Convicted frauds and self-confessed criminal Christopher Angus is kicking off a confidence series, providing free video tutorials on how to defraud investors. This fifth video is 15:04 & was shared on April 20, 2016. The criminal who shot these videos delivered over a 99% investment loss, as he simply stole the money and integrated it into other investment scams abroad. https://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/18263036.christopher-angus-jailed-fraud-friend-philippines/
Crown Police never followed the money trail.
1 minute 20 seconds: talks about algorithm he wrote on the ninja trader platform. it went from close to zero to around a million in about 6 years.
3 minutes 30 seconds: talks about the VIX being around 13 being really low and how it most recently happened ahead of a crash & usually preceeded a crash like the crash of 2008.
7 minutes 15 seconds: starts sounding almost emotional when talking about how low VIX is on the back of poor earnings near record stock highs, sounds frustrated that share buybacks were driving the "hollow" stock market higher.
10 minutes 25 seconds: doesn't care if is right or wrong with preconceived outcomes. only goes with what he sees in the market & doesn't carry emotional baggage.
00:53 Christopher Angus: And listening to fucking... All that shit going on. At 9 o'clock, I just wanna get away. So I'd much prefer doing the reports the next day actually because I've got a fresh mind and I'm in a good mood. So I hope you'll be okay with that. I'm sure you will. Anyway, so I've gotta a couple of things I wanna show you today. And that is, one, just this is out of interest, this is an algorithm I wrote on a platform called NinjaTrader, which is a retail platform. It's, so to say, 50% for normal trading, 50% for algorithmic trading. Also, you can write plugins for it, you can buy plugins. It's a really versatile platform, very open platform. It's not open source, but it's an open platform, and there's like thousands of developers that write stuff for it and so on. All plugins.
01:43 Christopher Angus: Anyway, that's something I wrote several years ago. Several in England, by the way, means two, not seven or six. Just one of the English quirks. So I wrote this... And it says the sixth of the six, 2014. And back-tested it. Might be some curve footing going on here, but this went from zero to about a million in about six years, so not bad. Well, I guess that's like maybe 12% compounding a year. Not bad, especially when you say it's algorithmic. Not fucking amazing either, to be honest, but you don't have to touch this. This wasn't touched. And you can see, I mean, that went kinda well with hardly any crazy draw down periods. There's just a nice 45 degree angle, which is always what you wanna see when you're seeing profit and loss. If you see massive fucking swings up or down, you know you've got some major issues going on. If it went up to like 400k, and then... Even like even a swing up to 400k would have got... Is concerning. You don't wanna see big swings up or down. Anyway, that's from an angle point of view at least, that's a beautiful angle. It's all I wanna say.
03:05 Christopher Angus: Next on the matter is you asked me the other day about the VIX and will volatility pick up. The short answer is, I don't know, obviously, because I don't know anything about the future. But I can tell you that when volatility is very, very low, like it is now, it is fucking incredibly low, excuse my French there. But it's... Like, I had to go back through my records to actually see when the last time it was this low, and for the VIX futures to be around 13, this doesn't happen very often. I think the last time this happened was last year, just before the super crash in August, and then the time before that was just before the crash in 2008. So this is... It's not really a thesis, it's just the way it is. Basically, when the VIX futures go very low. So let's pretend that this was November last year. The VIX futures were around 15, 16, something like that, and it was just bouncing off the bottom and kind of doing that. But, end of the year, this concern for China picked up, etcetera and you saw this incredible crash in the markets where the S&P was 300 points further away than it is now, which is a bit nuts. The S&P is at 2100 at the moment and it got down to 1820. So that's what's 280 points.
04:55 Christopher Angus: So when the S&P is high... I mean, you know this, but when... The reason I'm telling you this is because when volatility is extremely low, which it is now, you usually... Well, you know that something is going to happen imminently. So you said, "Well, is it gonna be like this for like another year?" But categorically not. I think, at some point in the next couple of months, something's gonna really fucking kick off, and around... When did we... When did we start? Like February. Yeah. So we were making a lot of money just around here and all the way back down again, and it's only once volatility started bottoming again, that's when we started having a bit of a hard time, because once it gets down here, I'm disinclined to try and sell it, which obviously, we were up here.
05:54 Christopher Angus: However to sum this up, the point I'm trying to make is when volatility is very, very low that is the time to buy volatility, at least with a medium to long-term outlook. Of course, we're in and out the market the same day. Like I would never ever hold a sale position over night now. Never ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever. Because you don't know when that crash is coming, if I'm sitting here, you know, it's fine I'll take it off. But volatility... The point to sum this up for the fucking sixth time, there is an increase in volatility coming not because I know there is one, because I don't, but based on everything I know, every time volatility gets extremely low and like I can't emphasize how low this actually... How low volatility is. This is like happens like once every couple of years low, right? And you... And once that happens, everyone becomes complacent, everyone starts taking fucking tons of risk, all the stupid retail equity traders are back in and they're fucking buying the market, buying the market, buying the market.
07:02 Christopher Angus: They don't know they're climbing the wall of worry. I mean we're only 40 points off the record high on the S&P now, less than 400 points off the Dow high, intraday high, not even the closing high, intraday high. These are record fucking highs, on the back of poor earnings and a bunch of other bullshit that's going on. Like it's just like mind-bogglingly insane, where companies have been... Where the stock market has been after massive breakdown then a tear up of like 15%. The only reason the mark was supported is by share buy backs by the big equity companies, by the big companies, I mean. And everyone's like cheering, like this is the most hollow, fragile rally I think I've ever seen, since I've been watching the markets which is like over five years. It is like nuts. You have to be so fucking crazy to be long in the market now. Anyway, enough of the fucking little rants, I just had there, sorry about that.
08:03 Christopher Angus: So this will happen, and this won't happen... This will happen in the next few months. It's kind of picking up a little, actually. But you see I'm managing to make some money because it isn't just... It isn't just coming down, down, down, down, down. It's starting to pick... The volatility is picking up. So I reckon we are somewhere around here now. And over the next few months, volatility is gonna rise, and we're gonna have a good, good, good few months. And then once it starts topping again, like things will slow down because I'm not gonna want to sell it until I know that we're back on the down one, on the down trend again, in terms of volatility. So the S&P is doing the opposite. So at the moment the S&P is flying up. You just turn this thing on its head. And that's kind of it for the day.
09:09 Christopher Angus: Expectations for the day. I am a little unsure. Well, I'm pretty unsure. However, I would say that we're probably going to see an up day on the S&P. So that's my forecast. Yesterday, we saw a down day, so to speak, we closed lower than where we opened. And I said to you... I was pretty sure we would've seen a pull back from wherever we were in the video, which was over 2100 to below 2095, which we saw, we saw it go back to 2091. So that... So it was just a little slow. And today, we are at 2097 currently. I expect us to go over, I'm gonna write this down, 2100, and probably stay there once the market has settled down. I could be wrong, I could be right. I don't give a shit, I don't need to be wrong or right, I can make money either way. Also, I don't have any emotional attachment to being right, I don't need to prove anything. And that's the main thing. I don't need to prove anything to myself, I don't care if I'm wrong, I just go with what I see. But my general expectation today is that we will see the markets probably get over 2100 at some point. If it sticks, fine, if it doesn't, better for us, but that's kind of my feeling.
11:04 Christopher Angus: It's 11 o'clock in the morning, it's still very early, I've not even fired up Bloomberg. I've only just looked at the price action and what Treasuries and so on are doing. Treasuries are actually way up. But this is the thing... I'm gonna end off on this because yesterday's video was 40 minutes. I thought it felt like seven when it was like 40. Treasuries were way, way, way up this morning, and the market had come off a little, but it's not about, treasuries are up, what's the dollar do? Is the dollar down? That's definitely the sign, that's the way forward. That's definitely not the way forward. What you need to know is what's happening relative to the... To... Well what... Sorry, how the markets are behaving relative to each other at the time. Because if the markets are starting to move against each other, which they do obviously, they're inversely correlated. Then basically, even though Treasuries are up, you need to be aware that they're falling, and how they're falling relative to the S&P.
12:23 Christopher Angus: So I said I was gonna finish but I just wanna see whether I can... I'm just looking on the other screen here just to see whether I can show you what I mean. Bear with me.
[pause]
13:00 Christopher Angus: One more second please sir. Uno memento por favor.
13:15 Christopher Angus: What is that? It's our Treasuries. I'm just gonna see if I can lay this over. No, I can't. Fuck. Right. I'll have to show you another day. I don't want this video to go on too long.
13:36 Christopher Angus: But that's kind of my forecast for the day, that we'll see somewhat of an up day. Although, I have to say my level of confidence isn't particularly high. It's like the markets are just kind of moving around, Treasuries are up, now they're down... Coming off and market was up, and market was down, and then it's up. And you know, so, but my general feeling... If you had to say balance of probability, one being the markets are gonna crash and I know it, and 10 being markets are gonna rally hard. I'm probably at about a six where I just feel that we have some upward momentum. Again, just from what I see. I see the price action. I see the dollar coming off a little. I see the Treasuries coming off a little. And I look at what's going on with the other indexes. And with that limited amount of information, before I started looking at anything else this morning, my thoughts are that the market will probably make a small rally today and will, at some point, be higher than we were yesterday.
14:53 Christopher Angus: So that's it for today. I'll do the sheet just after the start of the upload of this video and catch you on Skype in a bit. Bye for now.
start: screenshot shows account balance of 1,105,907 GBP
1 minutes 15 seconds: uses his proprietary software rather than web interface
5 minutes 10 seconds: talks about not trading the near month expiring contract near date of contract roll
5 minutes 20 seconds: has had extensive training
5 minutes 40 seconds: decision tree on certainty with trades
7 minutes 30 seconds: talks about how volatile the oil market is and why it is not good to trade
18 minutes 15 seconds: mentions a bit on technical analysis
24 minutes 40 seconds: I don't really call trading trading because I am not really a trader. I am a risk manager. and that is it. trading is just risk management. so I put on a trade which I feel is an appropriate size. usually I start at 1% of the account.
26 minutes 10 seconds: studied 5 years knowing he wanted to be a professional trader and perhaps 10 overall. I probably have a brain of just like 1000 pages of knowledge. my communication skills are not that great so I do not really articulate what I know well.
27 minutes 20 seconds: mentions vix has fallen toward a bottom (if he lost the money early on in his trading history then why does this account still show the above mentioned balance?)
28 minutes 15 seconds: emphasizes he knows a lot about market microstructure, how the market plumbing works, how things move on a short term basis.
29 minutes 30 seconds: trading is 20% skill, 50% skill & 30% emotion. you need to have a lot of discipline.
30 minutes 10 seconds: "if you could rob a bank, you know, online, financial fraud, and you could get a million pounds and no one would find out, what would you do? would you steal it or not? and there is 0% chance of you getting caught. ... if they would say yes I would steal it then I say trading is not for them. ... if you are not honest with yourself and are not an honest person in general then you can't really trade. ... if you lie to yourself you don't have clarity in your trading and you don't have the discipline. ... if you don't have self honesty and have the ability to say I am going to cut a losing trade and take a loss you don't even have a chance." ... talks about how aspects of his life are a practice of his discipline.
32 minutes 30 seconds: talks about how people tell him he doesn't show any emotions and he says it is almost like he reprogrammed himself to not let his emotions rule him. he says you can't make emotional decisions and make good decisions in life & non-emotional decisions are much better in terms of making clear decisions with the best outcomes.
38 minutes 10 seconds: trades VIX "because somewhat of a riskless instrument if you know how to trade it"
00:00 Christopher Angus: Okay. So I just want to do a quick video explaining a little bit more about how I work. I don't know, you seem interested, so I'm gonna give it a bash for three minutes. Firstly, I just wanna explain how much money I make, and how I kind of determine that. And it is a little bit varied. For example, if we look at the volatility index here, you can see that it's 15.53 to 15.63, so that's a 0.1 spread, very tight. And I base my profit upon each point. So, yesterday was a classic example, and a very clean example. It usually doesn't work out this way, but say I take 1% of the account, so that would be 11,000, and then I bet 11,000 per point on the volatility index. I don't usually use this side of things. I use my own software because I've gotta manage more than one account, and it just is a little confusing. So, you can see that if I... It's not exactly the right amount for this, but if I bet this here, and press buy, for example, it would be a big fucking mistake today because the VIX is gonna roll over, so I won't. Should I? Shouldn't I? No. Fuck off. [chuckle] God, I'm mad.
01:49 Christopher Angus: Anyway. So, if I... If I did that, and the VIX moved one point, I would make £11,000. I wonder if I can blow this up so you can see it a bit better. Yeah, that works. So, if I did this, and the VIX moved exactly like what happened yesterday, I didn't sell the April because it's rolling over. I actually sold the May VIX. I don't usually use things on this side and get that up in a second. But let me just get that up now. Sorry. I keep saying that I don't usually use things in this side, I mean, I keep it open. Not this one... The smaller one because I need to sometimes reference whether the trades are going through properly, but I try not to trade from this because it gets fucking messy. And it just is not my system. And you know I don't like change. So... I've got seven black shirts, I wear the same fucking thing every day. Every good woman that I've dated has said, "You need to expand your wardrobe." I've got a big wardrobe. It's just I've got seven of the same shirts, seven of the same trousers, seven of the same everything.
03:08 Christopher Angus: I really hate change. Anyway, this is a better example. This is the May VIX here. Can't really go back enough. I wonder if it's gonna crash my browser. Fucking IG. This is why I don't use this bullshit, in this side, 'cause it makes my browser stall. Anyway, so let me just get something in perspective here. Let's just say... Where were we yesterday? Here, sold it somewhere here. 17 point... Actually, it was 17.28. So, it may be somewhere like... Somewhere around here. I don't know. Somewhere around here. Sold it somewhere around here, 17.28, and then we bought it back at 16.18, which was somewhere there. So, basically, I sold it because I saw that the oil short squeeze coming. I knew the correlation between oil and the S&P was going to drag the market up, thus crushing volatility yet again. But it was just so fucking obvious, and it just fell off a fucking cliff face.
04:48 Christopher Angus: Things have been exceptionally quiet. It hasn't been helped by the fact that April... April's rolling over tomorrow, this is the last day of trading today, and it's just... I can't trade April because if I get stuck in a trade, it'll absorb that loss on the roll over. So that's also been somewhat of the issue. Anyway, I don't know what's gonna happen today. And this is the way I was trained, I wanted to mention this, I have had actually extensive, very intensive training at various points, because I wanted to just learn as much as I could. So there's only three answers when you're trading. Yes, no, and I don't know. And I use the, "I don't know" a lot because unless I'm fucking sure or I'm the opposite of fucking sure, those are like trading areas. The "I don't know", if you imagine the yes is 10% on the left and, as you move right, the "I don't know" is a 80%, and then the no is the other 10%. So you have like this... This three part like decision tree for me.
06:00 Christopher Angus: And when it's "I don't know", you can't trade, so that's why I end up sitting out for such a long period of time. Also, volatility's been so fucking low and moving just so grindy, in one direction, you need moves to be able to do stuff because if it's kinda doing this, you get trapped a lot and you end up scratching trades or, worst case, take one off for like a tenth of a tick loss, and it just like... This is the way you just... Death by a million cuts. This kind of... This kind of action here, where there isn't really a clear direction. And the direction really is determined by the S&P, of course. So this is an instrument that I end up watching an awful lot. So you can see the S&P is flying up today, but the VIX is not responding.
06:54 Christopher Angus: Now, as I said yesterday, on the mail, on the text, on the Skype thing, the S&P... Sorry, the VIX has been broken in terms of the correlation between the S&P somewhat, because there's a lot of people who are along with VIX and are absolutely being crushed because they're like long-term players, big hedge funds, institutions, that kind of stuff, and they're being absolutely smashed. So what you saw yesterday was a double-whammy, so the oil short's being crushed because the oil fell of 7%, everyone started selling oil. I thought, yeah, you fucking guys are gonna get smashed up because when there's a sharp move down, there's a sharp move up. And it was such a sharp move down, there was tremendous pressure going down, but then everyone, all the big players came in and they started buying oil, 7% off this guaranteed 2%, 3%, 4%. Actually, it made a full recovery, and then a little more, so it went down 7% and up 8%.
07:52 Christopher Angus: Think about how fucking insane that is, a 15% range in one day. It is fucking lunacy. Anyway, you wanna lose all your money, you go trade crude oil. That's the fastest way to go broke. Anyway, so I saw that happening, because the correlation's virtually one to one at the moment. And this does change, by the way, correlation between crude oil and the S&P does change, so you have to be very aware of the correlation, because once crude oil goes back to 50, 60, or even 45, and everyone eases off, the correlation might be like zero. And it's just like they start acting independently of each other, but I know when crude oil gets crushed, the correlation is like one to one. I know that because I used to trade futures a little, and I traded crude oil. So I'm pretty switched on when it comes to trading crude oil.
08:46 Christopher Angus: I made a little money, actually, but it's a really, really hard game. So that's how I saw what was happening yesterday. Now, I wanted to just go through some of the things I look at. Part of this is I'm not gonna be able to explain, not 'cause I don't want to, it's because I can't. There's so much stuff that I take in, like I've got Bloomberg going, I've got Twitter, I've got the Associated Press, so I'm very aware of what's going on in the world all the time because I think that gives me a little edge. I'm also looking at the Euro... It's the wrong one. Told you I don't use this fucking thing. Euro, USD... And then the Euro. Oh, sorry, the dollar basket. So dollar basket is obviously a basket of US dollars or the US dollar crosses, the FX crosses. So the dollar basket goes down, the Euro goes down... Let me get rid of this fucking thing, because it's gonna confuse us. So the dollar goes down... Oh, I just got out of the wrong fucking thing. Jesus Christ.
10:25 Christopher Angus: So the dollar gets weaker, which is... In this case, it is. You can see that the Euro's 0.1 up, but the dollar basket's down. This correlation is fairly weak. But I do... I guess if I wanna explain it properly, or at least in a way that you may have a chance of understanding, the dollar correlation is fairly weak. And so I have like a group of signals, maybe like 15, 20 signals in my... That come at me, and I put a weighting on each of those signals. This is just like fucking SEO, by the way.
11:01 Christopher Angus: So I put a weighting on each of the signals. Now the dollar... The dollar signals are weak to me. They're strong, but they're not the strongest, should I say. So, on a scale of one to 10, maybe they're like a six. The strongest signal's, obviously... The... What's happening on the VIX itself. Because you can't argue with what's actually going on. The second strongest signal's, obviously, the S&P. Because the way... I'm sure you know the way the VIX works, it's determined by how many put options are being bought. It's a lot more complicated than that, but, in the most succinct way, that's basically how the VIX is calculated.
11:51 Christopher Angus: So more fear, more put options being bought, the higher the VIX. So the reason it started getting crushed yesterday is because everyone was along the VIX, and then everyone started covering their positions, and basically started selling the VIX to cover, and it just started crushing it. So, you know, all that selling pressure hitting at the same time, just crushed the VIX and they made a disconnect between the two of them. So, you also saw me talk about flashy blue and red things. No, these are the flashy blue and red things. This is something [chuckle] I probably... I couldn't explain on Skype. But you can see how they're just ticking along, blue, red, blue, red. Once these start having some kind of consistency, and they start hitting, you'll see they go a little more solid blue, a little more solid red.
12:56 Christopher Angus: Okay. So, look, that's going red now, right? So, we'll see the S&P come off, and you can see it's just come on. I mean, it just changes, like, by a tick, and I can show you. Right... So, let me see if I can do a live demo here. This is really on a really micro basis, but I look at this to see where the starter moves are coming. So, there isn't a move coming now, but I may be able to show you how I'd look at this. So... Okay, so it's looking a little like there's a little bit of a pressure building. Now, the S&P is up, and I don't know what's gonna happen, but I expect a small pullback before the open, and then it'll probably reverse. But it looks like it's gonna come off a little bit here. And you can... Well, what I'm looking for are basically big splots of color. So it looks like it's gonna come off a few ticks, maybe a few points now. So we can watch this here. It's 6.75, alright. And I think we'll probably see half a point to a point come off, just by looking at the pressures building. You can see the reds that... Building.
14:25 Christopher Angus: So, again, this is one of my signals that I look at. See the reds just flash up. I mean, you've gotta be able to tell the difference of the intensity between the blues and the reds. It takes a lot of practice but, you know, that's kind of the way it works. That's, again, one of the signals, and that's something I use to get into positions and get out of positions. And this is why when you imagine staring at this for... For 10, 12 hours, that I start to get a headache, because you start... All I'm doing is staring at this, especially yesterday, when you're trying to take your profit, you know, I was fucking fried. I went to bed straightaway.
15:18 Christopher Angus: I think maybe I had something small to eat and I just went straight to bed. So, yeah, I was asleep by 10:00 PM. Let me check my Fitbit. I had the... Great sleep. I was fucking screwed though.
[pause]
15:54 Christopher Angus: So, yeah, 10:00 PM right through to like 7:00 AM, I was fucking screwed. Anyway... So, remember we started at 6.75. I'm going to stop looking at this, but at... I think that we're gonna come off about a half a point, maybe, to a point. So we wanna see 5.75, not really trying hard... Hang on. Excuse me, I just had to cough there. So I'll just move on, but, as you can see, the... I call them the flashy blue and red things, they are signals that I use to get in. Then I also look at... This is in hours. The MSCI are these indexes in the other world, so everything but the US, basically. And, wow, this thing's on a fucking tear. Jesus Christ. And then you can sometimes see, if you're looking at this, when it goes a half tick, so instead of going seven, it went 6.87, that's usually a little sign of weakness there.
17:13 Christopher Angus: So I'm still gonna stick to my side, you know. I wouldn't be surprised if we see eight because the trajectory is just up, but I just wanted to give you a little demo. I'm gonna stick to my side, saying, I think we're gonna come off. Oh, maybe we're not. Right. So, here we can see... Look at that, the VIX is still crashing. So the VIX is pointing down, that means the market's wanting to rally. So... Wow, look at that. Seven. Wow, I have to take on or I have to take my thing off. I'm a little bit cautious about this area here, because... Not... Not for this video. I'm just telling you, as an example, because we're at 2100 now, the whole numbers, so that the 100s serve as a lot of resistance. I don't do a lot of technical analysis, but I'm aware of the levels. So 2100 is a very, very strong level which... But there's an extra spread on here as well. So the... The futures would be just a little bit lower. But once the futures... I wonder what the futures are at. Once the futures get to... So the futures are five points off. Once the futures get to 2100, they're probably gonna bounce off.
18:49 Christopher Angus: Jesus, look at that, fucking thing is ripping like a motherfucker. Wow. So this is a kind of a dangerous area to trade because if you sell the VIX, look, the VIX doesn't have that far to go. I mean, it's maybe got two points, yeah, we can make some money, but like just at this area here, it's... It's very, very dangerous because if this thing bounces, the VIX is gonna reverse straightaway. So, I'm very much in the area of... I'm very cautious today of what's gonna happen. If this gets above like 2105, and holds there, so like 2107, 2108 and holds, this, actually, it has some ability to stick, then we'll start shorting the VIX again. I think also what I wanted to say was like we've had a couple of... We haven't had like a very good run because volatility has been so low.
19:47 Christopher Angus: I mean, I'm a very cautious trader anyway, but what I wanted to do was, I'm gonna just try and step up the aggression maybe like 20%, especially at the moment, because it's fairly easy to trade, it's not like a lot of sideways action. So I'm probably gonna wait till closer to the open to see this, because right now, I'm not doing shit. So, moving on, some of the other signals I trade are... This is the 30 year, so that's called the ultra bond. Usually, on the futures, this is in fractions, but they have decimalized this for some reason, probably because English people don't understand fractions. So this would move in increments of 32, so fractions, one over 32. And they've just converted that. I don't look at the 10-year that much or the two-year that much because they don't move as much, they don't give me like a really strong correlated signal.
20:54 Christopher Angus: Of course, I also look at Brent Crude, as you saw yesterday. I look at what's going on on the Footsie, but the Footsie's comprised of a lot of mining constituents, so you see oil go nuts, you see the Footsie rise, but it does seem to do its own thing. That's why I got the basket of other... Of other stock exchanges here, sort of like the dollar basket, of course, this is somewhat off, it only works in hours. Gold is very poorly correlated. I mean, the correlation is actually zero, so it can be up, it can be down. But, at the moment, with the safe havens... So the safe havens are the dollar, the yen, and gold, and treasuries, of course. The correlation is usually quite good. However, as you can see today, the market's going up, and gold is going up, but, normally, on a day-to-day basis, they work somewhat in opposites. However, what never fails is the treasuries. Treasuries are down, markets are up. VIX is down, markets are up.
22:13 Christopher Angus: As I said, the dollar's a little more iffy, but you can see the dollar's down today, markets are up. I guess those are kind of the main things that are coming at me. Then depending on... This is nothing compared to in hours. When these things really start going, it becomes a lot more obvious as to what's happening, and you can start seeing the blue and the red flashes, and they start hitting. Once they start hitting consistently, you can sort of start to read what's going on. Of course, I showed you the other... My put-call ratio thing, although this is like about... What? How many hours before the open? Four and a half hours for the open, so nothing's really going on. And I guess, in a nutshell, that's kind of the main stuff I tend to look at. Of course, I'm looking at the news and Bloomberg and Twitter, not just Associated Press. I follow a bunch of professional traders as well. And so there's... I don't know. I probably explained seven or eight there, but there's probably a bunch of others that I'm not even thinking about at the moment, just small things that I'm listening to across the day. For example here, the Tech 100, that's the NASDAQ, and, usually, I have the Russell on here as well. So, usually, I put the Russell on as well. As I said, I don't use this account. This is a... I just have it open from time to time to make sure the trades are going through correctly. So that's one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11.
24:03 Christopher Angus: Yeah. So, as I said, 15, 20 things that I look at, and that kind of comprises the information that I'm constantly absorbing at a very, very, very fast rate. In the back of my mind as well, I have the global events that are going on. I try not to think too much, too much in advance. Like, yes, we're all expecting a market crash and... But I know my crystal ball is fucked. I can't determine the future, I can only go on what I see. So that's the trick to trading. I mean, I don't really call what I do trading trading because I think I'm not really a trader, I'm a risk manager, and that's it. Trading is risk management. So I put on a trade which I feel is an appropriate size. Usually, I start around 1% of the account and then I move up from there, and sometimes I come in and out. So yesterday was a very nice example of how you make 1%. It was like 1.1%. Basically, the VIX moved one point, and that's the way I do it. It just is an easy way. Now, everyday is really not that clean because I may come in and out of a couple of little trades. If a trade is going against me two ticks but I can see the market's moving up, I may add a little more, but I kinda know, from a VIX perspective, how much I'm making. Usually, I have to wait till afterwards and just do the numbers and see how much I made then. But I hope that gives you a little more insight into how I work.
26:06 Christopher Angus: I think... I don't know, I guess I'll sum up by saying this: There's so much stuff coming at me, and I've studied this for so long, like four or five years very intensively, probably 10 in total, but five knowing that I wanted to be a professional money manager, trader, whatever you wanna call it. That I probably have a brain of a thousand pages of just knowledge. My communication skills are not good, so I don't really articulate what I know that well. And also, I don't wanna give the impression that I'm, I guess, interested in too many other things, because of course I am, but I'm very, very focused on what I do. I keep thinking to myself, I need to open up the strategies a little, but then, I think to myself, we could do some spreading like I showed you on the pictures and stuff. I know I can do that. I can trade that, but it just makes it a lot more variable, and... I don't know. This works, and it's just a quiet period. It'll get better because now we're doing the roll over and the volatility will pick up in the back month, and we'll have some space to play. Right now, we've got no space. And that's the thing.
27:21 Christopher Angus: The bottom of the VIX... The VIX is the lowest it's ever been. It's like 11 something, 12. So, you can see there's no downside left. And this is rolling over today, but here we've got a little more space to play. So, it'll pick up a little bit after tomorrow... Well, today, really... Especially once it rolls tomorrow. Fucking hell, this thing is gonna fucking tear. Jesus. This is interesting, actually. You can see... I don't know if you can see this, but the US 500, that's the S&P 500, is up 0.37. Wall Street's up 0.34. And the Tech 100, that's the NASDAQ Composite, is up 0.38. When you see... This is, again, one of the things that I know. I know a lot about a lot. But... I know a lot about a little, which is about trading and market micro structure, really, if I have to sum it up. That's really where I know a lot, is market micro structure. So, how the plumbing of the markets work. And how things move on a short-term basis. When it comes to the bigger picture, I know fucking nothing. But you can see here, like these are all very, very, very, very, very close together. Even then, the Russell's up 0.45. So, these are all within basically a 10th of a percent.
28:51 Christopher Angus: And when you see the market walking in lockstep like this, you know that this is professional money moving the market now. And this is a very strong move to the upside for the moment. This may change on the open, but, for the moment, the market is walking in lockstep, and so all the indexes are moving together. And that's just like... It's like double confirmation that the market is actually moving in a certain direction. So, as I said, sounds really wanky. But if I say, "This is the way I trade, and these are the things I look at," there's a lot that I can't really explain. It's just about... And I always say... So people say, "How do you do it?" I say, "Trading is like a lot about experience. It's like 20% skill, 50% experience, and 30% emotion."
29:50 Christopher Angus: And you have to have a lot of discipline to do what you do, and to do what you say you're gonna do." And usually when people say they wanna be a trader, well, I show them... What are... Normally, I ask them a question is if you... Fuck, this is a long one, I'm gonna need to cut this off. But if you... If we... If you could rob a bank online, financial fraud, and you could get a million pounds, and no one would find out, no one in the world, zero, okay, what would you do? Would you steal it or not? And there's zero chance of you getting caught. Now, I hate the banks as much as anyone. And then I ask them that question. And if they say yes, they would steal it, then I usually say trading is not for them, because if you're not honest with yourself and an honest person in general, then you can't really trade because you end... Dishonest people lie to themselves a lot, and if you're lying to yourself all the time, you don't have clarity in terms of trading and you don't have the discipline, like you say, "Okay, I'm in a losing position. I'm gonna get out." Or if you don't have a lot of self-honesty, if I put it that way.
31:11 Christopher Angus: 'Cause a lot of people are honest people, they're just not honest with themselves, but if you don't have self-honesty and the ability to say, "I'm gonna cut a losing trade and take a loss." Or, "I'm gonna get into position for this reason and that reason. It's not an emotional thing." And then you have a chance. But like my mate who just seems to keep... He's just like a money leak. He's just like a money murderer, basically. He's a smart guy, probably smarter than I am, but you have to have a certain mindset. And, again, this is something that I've learned over five years, and it's something that I practice every single day. If I wake up, I look at my phone and it's 7:24, I say, "Okay, I'm gonna lie in bed until 7:30." I get out of bed at 7:30. I don't go, "Okay, just another five minutes." I make sure whenever I make myself a promise, I keep that promise, because it's a practice of my discipline every single day. Everything I do is a practice of my discipline, because it's taken years to... And my ex-girlfriend said this to me. She said... Three people have said this to me since I broke up with my ex-girlfriend.
32:21 Christopher Angus: My ex-girlfriend, her parents, and someone else said this to me. They said... I think it was another girl, actually, said, "You don't show any emotion." And I think part of that is I've almost re-programmed myself to live... To not let my emotions rule me at all because I think you can't make emotional decisions in trading, especially, but in life, and make sure that they're good decisions. Non-emotional decisions are much better in terms of actually making clear decisions which has the best outcome. It makes life a little dull. And I think also part of who I am is I'm a Stradivarius, so like a musical instrument that plays very well when he's in tune, but he goes out of tune, he doesn't play very well, and he goes out of tune pretty easily. And that's why I don't like disruption in my life. I don't like noise. I don't like people coming to my house, I wear the same fucking shit every day. I get nervous and weirded out really fucking easy. Like go to the same shop, same hairdresser, same fucking everything. I don't like my friends coming here. I think that happened the other day, actually, like this guy, my friend, turned up. He didn't phone me before, and he just turned up while I was watching the market, and I had to say, "You can't come in." That kind of disrupts my kind of mental place for maybe 30 minutes, even just someone coming to the door.
33:55 Christopher Angus: So a part of this is my focus and my programming of myself to have this, because like this is something which I've said, we wanna do for a finite amount of time right. So we wanna maybe build this up say 50 million, 100 million, whatever it might be. My personal goal is to have 50 million, so I mean what does that leave you like a 100 million, something like that. So we get it to 150, and then I wanna stop because I think this... I'm here every single day and I do love it so it's not hard work but I wanna experience other things in life as well. I wanna have the freedoms. Not that I think that's gonna make me happy, like you said, but I wanna be... Have the ability not to ever think about money ever again. That's my goal, to never, ever, ever, ever to think about money. You have money in your bank. You never have to think about. You're gonna buy and never have to look in your bank. Of course, it's not all gonna be in my bank, it's gonna be in some kind of investment thing, but this is my life at the moment.
34:57 Christopher Angus: In the morning, I wake up... Jesus, this is going on. This is the last thing I'm gonna say. In the morning, I wake up, I check the markets, then I'll kind of watch the markets loosely up until like maybe 12:00. If there's something going on, I'll be straight at my computer from 8:00, and I'll sit here until 9, 10 o'clock, so that's 14 hours straight at the computer, and I do love it. Right. The market's coming off here. So here we go. Here's a VIX spike up, market's coming down, and what's the treasuries doing. Oh, here they are. I don't know. It's the treasuries, open the treasuries. Like I said, this isn't the side that I use. I use the other account, because that's kind of set up a lot more nicely, the little one, just for history. So here's the treasuries coming up. I'm just trying to get this set up nicely.
35:55 Christopher Angus: Right. So treasuries are spiking, VIX is spiking, market's coming off. So let's see. Now we see... We want to see some red splodgy things. Oh, fucking treasuries are coming off again, motherfucker. I'm gonna... We're still gonna stick to my side that I want to see a pullback. I reckon, before the open, we'll see a pullback probably to at least 2096. I'll watch that. I'll let you know once you've watched this video. Another little signal, before I forget, is I look at the highs and the lows. That's like really important as well.
36:40 Christopher Angus: So when things are very close to the high, like S&P here is at 2101.9. That's bullshit. Anyway, this is just because it's a synthetic market. Things don't move in fractions of a tick. A tick is 0.25, but you can see the high is 2103, and this is 2102, for all intents and purposes. This is very close to the highest, and when things are very close to high, they tend to keep magnetizing the high. And if something's pulled back, if things made a new high, pull back two points, usually want to buy it. In this case, I wouldn't be buying this with the VIX pointing up and treasuries pulling up like that. See that. But that... If you're a directional trader, I could probably... I can make money trading this, and this would be a position, not right now, but something where I'd be feeling like I've got the mindset, okay, we're two points off the high, let's pull back. It's grinding up.
37:41 Christopher Angus: This is a buying spot. This is a... This is like a micro buy, the dip. Again, market microstructure, but like not with treasuries facing up, and the VIX facing up, no fucking way, Jose. Anyway, so that's that. Hope that gives a little more insight. As I said, there's so much I can't articulate. There's so much about feel, about speed of the markets, about... It's too much. I can't really explain it. And that's also why I trade the VIX, because it's somewhat of a risk-less instrument if you know how to trade it. S&P, it's got so much upside, so much downside, you get it wrong, you can really fuck up. But, on the VIX, there's somewhat of a floor, and you can keep buying it, if needs be. And, again, that's... When it comes to daily profits, you may come in and out of several trades, wasn't as clean as yesterday's, one big trade, but, usually, you make more than one trade or re-buying, it gets less clear, but it gives a little bit of understanding. The VIX goes up from 16 to 17. If I get onto a trade at 16 and it goes to 17 and I don't come out, that's 1%. And that's the way I work it. Of course, as I said, it's not that clear because, often, I'll be in and out a couple of times if I... If I want to just grab a little profit, so on. But yesterday was one big trade. And I'm just gonna take a screenshot of this while I'm in here, so I can do the numbers. Okay, Mr A, I will catch you on Skype later. Bye.
It really is like Google is no longer a search engine, and more like a Yahoo! directory.— SEA☂☂LE SEO (@searchsleuth998) March 31, 2016
Maybe the doommasters who called SEO dead for over a decade were finally proved right about SEO?
SEO was only ever a bug. And web users mostly didn't notice when the search results turned into nothing but ads.
Everything is going full circle. Ad heavy is bad to nothing but ads.
Webmasters are focusing so heavily on mobile-first that they are making their desktop sites unusable...
Some websites have become so mobile-first that they’re basically unreadable on a big desktop monitor.— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) April 1, 2016
...at the same time usability experts are now recommending making things harder to save humanity.
Change creates opportunity. New changes, new channels, new options, new models, new methods.
I have decided to take a break from SEO and am transitioning to paid search, since clearly that is the future of all search marketing.
I've closed our membership site down to new paid member accounts & canceled all active paid subscriptions.
Perhaps it might be time for me to dust of PPCblog and shift most of my blogging to over there.
That is, if blogging still matters!
Maybe I’m super slow, but it sure seems Google has worked hard to destroy blogging as indexable content.— SEA☂☂LE SEO (@searchsleuth998) April 1, 2016
Going out on a positive note, the great team at Bing recently shared a promotional code with me to offer new advertisers a free $100 ad credit. Bing Ads clicks are a great value when compared against Google AdWords. You can access this coupon today via the following link:
Convicted fraudster and self-confessed criminal Christopher Angus is kicking off an educational video series on boosting investor confidence so you may steal from them. He is providing over a dozen detailed free video tutorials on how to defraud investors. This third video is 22:38 & was shared on March 18, 2016. The criminal who shot these videos delivered over a 99% investment loss, as he simply stole the money and integrated it into other investment scams abroad. https://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/18155553.oxford-fraudster-christopher-angus-defrauded-friend-2m/
Crown Police never followed the money trail.
0 minutes 40 seconds: did not do any trades because risk in market was too high, sat on hands
3 minutes 30 seconds: talks about how 5 point range in S&P 500 is absurdly tight & how normal range is 17 to 20 points
5 minutes 20 seconds: gambling is not what we do
6 minutes 20 seconds: difference between high volatility & low volatility markets in terms of margin of safety in entry and exits
12 minutes 5 seconds: does not believe in crystal ball & only trades reactively to good trade set ups
15 minutes 10 seconds: again talks about hedging any positions
16 minutes 20 seconds: vix at 20 is often a decent entry point to start buying
19 minutes 20 seconds: (over next 1 minute & 10 seconds) explains how low volatility makes entries harder & states he thinks options get too complicated. mentions most the smart people in options make money selling premium, which is writing options betting volatility will fall. then states he can't deviate from what he does which works even in bad markets we still make money.
20 minutes 30 seconds: states importance of discipline & states people who lose it and start fooling around are basically gambling
00:00 Christopher Angus: Okay, so, just a quick recap. I didn't do any trades today, reason being is nothing happened. Looking back at the opportunity, there was possibly one move that may have worked, but it was such a tiny move that the risk far outweighed the reward. I'll get to that just in a second. Let's go here. And this is the move that I'm talking about. You probably can't see these numbers 'cause on the video, it always comes out with slight low quality, but that's starting at about 13.82. The futures again operate at a slightly different number, but... And they move a little less than this. So, even if we're just trading the VIX here, we would have really struggled to do anything and actually come out with a profit and not get trapped in a trade over the weekend, which is something which should always be avoided 'cause you don't know what's gonna happen.
01:13 Christopher Angus: So, as you can see, this is the open and we... Because it's... We're in such a low, low, low place, we are only buying. So, as it came down, this is the only time we could have bought it. Bear in mind, when you take into account the spread, this move is about 0.4, and the spread is 0.1. So that leaves you with 0.3 points to play with. Again, you're not gonna nail it on the bottom, maybe you'll get a 0.1 off the bottom and 0.1 off the top because you gonna let it roll on you as it starts going over and then you're gonna say, "Okay, you know, it's... The markets turn, I'm gonna take my profit here." So, take into account that's 0.4. You can take off 0.1 straight away for the commission. Yes, we get a tiny bit of that back, but it's not much on one's tiny trade. So then we've got 0.3 left and we're gonna give away 0.1 to stock, and we know it's actually turning, and we're gonna give away 0.1 when we think it's rolling over. So, from 0.4, we're left with 0.1 profit, which is one tick, 10 ticks to a point on the VIX, which is the very smallest increment you can make. Bear in mind, I like to make one point a day, not 0.1 points a day. Its just the risk doesn't justify the reward.
02:48 S1: And if I just go back to the S&P here, you can see the S&P opened, what's that, 2045, went up to 2050, went back down to where it opened, and then went back up to where it closed. So the whole day, this was in a like five-point range, which is insane. That's just algos fighting each other, basically, with no big market participation. Volumes are very, very low at the moment, for some reason. Normally, there's around 200,000 shares traded on the DOW. At the moment, there's 200 million shares traded with all the DOW constituents, there's 30 companies within the DOW. It's 200 million shares, and that's kind of the average. At the moment, I'm about 90 million, so we're really down on volume. So, we need some news. So to have a market that's stuck in a five-point range... The average daily movement on the S&P normally, like just in a normal day, the normal range is like 17 to 20 points. It was 17 a while ago, but when the volatility really picked up in the last three months, went to about 20. So, even stuff which is historical that... The movement on the S&P will be about 17 points; today, it's five.
04:25 Christopher Angus: Really an impossible trading environment at the moment. Now, the market really just couldn't break out, it didn't break down, either, but it seems to be running out of steam. So we're positioned in a very good position, again, we've had a shitty week. I'm sorry, I do apologize, but there's literally nothing I can do. There's one move today and it just does... It didn't make any sense to even bother trading that and getting stuck over the weekend. You know, I would have been reporting 0.1% at best. You can see it's just what the market's doing, and even if you're trying to trade another market like the S&P, it would be a very similar story. What's the alternative? Go pick some small stocks and gamble. It's not really what we do.
05:25 Christopher Angus: So, I wanted to just take some time as well just to explain how things work in low-volatility environments and how things work in high-volatility environments and where the risks are. I don't know how... Oops. I don't know how high I can actually get this. That's a bit better, and then... That's kind of better. So, the brown tree or the green tree here... This is high volatility. See if I can do some writing here.
[pause]
06:31 Christopher Angus: And then the brown tree here is low. Low volatility. And what this... Imagine it was raining and you had to go stand under a tree, and both of us had to get under a tree. The brown one's only gonna take one person because it's narrow, so, that's you. And it's raining, here's me. I'm getting rained on. But we could both easily fit under... Stupid analogy, maybe, but we could both easily fit under with some other friends under the green tree, which is high volatility. Which means as the market moves, there's more time to take an entry, and there's more profit to be made. You don't have to get your entries as correct. You can come in anywhere and make a lot more profit, and you can exit earlier and still make profit. Now with the brown tree, you've gotta really nail it in the right place. And imagine this was one move, you'd have to get in here, and then you'd have to get out here to make the smallest amount of profit. So it's high risk for low reward, which is not a good trading theory.
08:28 Christopher Angus: And this is exactly the brown tree. It's, you've gotta nail that baby on the nose because if you screw up, you're basically underwater straight away and there's no recovery. And again, I hope that makes a bit more sense. That's a low-volatility environment which we seem to be in, which we'll be in this week. High volatility, when you have tremendous moves... I'm just gonna put this on a little bit longer. It's not been great the last couple of weeks, but here's a high... That's a three-point move, nearly, so, we could've... Today, we had a total range and one possible move of 0.4 on that... This example here that I showed you, that was basically within one day. I kinda ran over two days, but just for this example, there's a three-point move.
09:44 Christopher Angus: So you can see the difference in volatility at the moment is enormous, and the risk of getting stuck underwater is high. So, in a way, it takes a lot of discipline not to feel pressured and say, "I'm gonna do something because I feel like I need to do something, 'cause we haven't had a really good week." But I'd rather do nothing than have to report that we're stuck underwater in some horrendous trade over the weekend, 'cause it's gonna be stressful, and it opens on Sunday, I'm not gonna have a good weekend. I actually have some kind of coldly-flu thing coming on, so I'm not feeling too good anyway, so I'm pleased. But what I'm trying to say is... I'm not trying to toot my own horn, but I did the right thing today in not doing anything. Because there was one move, and it was such a small move that I could've made almost no money but could've been stuck much more easily than I could've made money.
10:46 Christopher Angus: So, as you can see, this is the longer-term thing from beginning of March 'til today, and the moves have been much more dramatic. It's just these last few couple of days... Well, this week, because it's been a downhill train and as you know, we can't sell volatility here because we're heading to the bottom. And there's basically... We could've grabbed a point, yeah, but the risk, again, risk-to-reward ratio is... It's pretty close to the bottom so there's not a lot of downside to capture, but there's a ton of upside to capture. If I roll this back a little longer, 28 days, there's volatility of 29. So, as you can appreciate, there's 15, 16 points on the upside, but like one on the downside. So that's why we can only buy when it gets down to these levels, and when it's there, I'm waiting for about a bottom, basically. Like I said, I trade reactively, not proactively. I don't know the future. My crystal ball's fucked. It's never worked. And I think anyone who tries to think that they have a crystal ball that is efficient and works properly, we usually end up losing money.
12:18 S1: So I can only trade reactively, so I wait for an event to happen. Unfortunately, the S&P's stuck in a five-point range, it's just unbelievable to have a tight range like that all day. Some of the spikes of two minutes might have been a little higher, but fundamentally, it would've spiked up. That's just market manipulation at a micro-level market microstructure. So there's nothing to do. It does become infuriating and creates sort of unreasonable doubt, and it is unreasonable because I know over time, this will come right. I was hoping the end of the week was gonna turn. You said a couple more days, I think that's Monday. And you seem to have a better hand on the markets than I do, to be honest, so, I'm just trying to run this out.
13:21 Christopher Angus: I don't know what I've done to my thing now. Okay. So as you can see, volatility does come back. It's just a matter of time. And... I'm gonna just put this into a more reasonable timeframe. It's pretty cool when it's at the bottom, because you can grab full points over and over and over, and literally it does become a bit of a printing press, as I've said a number of times. We're yet to see the printing press. At the moment, the fucking machine is on some kind of go slow, but it'll speed up, I promise. Like here, you can see, there are times when it is quiet, but it always comes back. And I could run this back years, and it's been the same. So, this is back to '91, 1991, when I was 11 years old. You can see, there are down times, of course, but it always comes back. The spike here is the great recession of 2008, 2009, when the VIX went to 80. Now this has smoothed out a lot of... This has smoothed out all the intra-day stuff and all the daily stuff so that this probably went a little higher last year, 24th of August, Black Monday, which was actually the day that my girlfriend left me, so I'll never fucking forget that day, when the S&P lost like 200 points in one day and the VIX also went to like 60 or 80.
15:08 S1: Now if you've loaded up, and you're short, that could really fucking damage your account; it really could. That's why, when you're on the short side, you have to run a hedge, so it catches you by a point, you run it up to 60, you start taking the leg, you start lifting the legs, and it starts to come down, and then you've had a really good day. And if it goes to 65 or goes to 63, you put the... You put what the hedge will be on anyway, because it goes on automatically, but it'll pick up the hedge. And yes, you do slide backwards a little, but it doesn't stay here. So the day that the VIX rockets up here, even if we're in a hedge, we'll be opening bottles of champagne, because it'll be awesome. Anyway. I diverge.
15:58 Christopher Angus: So, things are cool. It could be cooler if we actually had a decent week, but I'm sorry, I just couldn't do anything. This week's been shitty. It's been on a... Like you can... And I'll change this here. It's been on a downward slide all dog goddamn week over there, and I just... Once it gets below this 20 point, 20 is like my cut-off, I don't sell anymore, because I wanna start buying it, and so now I'm waiting. And yes, it was a little better 'cause I could scalp like a quarter point and half point. Not even that much, but a couple of small trades like third of a point, third of a point kind of thing. Something like that, plus the rebate.
16:42 Christopher Angus: But today, there was fuck-all. There was nothing to have. But you can see, this is going back to 2010, 2010, just short of beginning of 2010. So, it won't be like this forever; things go up and down. It's just that we're in a down phase and it's loading up before it goes back up again, so there isn't anything to worry about and I'm gonna trade much more aggressively next week 'cause we're at a really good level. But I just... I have to be reactive and not proactive, and I have to see the market turning, because like I showed you the thing the other day, we're waiting for the fed. I was deliberately holding off until something happened. If I'd been in a trade, the VIX dropped a full point straight away, we would have been underwater, and we'd still be underwater if I had actually taken a trade. And that's experience talking. My experience, I know when it's good to go and when it's not good to go. And again, today, if I'd taken a trade, the probability that I'd have either maybe just scratched the trade, which would have been like barely okay, or we would have been stuck. There would've been over 50% probability.
18:00 Christopher Angus: And again, it comes down to experience. I have to be reactive, I have to see the market turn before I go. And it's the whole... I'm looking at not just volatility turning; I'm looking at what the S&P is doing, what the DOW is doing, what t-notes are doing. You can see in my screenshots the flight to quality. Sometimes I leave that watchlist up if don't close it. And I don't see anything. I see the markets locked up, and just this really backward and back and forth fighting all the time over like two points each way. Two points up, two points down, two points up, two points down. And it's not... If you are trying to trade the S&P as like a regular trader who, there was unlimited upside and basically unlimited downside, you would have been chopped to pieces. You would've just given away loss after loss after loss because you had got in a trade, seen it go up a point, said, "Okay, it's gonna break out now." It would have turned on you and then would have come down a point, gone down another point, then you would have scrapped... Taken off for one point loser and you would have been chopped up.
19:13 Christopher Angus: These very, very low-volatility environments are no good for anyone. The only thing I could probably do is I could take a straddle with some options, betting that the markets aren't gonna move. I don't know, fuck options. I like options, they do interest me, but they're so complicated, and that's not what I do. I only like them 'cause I'm interested in them. But we're... If you're in these low-volatility environments, you're selling premium, because you're betting that the markets are not gonna move, not buying, not buying puts and calls, you'll be selling them.
19:47 Christopher Angus: And that's how all the big-option guys make money, really, is they sell premium. And all the smart ones don't sell naked calls and naked puts because you make 15% a month until one month, you lose everything. So, I've heard many, many horrible stories like that. And options have always really scared me, because of it, so I've never... And they're not a big thing in the UK, anyway, to be honest. So I've never really got into them. And at times, I really wanted to, but I can't deviate from what I do; what I do really works. You can see this. Even in a shitty week we don't lose money. We still make money, we just make a little less. And I never wanna deviate. Even once I've made my 50 mil, and you've probably made 100 mil, I don't wanna ever go and start fooling around because I think it's this...
20:41 Christopher Angus: Once you start fooling around, you've lost your discipline and that's that, and then you're basically just gambling. And it's just, even if you feel like you have a strategy, it's not the disciplined, well-honed, bona fide, well-optimized strategy. It's just like fucking screwing around and... I don't know, it's just it's always seemed kind of like really sloppy to me.
21:04 Christopher Angus: So, that's today. When I don't make money, I make videos to explain. So if you see a video, you know it's not been great. But like I said, just hang in there. And I'm sorry that as you've started sending some big money, things have like ground to a fucking halt. It's not good. You're gonna wait at least a couple of weeks before you send any more money. I'm not in any rush, especially not at the moment; everything is quiet anyway. So, we'll make money every week. We will. Even if there's... We have another week, like next week, you know, maybe we'll make 2%, 3%, hopefully. It's not the end of the world; it could be better. I like to do the 1% a day that's like my goal. Of course, February, was fucking wild, so, we had a really good February. Unfortunately, I wasn't with the big money.
22:00 Christopher Angus: Anyway, I don't wanna make excuses, it is what it is, I can't do anything. But thanks for your patience, thanks for the trust in me, thanks for everything. Thanks for remaining happy and calm. I need it, especially at times like this, 'cause I don't wanna feel pressure to perform because there's nothing I can do and then I don't wanna start doing crazy things 'cause I think I need to like put some trades on. Because I just... I won't do it, but I don't wanna ever feel the pressure that I have to anyway. Anyway, bit of a monologue, thanks again, and I'll catch you over the weekend or Monday at the latest. Bye for now.
Convicted fraud and self-confessed criminal Christopher Angus is kicking off a confidence series, providing free video tutorials on how to defraud investors. This third video is 22:36 & was shared on March 18, 2016. The criminal who shared these videos delivered over a 99% investment loss, as he simply stole the money and integrated it into other investment scams abroad. https://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/18263036.christopher-angus-jailed-fraud-friend-philippines/
Crown Police never followed the money trail.
0 minutes 40 seconds: did not do any trades because risk in market was too high, sat on hands
3 minutes 30 seconds: talks about how 5 point range in S&P 500 is absurdly tight & how normal range is 17 to 20 points
5 minutes 20 seconds: gambling is not what we do
6 minutes 20 seconds: difference between high volatility & low volatility markets in terms of margin of safety in entry and exits
12 minutes 5 seconds: does not believe in crystal ball & only trades reactively to good trade set ups
15 minutes 10 seconds: again talks about hedging any positions
16 minutes 20 seconds: vix at 20 is often a decent entry point to start buying
19 minutes 20 seconds: (over next 1 minute & 10 seconds) explains how low volatility makes entries harder & states he thinks options get too complicated. mentions most the smart people in options make money selling premium, which is writing options betting volatility will fall. then states he can't deviate from what he does, which works even in bad markets we still make money.
20 minutes 30 seconds: states importance of discipline & states people who lose it and start fooling around are basically gambling
00:00 Christopher Angus: Okay, so just a quick recap. We didn't place any trades today as I suspected. I thought today was gonna be another horrendous day, and it was. This is just... Let me just go back a little here, what time is it? Let's see if I can...
[pause]
00:35 Christopher Angus: Sorry I'm just... It's not good.
[pause]
00:50 Christopher Angus: Let me do it like this. So yesterday we closed at down here. And once the cash opened, it basically would've just gapped up. That's not really a trade there. You would've just found the cash there, and then had to decide are we gonna buy it here, 'cause you ain't selling it there, that's for sure. And if you had decided to buy it, which of course I didn't 'cause I just... Instinctively, I knew it was gonna happen. I just watched it and it just fell off again and turned around and came back up. As you can see, it's so volatile just on the open from 9:30 US time to 10:00 that you always have these really big moves. These moves aren't really big enough to make decent kind of money. This one here is like around half a point, which would've actually been able to make money, but we weren't really in that frame of mind where we're trying to take half a point because you're not gonna get half a point. You're not gonna get it right on the bottom; you're gonna get it here, like at 17.2. And then as it comes up, you're not gonna get it at 16.2; you're gonna sell it something down there at like 17.4.
02:20 Christopher Angus: Plus, you have to take 0.1 into consideration, so 17.2 to 17.4's 0.2. And then there's 0.1 in commission that you're paying back. Of course we get some of that back, but in a sense we would've made 0.1. We would've made one tick on that. That's not really a trade. And this, of course, is not a trade at all. There's there's nothing in that like. You're not gonna nail this at 7.04, so 17.1, 17.30. They would've had to have complete precision to make 0.1 after you've paid your commission. And that's not a trade, that you would've not even broken even. So there's just been no opportunities. But like I said, we wanted to see the VIX drop-off. Thankfully, at the end of the day, it sort of dropped again.
03:15 Christopher Angus: Again, the contracts rolling over, the March contract is expiring. Which means that we can now get on and trade tomorrow because we may have been able to make a little money today if I'd really worked like a son-of-a-bitch. Wouldn't have been easy and I wouldn't have made a lot but, with the Fed stuff coming up, that's all Bloomberg's talking about, getting us ready for a June rate increase. No, a cut, sorry about that. Basically, no one's ready trading. Or people are trading, but they're just gently buying it. And you'll see some interesting stuff. If I look at the S&P, so S&P had a big gap down on the open opposite to the volatility, as you could see. And you could see everyone selling into the open here and then covering their positions at the close of the day. These people got short and I guess probably hoping for a breakdown or something. That didn't happen, so everyone just settled at the end of the day.
04:27 Christopher Angus: It would've been obviously virtually an equal number of buyers that wanted to fill this gap. So whenever there's a big gap, the algos are always gonna wanna fill the gap. It's a standard play, so the algos start buying it here hoping they'll get back here. And it didn't even do that. It was so lackluster it was unbelievable. If we look what happened on the open, we opened... Where's the open? Around 17.11, and we traded between 17.11 to 17.05. We closed at 17.15. It's a very, very tight range. No break out, just stuck. And this is really indicative of some really big upcoming news and... Oh, bollocks. If we look at the news that's coming up tomorrow, this the Forex Factory. It's like a Forex thing, but I use it because it lists all the upcoming events. Very, very important because that's when you get a lot of the volatility. And you can see, this is from like this an hour after the open tomorrow 'cause we're an hour ahead on Daylight Saving. That'll be evened up at the end of the week 'cause for some reason, the US changes an hour early compared to Europe, which is pretty cool for me. I wish it was always like this 'cause it lets me finish an hour earlier.
05:55 Christopher Angus: But over here, we can see there's all this, there's crude oil, there's all this FOMC, which is the Fed stuff. And it's gonna be a really kind of crazy day. And even now before the open here, we can see there's building permits which is really indicative of what the economy's doing. Not really, 'cause it's all bullshit anyway. They bend the numbers. But it does cause volatility in the market and the CPI. Tomorrow's a huge news day. Massive. Let's have a look at the end of the week. Unemployment tomorrow as well, and then the Philly Fed Manufacturing Index. Again, this is a lot of the industrial stuff and it gives an indication which way the economy is going or the industrial side because if people are not spending money on industrial goods, like investing in machinery and stuff, it's seen as usually quite a negative signal for the economy.
07:03 Christopher Angus: There's gonna be some massive volatility tomorrow and on Thursday, yay. Finally. 'Cause the last two days, I can't even remember shitty days like this. So, no trades at all. Didn't even bother. I was hardly interested 'cause I knew this is just a way to get caught under water as you try and buy this and then be unhappy. I know it. What did I wanna show you here? Let's have a look.
07:38 Christopher Angus: So I wanted to show you a time where we would hedge... Now we only would really hedge when we are selling volatility, when we buying volatility, there's not really a need to hedge because if it does run through your order and you to go under water you know it's gonna come back, especially if you buy it well. And the time when we would hedge is when we got it wrong on the sell. So let me just see if I can zoom in a little bit here give you a little example this is obviously not going to be... This is just a made up thing 'cause I haven't had to hedge but... So a hedge we would want to... We would think that the market was... This is well out.
08:31 Christopher Angus: Hedge would be once we'd be thinking that the market was going down, but actually what it did was it just turned around and went back up again. So over here last... No, give you a more recent example, yeah. So... See if I can make that a bit better. Okay, so here... It was at February, yep, alright. So we we we... Systems nearly fully automated now anyway. The hard thing is just trying to tell the system where the ranges are because we don't just buy at 14 or 15 and 16 and sell it 25. It depends on where the ranges are being established over a short amount of time. So this would be a really nice range to trade because like one point one point one point one point like it's very obvious, we wouldn't have been selling it here. We would have just bought it wait it bought it wait it... And so on.
09:49 Christopher Angus: Until it got to about here and then we would have sold it because that there becomes quite a clear place, but I want to show you a place where we would have had to hit. So what we do is when we buy volatility, we just buy it. We place it depending on where it is in relation to the bottom and this is very, very close to the bottom but depends on the size of our trade. So its a money management thing. Now, when we sell volatility, we have to have a hedge in place because volatility has unlimited upside. So say we wants to sell volatility here and have a hedge, wait what number is that... 19, have a hedge on 21. So we sell volatility and it doesn't, it goes against us and it hits our hedge, now our positions is Delta neutral. So we've locked in a loss, say we're like two grand down. Now we're gonna remain two grand down as it comes up here. Now, one position is going to be four grand up, for example, and the other is gonna be six grand down. Once it gets here, we'll start to break the hedge and take... Lift one of the legs and we would then lift some of the leg so that the... That the buy side of things has been... Is lighter than the sell side. So we now are going to start pocketing some of the profit.
11:31 Christopher Angus: This isn't a profit gain, by the way. Let's start pocketing some of that profit and start to remove it bit by bit by bit. So now, by the time it gets back here, we probably only have one side of the leg back on. In effect we'd would still be two grand down but our balance would be four grand higher. But we would still be running a negative position and then we would of just let it go through. That's a really over simplified version of how hedging works. It's never... It doesn't really play out that... As simply as straightforward as that because, as I said, there is a cost attached. There's higher transactional fees. When you lift legs, often you lift a leg... Say we started lifting a leg early, we might have to put the leg back on.
12:18 Christopher Angus: It gets, as I said really, really complicated and its something which we try hard not to do because what happens is you don't lose money but you end up focusing a lot on trying to unwind hedges and you have to unwind them very, very slowly because as soon as you take off big pieces in one go, you inevitably will have to be putting them back on because you don't want it to continue out. So that's fundamentally how we handle trades that don't work this... You would have seen the market turning. Okay, maybe it's turning... This is around the level which its turned. No it didn't, caught in a hedge, picked up a hedge here, lift the leg over simplified and then let it run down and if it had turned here we would have had to put it back on again.
13:12 Christopher Angus: Often make money from hedging just because you're picking it up, it's running back down, and you'd taking some money, then you take that money you take it out then you reduce your risk on the other side. So say we'd made four grand there but was six grand down, we could basically take... Make that position a lot smaller and then we would still be two grand down but our actual risk could be much smaller because the contract numbers would be much lower, if that makes sense. The position would be much, much, much smaller. So if there is a big rip, it's not going to be hurtful. There's many ways of doing it, that's kind of my way of doing it. Anyway, like I said, we fully automated the problem teaching the computer or the algorithm and trying to train it is to train it where the ranges are. And as I said, this is obvious as a human being because you buying selling wait, buy sell wait, buy sell wait. This is also a range which we were trading, was it we were trading for you here? I don't think so. But this is a range which we were trading.
14:17 Christopher Angus: This is arranged we... I think, we traded a little bit, but you don't make as much money. This is where you make lots of money. I think I said yesterday, these big one-way moves down or up. And this is not even a range. This is just like this needs some Viagra or something because it's like nothing's happening. Anyway, this one's a little easier because we kinda knew it was at the bottom anyway because of where it had been and what the broader markets were doing. Over here, you can see I'm a little bit more cautious because I know that it's highly likely to come down a little bit further. Because that's kind of [chuckle] what it does. And I wanna get a good position. Over here, we would have handled that in a different way and been a lot smaller. But I'm looking to really try and capitalize on this and do well for us here.
15:25 Christopher Angus: So, we'll have to see. As I said, tomorrow, it's very likely that we'll start trading again, pretty much regardless of what this does. I'm not gonna be waiting around too much longer because just after the stuff in the morning... Where are we? US time. It's evening for you. But just after the stuff at 12:30 UK time, that's at 8:30. That will cause some volatility. And almost certain you'll be wanting to trade there. If unlisted, it's just flat again. But this is gonna cause some incredible volatility. And I'm gonna eat that all up. Yummy.
16:12 Christopher Angus: And then again on Thursday, I've got some unemployment stuff. Yep. Thursday I've got unemployment in the US and that is wild. So yeah. Monday and Tuesday, zero. But I'm pretty sure at end of the week we'll be where we need to be. We're at 5% at least. At least. So that's the video. Not even that interesting I'm afraid because there's so little that's happened all day. It's just been a bit of just a zero day. Nothing. Nothing's gone on. But thanks for your patience. It will come good. And it's the right thing to do. I can't just start forcing on trades because I'm getting impatient or I feel under pressure, I don't. This is what we have to do. We've just got to wait, be patient, and on average, we'll make good money. Thanks a lot. Speak to you tomorrow.
A few weeks back Google introduced literallyorganic-free search results on mobile devices in the travel vertical. Google is now deepening that organic-free offering, announcing their new mobile travel guides would launch in 201 cities.
If you live outside of the United States it can be hard to appreciate just how ad heavy some of Google's search results have become in key ad categories.
Plenty of Room in Hotel California
When Google rolled out the 4 AdWords ads above the organic results layout they mentioned it would mostly appear on highly commercial search terms like New York Hotels. Hotels are one of the most profitable keyword themes, because:
the searches tend to be fairly late funnel
the transactions are for hundreds of dollars
OTAs and other intermediaries often get somewhere between 10% to 30% of the transaction
Google search results for hotels not only contain 4 AdWords ads, but they also have price ads on the "organic" local listings. That gives Google a second bite at the apple on monetizing the user.
Click on any of those prices and you get sent to a beautiful(ly ugly) ad heavy click circus page like the following.
today we will begin phasing out the following Digital Magazines: Yahoo Food, Yahoo Health, Yahoo Parenting, Yahoo Makers, Yahoo Travel, Yahoo Autos and Yahoo Real Estate.
Direct Marketing Budgets vs Brand Ad Budgets
Google recently had another vertical search program which paralleled their hotel offering which focused on finance. It allowed users to compare things like credit cards, home loans, auto insurance policies, and other financial offers. They acquired BeatThatQuote, hard coded aggressive placements for themselves near the top of the search results, increased the size of these custom ad units - and then killed them off.
Why would Google invest hundreds of millions of Dollars in vertical search only to kill the offering?
It turns out the offering was too efficient from an advertiser perspective, so it didn't drive enough yield for Google.
If it is a lead-based product the ad rates are set by rational lead values. There is no brand manager insisting on paying $120 a click because "we HAVE TO be #1 in Google for auto insurance."
If Google does lead generation and sells the lead off exclusively they get paid precisely once for the consumer. Whereas if Google scrubs many aggregators from the market & allows searchers to click on one brand at a time they get to monetize the user many times over and take advantage of any irrational bidders in the ecosystem.
As long as Google is monetizing brand advertising budgets they can insert many layers of fat into the ad stack.
Google's vertical ad offerings may come and go, the biases behind the relevancy algorithms may shift, and the ecosystem constantly has some number false positives. As search engines test out various features & shift their editorial policies some companies get disrupted and are forced to change their business models, while other companies get disrupted and outright disappear.
Google's move into auto insurance might have been part of the reason Bankrate decided to exit the business. But Google exiting the Google Compare business and adding a 4th text AdWords ad slot above the organic search results a few days before Bankrate reported results caused BankRate's stock to slide by as much as 47%.
Brand Building to Lower Risk
Part of the SEO value of building a brand is the strength of the brand awareness helps you rank better across whatever portion of the search ecosystem Google has not yet eaten, while lowering your risk of becoming a false positive statistic. Branded-related searches should (in theory) also provide some baseline level of demand which insulates against ranking shifts on other keywords. And having a brand name rather than a generic business name allows one to go from one market to the next.
Just be Apple...
Computers.com won't magically morph into MP3player.com then CellPhone.com then Tablet.com then Watch.com, but Apple was able to move from one market to the next with ease due to consumer familiarity and loyalty toward their brand.
Investing in building brand awareness is often quite expensive & typically requires many years of losses to eventually see positive returns. Trends come and go, and with them so do associated brands.
Heavily invest in the wrong trend & die.
Wait too long to invest in an important trend & die.
Few companies are able to succeed in field after field after field.
For every Apple-like example, there are dozens of losers. Look at how many computer companies shifted to an emphasis on higher margin laptops, then sold off their laptop divisions for almost nothing and chased cell phones for growth. While they outsourced everything and relied on a faux open source software provider they guaranteed their own death. Look at how some of the mobile companies are valued at almost nothing, or those that have been bought & gutted like Motorola or Nokia. There are only 3 somewhat strong mobile manufacturers:
Apple - the source of the original iPhone which Google worked so hard to copy
When the financial crisis happened about 8 years ago Google saw both their revenue growth rate and their stock price crash. Direct marketers receded with the consumer, but many pre-approved brand ad campaigns continued to run. Google's preferred custom shifted away from direct marketers toward large global brands.
Since dumping that profitable as hell company on the public they've only had to invest in removing about 2.4 million articles from eHow.
The site is still torched by the Panda algorithm.
And they are still losing money. ;)
Companies like Mahalo which chased eHow also washed up on the rocks. They've since pivoted to YouTube, to mobile apps, to email & perhaps should re-brand to Pivot, Inc.
If you shop at big box stores in the United States you may have no awareness of the following product.
Look a bit closer at that image & you'll see it wasn't LEGO, but rather LEBQ.
Sales for Le Bao Quan are not sales for the core LEGO brand, the consumer gets acclimated to an artificially low price point, and imagine what sort of a traumatic impact it might have for a child if their first LEGO-like toy looks like a pig fresh from the butcher's shop.
The key difference between that sort of stuff and gray areas monetized by the big online platforms is you may have to go to third world to find the sketchy physical products in the real world; whereas the big online platforms all have some number of sketchy globally accessible offers at any point in time. Here are just a few examples:
At the core, all these platform plays are both brands unto themselves & places where third party brands get monetized.
The start up costs to have leverage to work with brands in an official partnership can be quite significant. Just look at how much Jet.com has raised and how much hustle they've used to get in the game, even with their massive burn rate.
Part of why Apple has such strong margins is their brand is so strong they can dictate terms and control the supply chain. Others are willing to give them the majority of the profits because carrying them completes the catalog and helps the retailers sell other, weaker goods where the retailers have higher profit margins.
Luckily when fake products use spammy titles on Amazon the reviewers will quickly highlight if they are of inferior quality. But if they look authentic & work, it can be hard for the brands to know unless they proactively track everything. And as that demand gets filled, if there is a negative experience it may lead to customer complaints about the brand, whereas if there are no complaints & the product works it still leaves less money for the brand which is being arbitraged.
"The Internet doesn't change everything. It doesn't change supply and demand." - Andy Grove
Some companies die slowly, as accountants drive strategy & they outsource their key points of differentiation and become unremarkable. When Yahoo! turned their verticals into thin "me too" outsourced plays they made it easy for Google to offer something of a similar quality, which in turn left the Yahoo! vertical properties without much distribution.
As Yahoo! struggles, some investors want to buy the core Yahoo! business so Yahoo! can exit the web business while being a holding company for Alibaba and Yahoo! Japan stock.
Some retailers have symbiotic relations with brands they sell, while other platforms may compete more aggressively with those whose products they sell. The same is true with affiliates. Affiliates can genuinely add value & drive new distribution for brands, or they can engage in lower value arbitrage, where they push the brand to pay for what was already owned by it through shady techniques like cookie stuffing.
One of the most one-sided and biased hate-filled perspectives I've ever seen about affiliates is Lori Weiman's guest columns at Search Engine Land.
Just the same, some merchants treat affiliates honestly and fairly, while other merchants have a pattern of scamming their affiliates through lead shaving, adjusting revenue share without telling the affiliates, and a host of other sketchy behaviors.
Monetizing Brand (Search Engine)
Search engines allow competitors or resellers to bid on branded keywords, which creates an auction bidding environment for many branded terms. Typically Google offers the official site / brand clicks at a significant discount for these terms in order to encourage them to compete in the ad marketplace & to help shift some of the organic click mix over to paid clicks.
Google has also tried a number of other initiatives to boost their monetization of branded keywords. A partial list of such efforts includes:
a test of banner ads from brands which were merged with organic listings (though this effort was quickly dumped due to lack of driving revenues as it didn't allow for auction dynamics to drive prices upward - similar to the reason Google Advisor was shut down)
adding other distracting eye candy to mobile results including the knowledge graph and "also searched for" links pointing at competing businesses
allowing syndicated search partners to use harder to notice ad labeling
allowing syndicated search partners to use more ads above their organic search results
Sophisticated vs Unsophisticated SEM
Many poorly managed AdWords accounts managed by large ad agency ultimately end up far more damaging to brands than the efforts from "shady" affiliates. The set up (which is far more common than most would care to believe) revolves around the ad agency arbitraging the client's existing brand, falsely claiming the revenue generated by that spend to be completely incremental & then get a percent of spend management fee on that spend. The phantom profits which are generated from those efforts are further applied to bidding irrationally high on other terms, to once again pick up more percent of spend management fees.
Both eBay and Google have done studies on the incrementality of paid search clicks.
eBay being a large brand found they didn't see much incrementality [PDF]. Search Google for eBay and they won't run AdWords ads. eBay still participates in product listing ads / shopping search for other products they carry.
Google (of course) found much more incrementality with paid search ads. While they conducted their internal study and suggested it would be too hard or expensive for most advertisers to conduct such a study, they also failed to mention that the reason it would be expensive for an advertiser to perform such a test is because Google intentionally & explicitly decided against offering those features inside the AdWords platform. It is the same reason Google shut down Google Advisor / Google Compare - offering it doesn't provide Google a guaranteed positive yield when compared against not offering it.
One thing Google did note about seeing higher rates of incremental clicks in their study was when there was increased space between the listings there tended to be a higher rate of incremental ad clicks. This is part of why we see AdWords ads getting larger with more extensions & there being so many features in mobile which push the organic results below the fold.
The same Lori Weiman who hates affiliates is currently running (literally) an 8-part series on why you should bid on your brand keywords.
If anyone other than a search engine monetizes brand that might be bad, but if the search engines do it then going along with the game is always the right call.
Owning the Supply Chain
"The true victory (the true 'negation of the negation') occurs when the enemy talks your language." - Slavoj Zizek
The opposite is also true. If you are a brand who is being dictionary attacked by an ad network, the brand quickly shifts from an asset to a liability.
"The only thing that I'd rather own than Windows is English, because then I could charge you two hundred and forty-nine dollars for the right to speak it." - Scott McNealy
Google owns English and Spanish and German and ...
Is your control over the supply chain strong enough that you can afford to be below the fold for your own brand?
While you think about that, other pieces of the supply chain are merging in key verticals to better combat the strength of search ad networks.
Expedia, Travelocity & Orbitz
Zillow & Trulia
Staples, OfficeMax & OfficeDepot
How much are you willing to pay Google for each click for a brand you already own?
When does that stop being worth it?
During the next recession many advertisers will find out.
Added: Within days of writing the above post Google was once again found running ads promoting phishing campaigns, even though the ads arbitrage Google's branded keyword terms.
Convicted fraudster and self-confessed criminal Christopher Angus is kicking off a confidence series, providing free video tutorials on how to defraud investors. This first video is 13:55 & was shared on Monday, March 14, 2016. The criminal who shot these videos delivered over a 99% investment loss, as he simply stole the money and integrated it into other investment scams abroad. https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-8047311/Businessman-told-friend-hed-quadrupled-2-3m-investment-fortune-actually-blew-1-18.html
UK Crown Police never followed the money trail.
highlights how positions are hedged & runs tight money management. hedges are a cost that act like insurance.
at 11:30 he talks about how he would dread the day of reporting a loss because it would be totally unnecessary because it would be caused by mental error.
00:00 Christopher Angus: Okay, so just a quick video on why I'm just holding my nerve, so to speak, and not wanting to initiate a trade. This chart shows two things, the blue line is the S&P it's actually the SPY, but that's a mirror image of the S&P, the correlation is one, so it's identical, and then the pink line is volatility. As you can see, there is basically a 100% inverse correlation of one, inverse correlation. As the S&P drops, volatility goes up, and as the S&P goes up, volatility drops. So based on previous history, you can see here this is from 1998, the volatility is very close to the bottom. It's only really been down around, let's say, 11.85 when the markets were super, super high; sort of breaking record highs. Let me just put that there. So you can see when the markets were breaking record highs at every point that's when volatility was at its very bottom.
01:15 Christopher Angus: Now, the S&P's very far from actually breaking a new record high, over 100 points. So, volatility is basically at the bottom; you can see that dotty line there. I can't... If I move that up just a wee bit. It's way, way below its historic average. So, that means we're gonna take a very formulaic strategy of, buy low and sell high. There's only one thing we can do, and this is part of the strategy, and that is... Let me expand this out. It doesn't work that well there. We can't short the VIX now or sell it and then buy it back when it's lower because it's near the bottom. So there's basically nothing, no downside potential; there's no downside opportunity. So when you're obviously trading anything, you can only buy or sell, and if you short, you're obviously making when it goes down, when you buy, you're making when it goes up, obviously, as you know.
02:21 Christopher Angus: Now, since there's hardly any way to go down, because we're so close to the bottom, there's basically very, very limited opportunity. And there's obviously a much larger risk that if the VIX spikes and we are short, that could be kind of bad, so we'd have to run a hedge and hedges run a cost, and it just would be really, really stupid to short the VIX now. So that leaves us with one option and that's to buy. And because we're very close to the bottom, I'm waiting for a bottom to come in. I've got my orders ready and I'm waiting patiently and I'm very reactive, as I've said before, I'm not proactive because I don't know. I used to have a huge sign above my desk that I printed out in big letters that said, "You don't know." And it was just a reminder to me to say that anything can happen, basically.
03:14 Christopher Angus: So, what I'm hoping for and expecting to see is that the VIX will come to bottom around 16 or at, very close to 17 now, and we're actually got close. What was the bottom here today on the VIX? It doesn't say. I might have to get rid of that chart, I think. But the bottom of the VIX today was around 16 and a half, I think. So, we're waiting for something in the region of 16, maybe a little higher, maybe a lower before we go, before we start to go along. Now, this is a very good opportunity because it doesn't happen that often. It was a bit funky in November, but you can see that about once a month or so it kind of tries to bottom out and then you buy it and you sell it much higher. So that didn't actually happen in the last couple of months either, which makes it an even nicer opportunity, because when it gets down here, we buy it and we buy it hard. In the last month, you can see what we're actually doing is shorting the VIX and we're running upside hedges.
04:28 Christopher Angus: Thankfully we didn't have the hedge any other time, but if you do short the VIX and it rockets up 2-3 points, and you hit a hedge, the hedge has a cost then you're gotta unwind that hedge and you never make a full amount of profit. So the reason I'm pretty excited about this but also I'd like to see it happen, is that we don't need to run a hedge now. We're so close to the bottom no matter what happens, we'll be fine. And so if we've gotta wait a couple of days, it'll be fine. And also, we'll be able to really take a larger position, not like this where you've gotta run very, very tight money management, because the VIX has unlimited upside potential. So if you short the VIX, and it hits a hedge and you gotta unwind the hedge then you gotta re-hedge, it can get very, very complicated and costly, and it requires a lot of discipline and patience. And obviously, like I said, when you hedge things, hedge is an insurance, it carries a cost, and so you just start chopping away at the profits in a trade.
05:33 Christopher Angus: So I can't really articulate my happiness, that we're actually down here and we'll have a straightforward trade. Now its been a slow couple of days, I know, but that's because I have had no choice. The market's grinding up, the VIX grinds down, that's the way it is, and there's no more downside potential. Like here, we're making loads and you can see those but we had a few massive days. We're making like 2, 3%, or close to 3%, because the VIX was just a steamship down and we'll sell high and buy low or buy low and sell high. It's the straightforward market mechanics. Once it starts getting into these very kind of funky ranges like this, wasn't an easy time to trade over here, because it becomes a knife edge. Are you high or are you low? The VIX is at like 20, 21, 22; you don't know. So you have to look at other market data which is coming at you to work out what's going on at the market. Like some of the other stuff, like gold and the T-notes, which I pay very, very close attention to, because the T-notes, like volatility, usually give you a leading indication of what's gonna happen.
06:50 Christopher Angus: Of course, we are also on upside hedges all the time, and when we're short in the market if we're going up. But right now, there's no choice, we can only go up. I cannot go short the market and try and catch like, one point. It would be absolutely ridiculous. Why take risk going down when I can wait a little bit and catch a really; there is a opportunity to catch a really, really big move up? So on average, maybe we'll make nothing tomorrow either. You just gotta bear that in mind. But if we catch like a three or four point pop and we will be bigger than all because there's no, hardly anymore, downside to go and basically there's no risk, absolutely zero, zero, zero, zero, zero risk of actually hurting ourselves in any way. We may, if it does keep, if we buy at 16 and it goes to 15, we carry it overnight. It's not gonna be a big deal. However, I wanna wait. I'd rather catch it at 16 than catch it at 17 and watch it go to 15.50. I'd rather be buying it at 16 and then buying it at 15.50 again, and then catching it all the way back up to 20, 'cause it'll be a really spectacular day and week. It'll make the week, if not the month.
08:06 S1: So it just requires a lot of patience. Sometimes it can get frustrating. You don't earn for a couple of days. That's just the way it is, and when it gets low like this, it really becomes a money printing press for a very short amount of time, because you catch it low, there's no downside, it's like someone giving you an insider tip saying, "You know, this stock is going up because some of the rating agencies, on an insider tip has... " And if this was a credible, as the markets are bent like that with hedge funds, if there was an insider tip, as soon as those insider tips, those rating agencies say, "Buy." Or, "Out perform." Or whatever they say, the stocks rocket. They go up like 10-20%, and that's kind of the position we are in now, is that we're just waiting for this to happen and then we're gonna jump on and it's going to be big, it really is. It'll be the best day that we've seen, with no downside. So just be a little more patient because with the Fed announcing something on Wednesday, probably warming the market up for a rate cut in June, that's why the market's kind of doing this kind of choppy, grind, chop grind grind grind grind chop chop chop grind grind chop.
09:32 Christopher Angus: And also, there's two futures contracts, which we trade. The March contract which is expiring on Wednesday. We can't trade that. Now, the downside is not being able to trade that because it expires on Wednesday, we have to wait for that one to go away, and for then for April and May to come in, is that March follows the VIX cash very closely. Like it's almost one to one. It is a little bit more benign. So say, the VIX was at 16.50, the cash would be at 17. Sorry, the cash was at 17, the March contract will be at 16.50, and then say so the cash goes up 4%, the first VIX, the front month, the March VIX month of March, would go up 3%. Now then the April one might go up like 1.5%. So the movements are much more benign and lazy in terms of actual making proper moves. So we're not able to really trade any instruments which are moving with any vigor because we can't trade the March future now. It's two days, basically one day, 'cause we're at the end of play, oh I think we've closed already actually, because we're an hour early, because we'll catch up at the end of the week, but there's one day left to trade with the March contract and we can't, because if we run a small loss, say 2000-3000 loss because we buy it at 17 and it goes to 16 or something.
11:15 Christopher Angus: And at the close of play, halfway through Wednesday, lunchtime Wednesday, that contract rolls over, or it goes away, expires, we would absorb that entire loss. And, we try not to make any losses here. I dread the day when I have to report one, because I think it would be a mistake and I would have made a mistake and be unnecessary. But I would have had some brain fuck up, that would have happened because they're totally unnecessary. So, for those reasons, the market's grinding higher, the VIX is grinding low, I can only buy. So, I'm waiting to buy better. Two; the Fed is making the markets go in higher and choppy and it's up and down, up and down. I think on Friday the S&P was caught in a seven point range. And number three; I can't trade the March contract. I would have to trade the April contract because March is expiring on Wednesday and April hardly moves until March expires then April attaches itself to the VIX's cash more, which makes it a little more correlated. And then the May one comes into play, but it's a lot more benign. I hope I'm articulating myself correctly. But those are the three main reasons, the grind higher and there's no more downside for the VIX, I can only go up. So, I have to buy, but I'm waiting for a good spot.
12:33 Christopher Angus: The Fed, and then that's what everyone's waiting for. That's a painful grind higher. And number three, the VIX contract expiring on a Wednesday. So, those are the three reasons I'm basically stuck until Wednesday. I will trade the April contract, which won't roll over, or expire, if we get a major pop. But the mark, we're done for the day. And there was fuck all at what happened. So, Wednesday's the day. And I have to say, just be patient. And I'm sorry to not make any money today, but it's... I'd rather buy better on Wednesday and have a 10-15% day and week, because these things hardly ever come along. It's to catch it right at the right time, not to be in a position so you can actually put some size on. We're in a very fortunate position at the moment. And I think tomorrow's gonna be... It may be okay, but I'm really banking on Wednesday being a good day. So, I hope that explains where I'm at at the moment, just waiting for a good set up to make, to hopefully end, or start the middle of the week, having a very, very strong middle of the week. That's it for now. I'll catch you on Skype. Cheers. Bye.
The below image has a somewhat small font size on it. You can see the full sized version by clicking here.
Many years ago we created an infographic about how search works, from the perspective of a content creator, starting with their content & following it through the indexing & ranking process.
As users have shifted to mobile devices, the limited screen size of the devices have pushed search engines to squeeze out & displace publishers with their own self-hosted information in an effort to offset the poor usability offered by tiny devices, while ensuring the search habit does not decline.
The philosophy of modern search has thus moved away from starting with information and connecting it to an audience, to starting with the user and customizing the result page to them.
"The biggest three challenges for us still will be mobile, mobile, mobile" - Google's Amit Singhal
Once upon a time, I was sitting in my office looking over data for one our new clients and reviewing the conversion project roadmap. The phone rang and on the other end was the VP of marketing for a multi-billion-dollar company. It is very unusual to get an unannounced call from someone at his level, but he had an urgent problem to solve. A good number of his website visitors were not converting.
His problem did not surprise me. We deal with conversion rates optimization every day.
He invited me to meet with his team to discuss the problem further. The account would be a huge win for Invesp, so we agreed on a time that worked for both us. When the day came, our team went to the company's location.
We started the discussion, and things did NOT go as I expected. The VP, who led the meeting, said, “we have a conversion problem.”
“First-time visitors to our website convert at a rate of 48%. Repeat visitors convert at 80%!”
I was puzzled.
Not sure what exactly puzzled me. Was it the high conversion numbers or was it the fact that the VP was not happy with them. He wanted more.
I thought he had his conversion numbers wrong. But nope. We looked at his analytics, and he was correct. The numbers were simply amazing by all standards. The VP, however, had a different mindset. The company runs thousands of stores around the US. When someone picks up the phone and calls them, they convert callers at a 90% rate. He was expecting the same conversion rate for his online store.
Let's face it. A typical e-commerce store converts at an average of 3%. Few websites are able to get to anywhere from 10 to 18%. These are considered the stars of the world of conversion rates.
The sad truth about a website with 15% conversion rate is that 85% of the visitors simply leave without converting. Money left on the table, cash the store will not be able to capture. Whatever way you think about it, we can agree that there is a huge opportunity, but it is also a very difficult one to conquer.
The Problem with Conversion Optimization
Most companies jump into conversion optimization with a lot of excitement. As you talk to teams conducting conversion optimization, you notice a common thread. They take different pages of the website and run tests on them. Some tests produce results; others do not. After a while, the teams run out of ideas. The managers run out of excitement.
The approach of randomly running tests on different pages sees conversion rate optimization in a linear fashion. The real problem is that no one shops online in a linear fashion. We do not follow a linear path when we navigate from one area of the website to the next. Humans most of the time are random, or, at least, they appear random.
What does that mean?
The right approach to increase conversion rates needs to be systematical, because it deals with irrational and random human behavior.
So, how do you do this?
The Four Steps to Breaking to Double Digits Conversion Rates
After ten years of doing conversion optimization at Invesp, I can claim that we have a process that works for many online businesses. The truth is that it continues to be a work in progress.
These are the four steps you should follow to achieve your desired conversion rate:
Create Personas for Your Website
I could never stop talking about personas and the impact they have on your website. While most companies talk about their target market, personas help you translate your generalized and somewhat abstract target market data into a personalizedexperience that impacts your website design, copy and layout.
Let's take the example of a consulting company that targets “e-commerce companies with a revenue of 10 million dollars or more.” There are two problems with this statement:
The statement is too general about the target market (no verticals and no geography, for example)
I am not sure how to translate this statement into actionable items on my website or marketing activity
You should first think about the actual person who would hire the services of this consulting company. Most likely, the sales take place to:
A business owner for a company with annual revenue from 10 to 20 million dollars.
A marketing director for a company with annual revenue from 20 to 50 million dollars.
A VP of marketing for a company with annual revenue over 50 million dollars.
Now, translate each of these three different cases into a persona.
So, instead of talking about a business owner for a company that is generating annual revenue from 10 to 20 million dollars, we will talk about:
John Riley, 43 years old, completed his B.A. in physics from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. He is a happy father of three. He started the company in 2007 and financed it from his own pocket. His company generated 13.5 million dollars of revenue in 2014 and expects to see a modest 7% increase in sales in 2015. John is highly competitive, but he also cares about his customers and thinks of them as an extended family. He would like to find a way to increase this year's revenue by 18%, but he is not sure how to do so. He is conservative when it comes to using new marketing techniques. In general, John does not trust consultants and thinks of them as overpaid.
This is an oversimplification of the persona creation process and its final product. But you get the picture. If you are the consulting company that targets John, then what type of website design, copy and visitor flow would you use to persuade him to do business with you?
What data points do you use to create personas for your website? I would start with this:
A website or a business should typically target four to seven personas.
Add Traffic Sources
So, you have the personas. These personas should impact your design, copy and visitor flow.
But how?
Let's start by looking at analytics data. Look for a period of six months to one year and see the top traffic sources/mediums. If your website has been online for a while, then you will probably have hundreds of different sources. Start with your top 10 traffic sources/medium and create a matrix for each of the personas/traffic source/landing pages:
Now, your job is to evaluate each top landing page for each traffic source through the eyes of your website personas. For each page, you will answer eight questions.
The persona questions: Eight questions to ask
What type of information would persona “x” need to see to click on to the next page on the website?
What would be the top concerns persona “x” have looking at the page?
What kind of copy does persona “x” need to see?
What type of trigger words are important to include on the page for persona “x”?
What words should I avoid for persona “x”?
What kind of headline should I use to persuade persona “x” to stay on my website?
What kind of images should I use to capture persona “x” attention?
What elements on the page could distract persona “x”?
As you answer these questions for each of the personas, you will end up with a large set of answers and actions. The challenge and the art will be to combine all these and make the same landing page work for all different personas. This is not a small task, but this is where the fun begins.
Consider the Buying Stages
You thought the previous work was complex? Well, you haven't seen anything just yet!
Not every visitor who lands on your website is ready to buy. Visitors come to your website in different buying stages, and only 15-20% are in the action stage. The sequential buying stages of a visitor are:
Awareness stage (top of the sales funnel)
Research stage
Evaluating alternatives
Action stage
Post action
A typical buying funnel looks like this:
How does that translate into actionable items on your website?
In the previous exercise, we created a list of changes on different screens or sections of your website based on the different personas. Now, we are going to think about each persona landing on the website in one of the first four buying stages.
Instead of thinking of how to adjust a particular screen for John Riley, now you think of a new scenario:
Persona “x” is in the “evaluating alternatives” stage of the buying funnel. He lands on a particular landing page. What do I need to adjust in the website design and copy to persuade persona “x” to convert?
Our previous table looks like this now:
Next, answer all eight persona-questions again, based on the different buying stages.
Test your different scenarios
This goes without saying; you should NEVER introduce changes to your website without actually testing them. You can find plenty of blogs and books out there on how to conduct testing correctly if you are interested in learning more about AB testing and multivariate testing.
For a start, keep the five No's of AB testing in mind:
1. No to “Large and complex tests”
Your goal is NOT to conduct large AB or multivariate tests. Your goal is to discover what elements on the page cause visitors to act a specific way. Break complex tests into smaller ones. The more you can isolate the changes to one or two elements, the easier it will be to understand the impact of different design and copy elements on visitors' actions.
2. No to “Tests without a hypothesis”
I can never say it enough. A test without a good hypothesis is a gambling exercise. A hypothesis is a predictive statement about a problem or set of problems on your page and the impact of solving these problems on visitor behavior.
3. No to “Polluted data”
Do not run tests for less than seven days or longer than four weeks. In both scenarios, you are leaving yourself open to the chance of inconsistent and polluted data. When you run a test for less than seven days, website data inconsistencies you are not aware of may affect your results. So, give the test results a chance to stabilize. If you run a test for more than four weeks, you are allowing external factors to have a larger impact on your results.
4. No to “Quick fixes”
Human psychology is complex. Conversion optimization is about understanding visitor behavior and adjusting website design, copy and process to persuade these visitors to convert. Conversion optimization is not a light switch you turn on and off. It is a long-term commitment. Some tests will produce results and some will not. Increases in conversion rates are great but what you are looking for is a window to visitor behavior.
5. No to “Tests without marketing insights”
Call it whatever you like: forensic analysis, posttest analysis, test results assessment. You should learn actionable marketing insights from the test to deploy across channels and verticals. The real power of any testing program lays beyond the results.
If you follow the steps outlined in this blog, you will have a lot to do.
So, happy testing!
About the author: This guide was written by Khalid Saleh. He is the CEO of Invesp, a conversion optimization software and services firm with clients in 11 different countries.
Update: Our extensions are now signed, so you should be able to download the most recent version of them & use them with the most recent version of Firefox without having to mess with the Firefox plugin option security settings.
Firefox recently updated to version 43 & with that, they automatically disabled all extensions which are not signed, even if they were previously installed by a user and used for years.
If you go to the add ons screen after the update (by typing about:addons in the address bar) you will see a screen like this
Extensions which are submitted to the Mozilla Firefox add ons directory are automatically signed when approved, but other extensions are not by default:
Only Mozilla can sign your add-on so that Firefox will install it by default. Add-ons are signed by submitting them to AMO or using the API and passing either an automated or manual code review. Note that you are not required to list or distribute your add-on through AMO. If you are distributing the add-on on your own, you can choose the Unlisted option and AMO will only serve as the way to get your package signed.
In a couple days we will do that submission to get the add ons signed, but if you recently had the extensions go away it is fairly easy to override this signing feature to get the extensions back working right away.
If you recently saw rank checker, SEO for Firefox or the SEO toolbar disabled after a recent Mozilla Firefox update, here is how to restore them...
Step 1: go to the Firefox settings configuration section
Type about:config into the address bar & hit enter. Once that page loads click on the "I'll be careful, I promise" button.
Step 2: edit the signing configuration
Once the configuration box loads you'll see a bunch of different listed variables in it & a search box at the top. In that search box, enter xpinstall.signatures.required
By default xpinstall.signatures.required is set to TRUE to force add ons to be signed. Click on it until it goes to bold, which indicates that the TRUE setting is set to FALSE.
Step 3: restart Firefox
After changing the add on signature settings, restart Firefox to apply the setting & your Firefox extensions will be restored.
Installing These Extensions On a New Computer
If you are having trouble setting up your extensions on a new computer, start with the above 3 steps & then go here to download & install the extensions.
