Monday, December 19, 2016

An Important Announcement from the Head of our IT Department - Christmas Hell

As CEO of 3Xtraders.com I where many hats, including being the head of our IT dept, Anthony Allyn 


If you follow me on twitter, you know I've had a lot of computer problems lately, and that causes me a lot of stress, knowing folks are relying on me for accurate charting... so here I am working another weekend, and bitching about it. Think about that the next time you donate to my PayPal (located in the left side menu). Also note that I've updated the menu text on this page to match our logo (red)? Looks much better I think.

According to Murphy's Law, "Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong" (at the worst possible time). These technical issues may at some point, become detrimental to our trade, and I want to avoid this as all costs. 


This weekend the computer seems stable, but last week windows started hanging on the boot screen, on startup, and on shut down. I had a similar problem a couple months ago, and replaced, what I thought was a defective SSD (solid state drive). Turns out the drive wasn't the issue, so I tried plugging into a different SATA port. That solved the problem for a couple weeks. Now I'm thinking bad SATA cable, or bad motherboard. Could be a bad PSU (power supply unit), but I doubt that. Those who are familiar with troubleshooting computer problems understand how frustrating, and time consuming, it can be....  After doing some trouble-shooting after the closing bell, on Friday, I found something called "superfetch", was turned off, but unsure that has anything to do with the problem,  probably not.

Meanwhile, we're still looking for a major market top, up here, somewhere, and believe me, you won't want to miss it! Quoting myself, "The big money is made on major reversals, not while trading confusing (sideways) consolidation patterns". The point is: I don't want to be sitting on a dead computer the next time the market crashes, and miss the entire move!

Considering that the motherboard is probably dying: 


Friday night I was up until 1:30 AM researching (worrying about) whether it would be better to perform a major system upgrade, or just try to maintain the current platform (AMD/AM3 running an Phenom II 955 processor), which isn't half bad, but is about to become obsolete, as AMD launches their new AM4 platform along with the long awaited ZEN (Ryzen) chip.

Some of you may remember me Tweeting about how, "AMD is going to kick Intel's ass"? 

That was back towards the end of 2015. 

$AMD was one of my favorite picks for 2016. 

Phenomenal 900% upside!





While I'm tooting my own horn: 


During Friday's trade, after just re-initiating my buy recommendation, on Evok Pharma, $EVOK was up an astounding 65%! What you do here is take profits, and leave 10% of your position on indefinitely. It's called, "playing with the houses money"! In other words, the shares you're left holding are paid for by your winnings.



We see the market losing momentum, and we also saw a big reversal in the US dollar. That was a good trade, in an otherwise dull market. There's always a trade somewhere, and I recommend selling the $USD, and better yet the USD/Yuan, into any further strength. Gold is also starting to look interesting at these levels.

Getting back to the issue at hand: what I finally decided was to not invest too much money in an obsolete AM3 system. Better to wait for prices to come down - on the latest technology - and then perform a major upgrade in a year or 2. I may even switch to Intel next time.


As of this Monday morning (edited):  


The Computer booted up with no problem, and the market seems to be holding up as expected.  I did end up driving to the city for a new motherboard Sunday evening. This is a good solid board, for $90.00 (on sale). I also need to replace all the cooling fans (7 in total)... so make that $160.00 in total. Not bad for peace of mind.
ASUS M5A97 R2.0 Product Overview 
    


I expect stocks to hold up into the end of the year on thin holiday trading; 


I figure that gives me 2 weeks to resolve this issue, and that probably means installing the new motherboard, and the best time to jump into that project is probably over the Christmas holiday.
"Sorry kids, no Christmas this year! Don't bother daddy while he's working." lol

I know it must seem - to Twitter followers - like I'm always complaining about computer problems, but most get solved pretty quickly. Just wanted to set the record strait. 2. Give Traders a heads up. 3. Explain to you, that a lot more goes into providing you up-to-date technical charts, than you might think.  

Here's a short list of computer problems that were solved over the past year:  


Connectivity issues solved! At one point I was sure my connection was being hacked... this issue was ongoing for quite a long time. 3 years...?

a. Rebooting of the modem, would bring the connection back, but only for a short period of time an hour/day/week.

b. Bypassing the on board LAN chip, with a PCIe LAN card seemed to solve the problem, but only for a while.

c. Replaced the old cable modem, with the latest equipment upgrade. This turned out to be a waste of time.

After ruling everything else out, the problem was narrowed down to the wiring. This led me to an already installed signal amplifier, which I had inadvertently bypassed, when I ran the cable. Doh!
Once I figured out how to remove the locked connection caps; I re-routed the cable... and problem solved! Took me all of 15 min.!  

Over the summer a nasty ransom-ware virus called Cryptolocker caused me to lose (though encryption) all my files. At that time, I couldn't find a decent program to decrypt the affected files. Finally after 2 days of headaches, I spent a another entire day reformatting the computer, rather than pay the ransom to get my files back. I don't negotiate with terrorists.


Final note: 


After being trolled 3 times in one week, we're going to a pay service. If the hedge funds want to troll us, they should have to pay like everyone else. I even went so far as to start building a new membership website, but quickly realized that's not the route I want to go. Instead this website will continue to operate on your generous donations. See the updated, "Join @3Xtraders FAQ" - (page tab) linked at the top of this page.
Happy Holidays and Happy Trading in 2017, AA



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