TRADING MODEL - CI AND CPO

CI
EMA3 AND SMA4+.2
EMA4 AND SMA6-1.1
EMA2 AND SMA3 60MINS INTERVAL

CPO
EMA4 AND SMA5
EMA5 AND SMA6 60MINS INTERVAL

DAYTRADING - CAN'T MAKE MONEY

I have reseached and reached a conclusion that you can't make money through Daytrading.

Top 2008 Earners: Trend Followers Right There

Blog: Top 2008 Earners: Trend Followers Right There

Michael Covel / March 26, 2009

Alpha Magazine’s top 25 earners for 2008 is littered with trend following traders. The trend followers:

6. Bruce Kovner: Caxton Associates $640 Million

The man is a former cabdriver - of course he knows how to survive. Bruce Kovner’s 13 percent net return last year (after a 30 percent performance fee) on his $4.3 billion Caxton Global Investments fund underscores his long-proven ability to perform in difficult markets. The New York-based manager, whose firm Caxton Associates runs $8 billion, made money in 2008 off his renowned macro strategy, gaining 8.1 percent in the final quarter alone, mostly from fixed-income investments - adding to his reputation as a master of capital preservation. Kovner, 64, another member of the Alpha Hedge Fund Hall of Fame, has a more colorful past than most managers. Before coming to hedge funds, he studied New York from behind the wheel of a taxi, took up the harpsichord and worked as a consultant to the national Republican Party. In 1977 he took out a $3,000 credit card advance to finance a shot at commodities trading, and in 1983 founded Caxton with $13 million. He says his edge comes from maintaining his intellectual curiosity and ready flexibility. “One of the most important skills you need is to constantly reinvent where you put resources,” he told Alpha last year. “You must seek out undiscovered information.”

9. David Harding: Winton Capital Management $250 Million

In a year when wave riders ruled, futures trading pioneer David Harding was among the best of breed. The founder, managing director and head of research at London-based Winton Capital Management rode a number of trends - both up and down - including large moves in bonds, equity indexes and commodities (especially energy and grains). His $5.5 billion flagship Winton Futures Fund rose 21 percent. Most of its gains came early in the year: The fund was up 18 percent by the end of May, and then Harding, 47, went on defense, dumping a huge chunk of assets into U.S. Treasuries. Still, his firm, which was managing $13.3 billion at year-end, had about $500 million in redemptions. An honors graduate of Cambridge University, where he specialized in theoretical physics, Harding in 1987 co-founded Adam, Harding & Lueck, a quant shop eventually acquired by London-based Man Group. In 1997 he launched Winton, which uses computer-driven models. More than half its 180-member staff is devoted to research.

18. Kenneth Tropin: Graham Capital Management $120 Million

Trend-following was one of the few winning strategies of 2008, and Ken Tropin was among its most successful practitioners. All 13 of his funds at Graham Capital Management made money - including the one third of his assets that are described as discretionary - enabling him to return to the top-earners list for the first time since 2003. Most of his funds racked up big double-digit returns, ranging from 20 percent to 52 percent. The $4.7 billion Rowayton, Connecticut-based firm reaped profits in a variety of areas - commodities, currencies, equity indexes and fixed-income assets. Its equity bets did especially well when prices dropped in the first and fourth quarters. Tropin was helped by a move in the Japanese yen against the U.S. dollar. His firm also profited in metals and soft commodities. Tropin, 55, founded Graham Capital in 1994 as a quantitative macro hedge fund after nearly five years at the helm of managed-futures firm John W. Henry & Co.

22. Christian Baha: Superfund $85 Million

Superfund founder Christian Baha has defied the skeptics who snickered at his strategy of selling managed futures to the little guy. Baha, an Austrian who dropped out of college and in his TV commercials pokes fun at his accent and his inability to properly pronounce “investor,” allows clients to pony up as little as $5,000. His is a pure retail strategy that seems to toy with government restrictions on marketing. “I would love to tell you about Superfund, but regulations prevent me from describing it on television,” he says with a friendly smirk. Last year Baha’s Quadriga Superfund U.S. portfolios generated 30 percent average returns; they qualify as hedge funds because they include short positions and charge a 1.85 percent management fee and a 25 percent performance fee. His more aggressive overseas funds, some of which charge a 6 percent management fee and as much as 35 percent of profits, surged by 46 percent on average. Baha, 40, is one of seven systematic trend followers on this year’s list of top earners. A former police officer for the city of Vienna, he says his firm tracks 120 markets. Last year it was generally short global equity indexes and long many bond markets. In the first half of the year, it was long corn, gold, oil, soybeans and wheat and then shifted strategy, shorting many of those commodities. At year’s end it was managing $1.65 billion.

24. William Dunn: Dunn Capital Management $80 Million

Bill Dunn didn’t coin the phrase “the trend is your friend” - credit for that goes to the late Chicago commodities trader George Lane - but few investors have profited from that popular bit of Wall Street wisdom for as long as the 74-year-old Dunn. The chairman of Stuart, Florida-based Dunn Capital Management has generated a 19.4 percent net annualized composite return since he launched his original trading program in October 1974 in the throes of the OPEC-induced global economic meltdown. After a tough money-losing stretch in the middle of this decade, when there weren’t many long-term trends to follow, Dunn’s funds since September 2007 have soared, capitalizing on sharp price moves - both long- and short-term. His $168 million World Monetary and Agriculture program, founded in 1984, was up 51.5 percent last year. The much younger and larger Mosaic Program, a $222 million fund started in October 2006, surged by 94 percent. Both programs trade across several markets, including agriculture, currencies, energy, interest rates, metals and stock indexes. In the first half of 2008, Dunn went long on commodities, especially cattle, corn, oil and wheat. In the second half he shorted interest rates, stock indexes and certain currencies. He has been broadly short the past six months, explaining that he is worried that the U.S. is drifting toward socialism and that free-market capitalism is imperiled. Dunn, who has a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Northwestern University, worked as an operations researcher and systems analyst for the Coast Guard, the Marine Corps, the Navy and the Department of Defense before switching to trading.

Who are the other trend followers on the list? I confess ignorance. They say 7 of 25 are. FYI, my new edition of Trend Following features Harding, Baha and Dunn.

(continue reading)

TRADING MODELS

CPO FUTURES

EMA5 AND SMA6

EMA5 AND SMA6 AND SMA21 INTERVAL 21 MINS

TRADING MODELS

CI

EMA3 AND SMA4+0.2

EMA4 AND SMA6-1.1

TRADING MODELS

Product CI Futures
Overnight
Combination of ema4 and sma6-1.1
Daily check, ema7 and sma13

Daily Trading
Combination of ema2 and 3, 30 mins interval
Combination of ema5 and 6, 60 mins interval

Product CPO Futures
Overnight
Combination of ema4 and sma5
Daily check, ema5 and sma6

Daily Trading
Combination of ema2 and sma3, 15 and 30mins interval

Best Values in Public Colleges for 2008-2009

by Jane Bennett Clark
Saturday, November 1, 2008provided by

Some surprising up-and-comers challenge familiar names

At the University of Virginia, the sense of history is as strong as the scent of boxwood. Students live and study in buildings designed by Thomas Jefferson. They tote their backpacks past fat white columns that line the walkways he created, duck into the gardens he envisioned and catch glimpses of the mountains he delighted in.

Some speak English as a second language and others with a Vuh-ginia drawl, but they all soon learn the vocabulary of this Academical Village. It's "The Grounds," not the campus; "The Lawn," not the quad; "first year," not freshman; and always, "Mr. Jefferson."

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Parents will likely have to pony up more, too, but that's nothing new. The average annual growth in total costs at public institutions has outpaced inflation by several percentage points over the past several decades, according to the College Board. Tuition has become a bigger part of the revenue pie as state appropriations have lagged. Don't expect prices to go down or state funding to go up soon, says Paul Lingenfelter, president of the State Higher Education Executive Office. "When times get tough, the path of least resistance is to restrain or even reduce higher-education spending."

Filling the Gap

As our rankings demonstrate, higher prices overall don't necessarily mean you'll pay more for your student's education. Financial-aid awards can knock thousands of dollars off the price tag, especially if your family qualifies for need-based aid. Of the top ten schools in our rankings, UNC-Chapel Hill, UVA and New College of Florida bestow enough need-based grant money to bring the average cost of in-state attendance to under $5,000 (less than the average price of a year at preschool).

If you earn too much to get in on those packages, click your heels and wish yourself to Georgia or Florida. At the University of Florida, number two in our rankings, and the University of Georgia, number four, in-state students who meet the academic criteria get to attend tuition-free, and many students qualify. Both states established the programs to keep top students within state borders.

Such merit scholarship programs, as well as the recent trend among elite private colleges and universities to extend need-based aid to higher-income families, have put pressure on other public universities to offer more and better aid to middle-class students.

UNC-Chapel Hill is no exception. Holden Thorp, the new chancellor, says the university plans to be "more competitive on the merit-aid side," perhaps by adopting a program similar to Florida's or Georgia's, using private funds. The university currently meets the full financial need of all its students and generally keeps loans to one-third of the financial-aid package for higher-income families.

It has no plans, however, to break faith with the Carolina Covenant, the financial-aid program that replaces loans with grants for families whose incomes fall at or below 200% of the federal poverty level -- about $40,000 for a family of four. UNC-Chapel Hill was the first major public institution to eliminate debt for low-income students, an undertaking that has since been adopted by more than 80 colleges and universities.

The school also established the Carolina College Advisory Corps, a program that identifies promising, low-income high school students around the state and encourages them to apply to colleges, including this flagship institution. Those who are admitted as Covenant scholars receive financial aid as well as ongoing academic support. The first class of Covenant scholars graduated in May, and "we're thrilled with how things have gone," says Thorp.

UNC students of every background have equal reason to be thrilled at the opportunity to share classrooms with other high-achieving students and learn from a nationally acclaimed faculty. The historic campus is undergoing a major refurbishing that includes the FedEx Global Education Center, a hub for international studies, as well as a state-of-the-art physical-science complex. Says Thorp, "The experience here is comparable to one you'd get at a major private research university, and we intend to keep it that way."

Our Top Ten at a Glance 1. UNC-Chapel Hill 2. University of Florida 3. University of Virginia 4. University of Georgia 5. College of William and Mary (Va.) 6. SUNY Geneseo 7. SUNY Binghamton 8. New College of Florida 9. University of Maryland 10. University of California, San Diego

Loan-Free Aid

John Casteen, longtime president of the University of Virginia, fiddles with a paper clip in his spacious office in Madison Hall as he recalls what it was like to be a first-year student at the University of Virginia. "My father was a shipyard worker in Portsmouth. My high school didn't send many students to college. I really struggled the first year. "I was dealing with a different set of academic demands and intense competition in an environment in which helping people was not the model. I had a crisis of confidence over the summer, and I realized I had to do something."

The next year, he dropped every activity except studying and working. "I taught myself how to be a good student," he says.

Several decades later, Kyle Mihalcoe of Sandston, Va., recalls his own crisis of confidence at the prospect of applying to UVA. "I come from a high school where the students are from a lower socioeconomic level. It's very diverse. We don't necessarily think of UVA as possible for us," says Mihalcoe. "I thought I wouldn't fit in here."

AccessUVA, a program similar to the Carolina Covenant, along with the College Guide program developed by UVA, gave Mihalcoe a chance to find out otherwise.

College Guide works with high schools that have a large number of low-income students to identify college candidates, brings in UVA graduates to help them apply and bird-dogs their applications. Access-UVA provides financial assistance once they've gained admission; students whose families are at or below 200% of the federal poverty level receive loan-free financial aid.

The university also limits need-based loans for higher-income students to 25% of the total in-state cost of a UVA education. "Throughout the 1990s, we struggled with a financial-aid budget that rarely got past 90% of what students needed," says Casteen.

"The effect was that our students, who had never used loans very much, began to build up debt." Concerned that undergraduates who borrowed heavily would be less likely to go to graduate school and more likely to settle for the first job they could get, the university came up with the 25% formula and committed to meeting the full need of every student.

UVA can afford that largess, owing to a decision to pump up fund-raising operations in 1991, when drastic budget cuts threatened its goal to become a major research institution. It now has a $5-billion endowment, which makes it one of the 25 wealthiest universities in the country. "Thirty years ago, the endowment was the icing on the cake," says COO Sandridge. "Today, it's very much the cake."

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Patrick Tyler, a fourth-year student from New Orleans, happily pays out-of-state tuition to attend the University of Virginia. "In terms of the quality of the education you get and the connections you make, UVA is comparable to any institution in the country," says Tyler. "It's a flourishing intellectual environment. People here want to do great things for the world, but they're also very social."

Tyler lives in one of the original residence rooms on The Lawn, an honor accorded to outstanding fourth-year students. He loves the history his room represents, including the signature carved in the wall by Byrd Warwick, a student who lived in the same quarters more than a century ago. He also loves being in the middle of things. "The Lawn is very much a part of student life," says Tyler. "It's not a roped-off museum."

Mihalcoe decided to become part of that tradition in the spring of 2005, when he found out he had been awarded a loan-free package through AccessUVA. Now a fourth-year student, he spreads the word about the university's part in the bargain. "I love the fact that UVA believes its students' value to the community is worth so much more than the help it gives you to come here."

Unlike UVA's president, Mihalcoe had support from the start, beginning with a summer mentoring program that helped him feel part of this academical Village before he arrived in the fall.

"From the outside looking in, you might see UVA as standoffish, but once you're a student here, it's one of the most welcoming communities I've ever seen," says Mihalcoe. "From the first day I stepped on The Grounds as a UVA student, I fell in love. It instantly clicked. I knew this was the right place for me."

For the full list of 100 colleges, click here.

Candice Jones, Louis Jones and Stacy Rapacon helped compile the data for this special report.

Copyrighted, Kiplinger Washington Editors, Inc.