NTAP update #4

As I posted my stop was 25.50 and I got stopped out right after the open on the 19th, we could see that an ascending triangle was forming as NTAP moved higher.
Once it broke out of that triangle it's was over. .....for now aways. Also that seasonal bias thingie that started on the October 8th is over and out....So we will have to wait until Feb. 15th and look to short this stock.
Great Trading everyone.....:)

The war of the rooms, some are droping, some are raising there body count...where are you at????

Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon
For the wheel's still in spin
And there's no tellin' who
That it's namin'.
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come traders, moderators
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside
And it is ragin'.
It'll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come Woodie and Tony
Throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand
Your customers and your clients
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin'.
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'.

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin'.
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin'.

Setting more posts

The southern building code requires all corners to have two 2 by somthing with another 2 by nailed between on the inside edge, which forms a "U". I talked with both the engineers and the city inspectors about this since we are 4 stories high.
It was ok with everybody to use the southern building code standard, BUT..I didn't believe it was strong enough so I order two Doug Firs that were 10x10 and 26 feet long.


While the crane was setting the floor joist, I had him also set these posts along with everything else I could think of since we have to pay for 4 hours no matter what. So here it comes.


Each post was placed in the corner of the great room, a 32 foot high vaulted ceiling inside of doing the southern building code thingie. We do have winds up here that can get up to 70mph at times. So I asked them to design it to take winds up to 105mph.


The whole tricks if there is one is the block you have to place on the posts so they come over straight up and down and not angled. The blocks is .382 from the end...go figure. Then they loop a strap there and how easy is that.......


After shooting in about 200 nails in each post we are done, sometimes I believe they think they are paid by the nail not by the hour....hehe. This is James the hotdog of the whole outfit, part Cherokee and part just nuts.


We are still removing some crapola from the fire even after 10 weeks. This is the grinder pumps for the sewer. Since the house is below the road we have to pump the real crapola (ROTFL) back up the mountain.


All that is left is the stainless steel bottom plate, a pile of fiberglass and some dirt, this sucker cost $11,800.00. The new one will be here by the end of the month and so it goes.......


The bottom of the pump housing was about the last thing that will be removed from the fire. The good news is the actual pumps had not been installed yet and are fine, so we were only out about $3,800.00, just 4 ticks on a 10 lots so let's trade.....

First bar trade kickin again.......how sweet it is...

This is a chart of the 9m Russell2000 and it's to show you the higher time frame and also to show the measured pullbacks in the market from Friday.

This is a powerfull idea that both CB and MarkB talk about. On the 3minute chart this morning using the 50CCI and the ZLR when the turbo gets below -100 we had several setups one at 10:21, then 10:30 and finally at 10:54. The first two were not the best trade, however as I showed in TradersHaven this morning you could manage the first half and at least get the commissions covered and have enough for some banana puddin for lunch....:) But the third one that triggered was also a ZLR on the 9 minute chart with symmetry and my secret sauce with is available in the lobby after the show........:) Would you still be holding steady and taking these setups if the first two didn't pay anything or would you be looking and reading some text somewhere on the next greatest indicator from BOB.......

HC-ed today took a short, around 10:12 this morning and said he was looking for 639.00 and got it....all in advance on "HIS" setup. Now that is great trading for sure, but for the rest of the time today.....if you were looking for a short and took them.....I have to guess your office looks like this one by the end of the day.......and so is your attitude.


I found it interesting that Eman_CA and jim-rainman were not around today.....what is going on now.....

Fourth floor here we come baby......rollin rollin rollin.....

So a couple of truck loads of floor trusses came last week, what a get sight they were.


That is the 100tons crance, that costs an arm and a leg to have come up and play with us for a few hours, but what a labor savers. We begin the setting of the trusses along with all the other stuff we can get delivered.


Each set is has code number that match the layout, well in theroy that is. Each set is strapped and lifted over to the house.


The hardest part of this whole process in not getting bumped off the beams as the trusses come over and are swung in position.


Now what is the fastest way to get from point "A" to point "B", find a strap and take a ride...see we don't work all the time....:)


It takes time to get every truss on their mark of 16 inch center. Then we have to put the stiffback in along with the leveling them and adding the ends on....


Adventech was 21 bucks a sheet when we thought about building this house, then it went to 34 bucks when we started. After the fire, it was back to 24 bucks a share and with a coupon we had it came in at $21.60 a sheet. Then I heard on the news that this hurricane was coming to New Orleans and it was a 4 or a 5. So, we went to Home Depot and bought 400 sheets of OSB, 150 sheets of HomeTech, a bunch of 2x4's, 2x6's, 2x8' 2x10's before the hurricane hit. Then came Rita and Adventech is now at $41.00 a sheet. NOW THAT IS A GREAT TRADE......rotfl.


The Adventech has gone thru the roof, but the screws to attach it to the trusses are still the same....go figure. So each floor takes 93 sheets of. Adventech and about 4,200 screws along with 6 cases of glue. These screw guns made this job easy as compared to crawling all over the place. The screws come on a strip of about 25 and you just punch it and in their go....NICE..

Why use price to confirm your trade.....?????

Why use price to confirm your trade...why not just use your favorite indicator. Well, this is a chart from Friday, nothing special about it, you could good to any market or any time frame and see the same thing. This could be one of the problem if you just use the indicator to trade off of, false signals.

So let's setup a trading plan real quick.....our setup will be:
1. If the CCI is above zero we look for longs and if below we look for shorts.
2. When the turbo (6) is below or equal to -100 and the CCI (50) is above zero we have a long setup.
3. When the turbo (6) is above or equal to 100 and the CCI (50) is below zero we have a short setup.

Now, let's look at two triggers to entry this trade.
1. When the trubo turns back toward zero and we have 15 seconds left before the close we will entry the trade.
2. When the high of the setup bar (cyan) is taken out without taking out the low we will entry a long trade.
3. When the low of the setup bar (cyan) is taken out without taking out the high we will entry a short trade.

So how would we have done.
Well setup "A", "B", "C", and "D" would have been long trades using just the CCI (50) and turbo (6). 1 winner(A), 2 losers(B,D) and 1 so so(C).
Now let's take a look at using price to confirm the setup. Well, again "A" was a winner, but "B" and "D" did not trigger you into a trade. "C" took out the low of the setup bar and would have voided the setup.

So using just the indicator........1-2-1
Using price to confirm.............1-0-0
Oh yea, I know using price to confirm the trade it only produced one trade all morning, and I am a trader....and just can't sit here waiting for this thing to setup. I need to trade man....can anyone help me, please post your trades in the chat room and help me out....

By the way, if you go and do some research using the secret sauce you will find even a more interesting result.

I received this letter one day, it was from the Make-a-Wish foundation.


Inside the envelope was an invitation to join the 25th Anniversary Conference. But the first line of the invitation was most interesting to me. "The Make-A-Wish Foundations honoring its most generous individual donors", it stated.
Now am I missing something....are there some facts that I never saw...there must be a reason, a simple explanation as to why the Duke of Wood never mentioned this invitation. I mean he likes to state all the time, that because of him.....MAW has received over $106,000.00 and I have to think that if I gave only $34,000.00 (and in his name) to MAW and I got one of these invitation, then I must have missed something..........oh yea.....accountablity....I guess. NO ONE that I know of has ever seem one penny given from all those TAL over the past two years. Now, we know that the first one, people paid cash at the door so we understand why that one is not on the books.....don't WE......
But why haven't we send any canceled checks, donation receipt letters, being on the anual donor list, heck I mean anything....why why....accountablity i guess.....just Traders helping Traders isn't it.

We continue to move higher in all areas

When you come across the bridge this is the current view, we laid OSB board on the deck of the bridge with a sheet of plastic under it to protect the bridge from construction traffic. The third floor deck is now framed out with those 18 inch tree posts as they work on the the third floor framing.


The second floor is our entertainment floor, with a billard, theater and a large open area with a wrap around bar. We have been able to rebuild this area just like it was before the fire, except we will have to re-surface the colored concrete floor in a few weeks. Each support beam that goes from the house out to their post are make up of 2x12's with a 3/8 inch steel plate sandwiched in between. So even my mother-in-law could clog until the cows come home and it wouldn't collapse.


After the fire instead of renting a high lift or cherry picker, I decided it would be cost effective to just go ahead and buy one....thank you eBay. This JLG lift is great for getting up to those high places safely.


The posts are from white pine trees, pinned at the bottom and notched at the top, they had been draw knifed before they came but look at the one on the left and then the one on the right and you can see how dirty there were. So we had the boys clean them up....all 10 of them.


During the fire, a lot of the ECO block concrete walls had their foam burned off so before the rockers could come back to start stone casing the joint, we had to fix the walls....simple right????


Oh yea, first we had to remove all the damaged foam, and the black tie braces and clean the wall. Then we had to shoot nails into the presure treated 2x4's after we glued the back of the those to the wall. Over 1100 nails and shots were used...why do I know this, well I had to buy 11 boxes of nails and 11 boxes of shot...#4.


Then a sheet of OSB was cut and nailed to the 2x4's after it was glued on. If that wasn't enough, a sheet of tar paper was then applied and around the house we went.


It didn't take forever, it only seems like it at times, but within a week the entire house had been cleaned up and was ready for the rockers...who started yesterday....pics of that are coming soon.

Working..working ...working.....

The entire first floor is made up of 12 inch thick concrete walls with a 12 inch thick ceiling that also serves as the second floor. These hollow-core panels were 4 feet wide by anywhere from 23 to 29 feet long and were placed over the first floor. During the fire, the first floor was protected against the extreme heat of up to 4,700 degrees according to the fire marshals. But, the concrete 2nd floor itself did receive damage and was pitted badly.


It was recommended that we patch these chipped areas before they come in to pour a slurry mixture over the floor and build it up 1 inch. The good news is it only took 3 guys two days to complete the process of patching each hole. The bad news was it also took 63 bags of re-surfacer to do it.


Each post and beam in the entire house will be hued by hand. This process is an interesting one to watch them work for sure as they chop their way down each side of the beams. By next Wednesday they should have done over 3,600 linear feet of beams, that means just one side....some beams or post are done on one side, some on 2 sides, some on 3 sides and some all the way around but they count each side as one.


Then comes the sanding, first 50 grit, then the 120 grit and then the 120 grit palm sander, it takes about 2.5 hours to do a 16 foot post. A sander will last only for about 3 days until it burns out, so we have a stock pile of sanders along with sand paper. If you click on the picture you can see how the beams appear pitted, this is the effect that I am after.....100 year old look. Pitted beams but no pitted floor....go figure.


Susan is the best person I have EVER found to do the staining, she is great at painting and staining as her dad was a master craftsman up in Michigan and when she is done, with the wood, it looks factory finished. She has her hands full as tomorrow we are expecting two tractor-trailer loads of posts and beams for the roof system........


We have two types of days up on the hill, one without rain...and one with rain. When it rains we move down on the first floor and continue to go after it. Here finished beams in the wine room are placed. After all the 6x12 beams are in place then 4x8 beams will be placed in to finish off the crossing patterns we are after.
The past couple of days I have not been able to trade......because of everything that is going on up on the hill. With over 23 people working there now, and more coming it keeps ya busy trying to figure out who is doing what to whom......hehe.
Today, it has been 10 weeks since the fire....and we are up on the 4th floor going after placing those floor joists yesterday......will have some interesting pics going soon.....

What does 3 pups on a plank and trading have in common????

Well up at the house the other day, the guys had pulled a walk board back up and it was sitting on the floor of the house. The "3" pups, yes we now have another kid, who showed up one day and is a really great dog....SO.....after a couple of days of hanging outside, WELL... he got invited in and it wasn't long until he found a sofa. Two weeks ago we took him up to the vets and ....well....snip snip..........

Anyways, the pups thought that I was going to leave and they ran over to the plank and tried to front run me. Right out to the end of the plank they went, I had to put my foot on the end laying on the floor to keep them from falling as their weight changed the center of gravity.....

Have you ever been following someone in a chat room, watching every post they make, listening to every word they say....and when you think they are about to take a trade, you front run them?????

Well, don't get caught out on the trading plank, because there might not be anyone there to step on the other end and keep you from getting into trouble......Have a trading plan, wait for trade to setup, take it when it triggers and manage it the best you can....simple as that.

NTAP Update #3

NTAP held it's gain today, which is a great sign...stop at 25.50 just in case as we try to hold for more money.....more more more....always more.....

First bar trade 2 for 2 this week....

Well the first bar trade is two for two this week so far. Not to bad for just using price bars and no indicators....but what do I know other then the way to the ATM machine.......

First bar trade back on the hunt again.....

The first bar trade has been doing Ok during the month of October, but as this past week ended we had a couple of losing days. Today, the first bar triggered long and when my favorite indicator went to overbought I took half off moved to BE and trailed the stop using the low of the last 3m bar. Well actually my computer did it for me, but I do have to hit the confirm tab....so I do work at this...:)

Then we had an ideal setup ....50CCI ZLR along with the secret sauce plus other toys....this is one setup you should study to find something that can help ya and it turned ito a nice winner....

So trade setup number 1 worked....
the ideal trade setup worked.....

BUT, if you look at the $PREM the first spike was to the downside (the white box), and the rule is...that is your tradable trend until it shows that the market is trying to reverse. In addition, the rule also says that you can trigger a trade in the direction of the first spike, when the $PREM spikes the other side. So at 10:05 we had that spike as shown by the circles. What happened, well down she came....there was timing on the 15m charts that CB was talking about to help confirm the trade.......But once she rolled, the CCI14/6 went south...followed by a ZLR and the 50CCI also got into the act......THANKS everyone for helping out....GROUP HUG

NTAP update #2

You know you have a good one when it's up and the market is down.....after the pop we were looking for, taking some off we now just trail our stop using yesterdays low plus a tick or two....

It's a dead heat.......

Not that it really matters, but it's fun none the less. This morning at 10am there was a dead heat between the new room and kids next door. The Duke of Wood at the time was still leading but only at 381.....from what I hear......


Welcome to the world of the CCI chat rooms, great info and it's all FREEEEeeeeeeeeee.

Beam me up SCOTTY!!!!!!

The house has four floors and on each floor most rooms have either post or beams or both. We are using DougFir 10x10 kiln dried lumber to make these post and beams with. Each one has to be hand drawn to get the effect I am after. So for two days, Mark and Skip worked up a sweat as they chipped away on three and four sides.


They charged by the foot, and didn't exactly take any breaks as they flew thru the 63 pieces of timber. What a business, bring an ax and make a mess...:)


Then the timber was carried out and sanded by hand. First 50 grit, then 80 grit and finally down to 120 grit until it was as smooth as a baby back end. Each timber had several spots were deep cuts had been made. This added the exact character I was looking for.


After each one was stained and given three coats of varnish it was time to instal them....but only if it was raining and we couldn't do anything else. But man do they look great in place......AWESOME BABY......just awesome.

Have you ever been looking for something and found something else???

Have you ever been looking for one thing and end up finding something else? Well, last week I needed a flat head screwdriver and that should have been simple enough to find...RIGHT?
Well I have a son that thinks he is Tim and Toolman, ever since we was about 2 bean sprouts higher then the cat he has been working on everything. We once took his 5 bikes, took them all apart and tried to build a new one...the super bike. We ended up buying him a sixth bike.

When he was about 18-24 months, we were building a nice size log house and I was losing tools left and right......a clauk line.....then a hammer....then a screw driver....then the clauk.....then a tape measurement...and my small square. I walked around every room, on every floor to no avail. I asked my dad about where my tools where.....he knew nothing. Then I asked my wife...she didn't even know what a T-square was. My two daughters....knew what a square but were busy with Barbies ... rotfl.
I was going nuts when I went over to my 2 foot 4 sidekick and asked him. His arms went up and he twisted his little hands. That was a sign that he knew "NOTHING"....no more....done...allie all.

As I walked past his yellow bus, I looked at it for a second and then lifted the seat and guess what I found. You got it, he had turned his bus into a tool box just like dad and his granddad......every man needs a tool box, RIGHT. IT was funny and we had a lot of laughs over the years about that.

So I had looked under my son's bed, in his closets, on the washer and dryer, under his dirt bike, in the trunk and ended up looking in all 18 junk drawers when I spotted a roll of film. It must have been in there since we moved in here about 2 years ago. So I had to see what was on the roll.


When I got the prints back, low and behold this is THUMPER. Thumper is the thinker, she doesn't do anything without first thinking about the risk. She is quiet, reserved and very loving. Always the last one in the truck as she smells every flower.


Then we have SCOOTER when she was a pup. If you ever meet Scooter you know why we named her that. Scooter is a simple minded kid, she just follows the end of her nose and gets in more trouble then anyone I know. Just looking at the pictures tell you everything. First in the truck and will step all over you to get to her seat.


Well one day, my wife had just given them each a bath....and they ran over to the neighbors and right thru a mud puddle. Ever hear of a golden that didn't like water? My wife went over and yelled at them to get back home and she was just nuts by the time they got back....and then they got another bath.....and this time with cold water.....YEA that will teach them RIGHT!!!!


Now let me ask you, how could these two ever be a problem......ROTFL....oh yea, you can see Thumper has her UT collar on and they are sleeping right out side my office..So they are my kids. I did find the flat head screw driver once my son got home from school, but what a pleasant surprise to find these photos. So you just never know what you will find looking for something else......That is a hint that carries over to trading also.....
:)