‘How I Trade For A Living… And Now So Can You “

You can order this step-by-step course that reveals all my trading secrets directly here,

http://www.howtotradeforaliving.com/order.php

Contents Page
The Challenge – Trading as a Business  4
What You Need     7
Trading Plan       9
The Trading System   12
Risk and Money Management  27
Position Sizing    30
Rules of Trading – Your Guide  34
The Don’ts    36
Price Behaviours   39
Putting It Together – The Daily Routine 41
Conclusion    54
Appendix I – The Emptiness  56
Appendix II – Know Your System Software Report 58

J.W. Lee
Trade Smart!
http://www.howtotradeforaliving.com
 

J.W. Lee
http://www.articlesbase.com/investing-articles/the-challenge-trading-as-a-business-711856.html

Heartland Payment Systems (HPY) and Federal investigators have released more details about the technical nature of the massive financial data breach made public last week, but have refused to pinpoint the exact date that Heartland first became aware there may have been a problem with their network security.

The date they settle on may well be the difference between market serendipity and an SEC investigation for insider trading, as an examination of stock sales made by Heartland CEO Robert O. Carr in the second half of 2008 raises some serious questions about just who knew what and when in the latest version of the worst-ever information security breach which has now spawned a class action lawsuit.

Federal investigators and the Secret Service have apparently traced the Heartland data breach to sources outside of North America, with some reports indicating Eastern Europe as being the most likely origin of the unauthorized access.

The principles and methods used by the perpetrator(s) have been uncovered, with evidence that is somewhat contradictory in nature, some of which is suspected of being nothing more than red haring planted by the hacker(s) to throw investigators off their trail.

More from Evan Schuman:

The sniffer malware that surreptitiously siphoned tons of payment card data from card processor Heartland Payment Systems hid in an unallocated portion of a server’s disk. The malware, which was ultimately detected courtesy of a trail of temp files, was hidden so well that it eluded two different teams of forensic investigators brought in to find it after fraud alerts went off at both Visa (V) and MasterCard (US:MA) according to Heartland CFO Robert Baldwin.

“A significant portion of the sophistication of the attack was in the cloaking,” Baldwin said.

Another consultant-who also wanted his name left out-said the ability to write directly to specific disk sectors is frightening. “Somehow, these guys went directly to the base level of the machine (to an area) that was not part of the file table for the disk,” he said. “Somehow, they got around the operating system. That’s a scary mother in and of itself.”

Other industry brains were less impressed. One nationally recognized and certified information security expert who I corresponded with Wednesday evening regarding the breach indicated that the hackers exploited a system weakness that should have been well known to Heartland, for which protocols issued several years ago.

From my email conversation:

“This was an ‘I told you so’ moment for me. I know exactly which part of the process got hit. It was the un-encrypted Point-to-Point connection which occurs between the Host Security Module (HSM) and the Application Security Module (ASM).

“But that means that they had to have had a hole in their firewall to insert the sniffer into unallocated disk space. “

“Now Heartland is crying poor me, and the making it sound like they are heroes by claiming that they are going to ‘develop’ end to end encryption. They should have been using the ISO Banking Security Standards which were promulgated in 2004/2005. They should be expected to uphold the standard.”

It looks as if the techies have already dissected the mechanics of this modern day cyber-cat-burglar, but ten days later we still have no clear idea of how long the sensitive data was exposed or when Carr and other Heartland executives first had an indication that something was not as it should be.

More from Evan Schuman:

Heartland CFO Robert) Baldwin also added more details to the sketchy timeframes that have been revealed thus far about the attacks, specifying that Heartland was contacted by Visa and MasterCard “in very late October,” possibly October 28.

Given that authorities are conducting an investigation, it is understandable that many details will not be released until after an arrest is made, but given the nature of the details that have and have not been revealed, one has to wonder who all is actually under investigation here.

Usually in an on-going criminal investigation, details are withheld from the press and public for many different reasons, but generally it is the mechanistic details of the crime, and often all the press has to report on is the headline and a timestamp.

Oddly enough it is the those details of the crime that have been trickling out that one would not expect – including the suspects possible location – but yet the generalities are being obscured, like what was stolen when did they steal it?

The answer to the latter of the two questions is of particular issue.

If Heartland personnel, and particularly Bob Carr, had absolutely no indication that something was awry with their processing system security until they were alerted by Visa and MasterCard at the end of October, then there is no problem.

Under this scenario, according to the chart above, Carr just happened to be in the middle of a major sell off of Heartland stock unlike any he has ever undertaken before when he found out “late in the fall” about the existence of problems.

It could simply be the case that Carr just happen to decide to sell 80,000 shares of Heartland stock for roughly $1.6 Million a pop on nine separate occasions about every other week in the four month period leading up to the announcement of the breach. These uncharacteristically large and more than frequent liquidations just happen to have occurred while the company was in the middle of an expensive acquisition and expansion of services push, all of course while the credit markets were in total dysfunction.

If on the other hand, company communiqué and records reveal that Heartland knew of possible anomalies in the processing security at the end of August instead of at the end of October, then we have a whole other scenario to apply the data to.

Under this hypothetical situation, Heartland may have discovered problems prior to end of August and may have known it was something serious simply because no one could figure it out. According to the official company statements, this was a difficult intrusion to detect, one that was missed more than once.

Again from Evan Schuman:

The initial internal conclusion was that “it looked most likely that it would be in a certain segment of our processing platform,” said Baldwin, adding that Heartland does not want to identify what that segment was. The company hired a forensic investigation team to come in and focus solely on that one area, an effort that ultimately proved fruitless. “We found issues in a large segment of our processing environment. The one that looked like the most promising turned out to be clean,” he said.

That second team “was nearing conclusion” and was about to make the same assessment the first team did: clean bill of health. But one of the last things that external, qualified risk assessor did was to try and match various temp files with their associated application. When some orphans-.tmp files that couldn’t be matched to any application or the OS-were turned over to Heartland’s internal IT group, they also couldn’t explain them, saying that it was “not in a format we use,” Baldwin said. More investigation ultimately concluded that those temp files were the byproduct of malware, and more searching eventually located the files in the unallocated portions of server disk drives.

So, continuing with the hypothetical scenario, Heartland would have had inside personnel looking for the problem when they get a call of Visa and MasterCard with the friendly heads-up. Heartland could have just not acknowledged the problem until their business partners forced them to.

The end of August is of interest because this is when Carr began to sell of large blocks of stock about every other week, and this was a significantly different trading pattern than Carr had engaged in previously.

If documentation turns up that indicates Heartland knew of serious problems with their network security prior to August 28th, these huge and rapid sell-offs by Carr may look more than suspect to the SEC.

I can not see the strategic value of withholding an accurate timeline of what exactly the company and Carr knew, and when exactly they knew it. But, if it turns out that everything is kosher here and all is as Heartland has indicated so far – which is very little – then I guess I just don’t understand Carr’s trading strategy over the last half of 2008 and how it related to his goals as a CEO for the growth an performance of his company.

They seem to be at odds, but that is no crime, just ask anyone who shorts their own company from time to time. It just needs to be cleared up. Not to worry though, as this is nothing that a solid and well documented timeline won’t be able to take care of (hint hint).

Meanwhile, Heartland’s stock (HPY) bounced back a little Wednesday, but is still trading at nearly half of it’s value prior to the breach announcement.

The data loss debacle at Heartland highlights the fact that the failure to secure information is a growing national security threat, and will be the next major shareholder derivative, director and officer liability, regulatory, consumer product safety, and class-action issue to impact our economy.

The Author gives permission to link, post, distribute, or reference this article for any lawful purpose, provided attribution is made to the author and  Information-Security-Resources.com

Anthony Michael Freed
http://www.articlesbase.com/investing-articles/did-heartland-payment-systems-ceo-make-insider-stock-trades-748366.html

Online trading is the new phenomenon which is currently sweeping the investment field worldwide. Although it might seem complicated at first sight, making money out of watching the rise and fall of the stock market makes online trading a good choice for 2007.

Smart investors generally make good use of online trading by adopting some of the strategies and philosophies used by long-term investors. By putting in practice some of their methods you will soon learn to appreciate the fun and the risk involved in online trading.

1. Trade Momentum Stocks

One of the strategies of experienced investors and online traders is recognizing the trading stocks with momentum. Investing in momentum stocks is a good idea especially since certain stocks can bring the possibility to gain up to 100% on the same day. While some momentum stocks may only rise 10% in a few minutes, you would still make $1,000 on a $10,000 investment on the same trading day.

2. Choose Your Timing

If you are interested in harvesting big piles of cash through online trading but at the same time protecting your investments the key is to learn the strategy of choosing your timing right. You don’t have to trade hot stocks online all the time. But you can take advantage of them to the maximum when you find the most promising opportunities, while limiting your risk at the same time.

Online trading works in a similar manner to hiring a broker, with the difference that you usually get to pull all the strings. This means that you can trade your stocks whenever you choose to, using the online features of the stock market. If you will watch the market closely, you will be able to buy and sell stocks once they begin to show certain signs.

3. Protect yourself

If you have no idea what stocks you should look for and how to approach the whole deal while limiting the risk, you will rarely get close to making any profit. The best way around this matter is to understand what you are getting into and choose certain protection measures. While watching stocks go up and down is fun, it’s no longer a game when your money is involved.

Diversifying is another manner of protecting yourself when using online trading. Given the fact that online trading is a quite inexpensive way to enter the stock market, you can use more means of investing and developing a mixed portfolio, such as stocks, CDs, bonds and other investment tools.

Last but not least, don’t forget to get professional advice if you need it. If you don’t know the basics of online trading, see out advice before enrolling into it. Online trading can be a fantastic way to get involved with the stock market from the security and privacy of your home.

Copyright

Joel Teo
http://www.articlesbase.com/finance-articles/online-trading-3-explosive-strategies-for-2007-91432.html

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