I'm alive. Been taking a time-out to work on rule #5. Apologies for not sourcing this list. I got it from an old email.

14 Common Sense Rules for Traders

1) No matter what you read about trading, until you use an approach and test it with your money on the line you will never learn how to trade. Paper Trading is NOT Trading!

2) If it were really possible to "Buy Low Sell High" or "Cut your Losses and Let your Winners Run", then almost everyone would be making money rather than losing it.

3) Remember that there is ALWAYS someone on the other side of your trade who is using a trading technique exactly the opposite of yours who hopes to make money with his system.

4) If 90% of all traders lose money, they must be following generally accepted trading rules. The 10% who win do not!

5) You trade your beliefs and your beliefs about your system. If you have a problem with yourself, fix yourself first.

6) Impatience, Fear and Greed will make you poor. Any need to trade is rooted in greed and impatience.

7) If you really understand the markets then YOU KNOW that there is the same opportunity on every time frame, in every market, every single day.

8) Waiting for the perfect trade is "chickening out", and caused by your lack of faith in yourself or your system.

9) Any hardwired, automated trading system sold that truly works 70 or 80 or 90 percent of the time in every market would be worth hundreds of millions of dollars and would not be for sale at any price.

10) Asking "How small an account do I need to begin trading" is asking to be wiped out.

11) Having a series of winning trades early can be more hazardous to your account than a series of small losses.

12) Learn to trade before you trade. If you win or lose without understanding why, you will never develop a winning strategy.

13) Ninety five percent of everything you hear from everyone about the markets and the markets "reasons" for doing what it did or will do are lies. Neither you nor anyone can predict the future. You can only make educated guesses about potentialities.

14) Asking someone (such as using a service) for advice on where the market is going is a sign you should be on the sidelines until you understand the market better. If the upcoming market direction is not obvious to you, you should not be risking your money. You will lose often enough even when you are right.

Handy dandy reference for the plateau trade. I'm not adding this to the arsenal, as I don't even have a firm grip on the more basic setups. Woodie says he only looks for PTs with the trend.

Not much doing for me today. I had 7 papertrades (4-3-0) for $45 (-29.52 comm). My energy and concentration waned early.

Today's my 7th wedding anniversary. We're cutting out early for a celebratory lunch. Baby has his 9 month appointment later this afternoon. He'll get his usual slew of shots and not be in the mood to go out for dinner.

Back to the old grindstone.

Maui was great. The wedding was great. My parents decided to stay over here a couple days to spend more time with the baby, and they left last night. I'm still seriously sleep deprived and my body clock is all out of whack. I hope to catch up and sort all that out this weekend.

I ran my charts yesterday to catch up on data, and today is my first full day back. I'm still in "vacation mode" and have just been trying to concentrate by drawing trendlines. That hasn't been stimulating enough, so I'm hitting my blog.

I notice the mkts are noticeably higher since the election. I guess Wall St is happy. I personally voted for regime change. I used to be a registered Republican, but I'm unaffiliated now. I'm one of the odd ducks who's only lived in NYC and LA and is out of touch with America. I figured it was a good idea to hold an incompetent accountable for ramming a badly planned neo-con Iraqi War up our asses. I also don't like this "trickle up" economics of giving my $600 federal tax refund to Exxon/Mobil. The bottomline of everything though is how fucked up is the Democratic Party? They suck. I think I should start to watch NASCAR, professional wrestling and the 700 Club to reindoctrinate myself with the proper values and mindset of my nation. This is my 4 year project so I can be properly prepared to cast my chad for Jeb Bush for Prez in '08.

k, enough of that.

Finally, I discovered that if you google "Woodie's sidewinder" this blog is the 2nd of 3 search results. Yes, dear readers, this blog prides itself as a wealth of information on the sidewinder. If I keep saying sidewinder, will my search ranking rise to #1? Sidewinder, sidewinder, sidewinder. BTW, the sidewinder still isn't available for Sierra Chart users yet, so I don't even know how it works and how effective an indicator it is yet. Stay tuned, though. As your source for everything "Woodie's sidewinder" related, we won't rest until we figure out what the hell it is.

Just checking in. I was only able to watch the market for half the day last Thursday morning and Friday afternoon. Time's really crept up on us as my brother's wedding is suddenly coming up. We leave for Maui on Wednesday and return early the following Tuesday.

Had trouble logging into IB this morning with the java standalone platform I usually use. Others in chat had the same problem and apparently IB is aware of the problem. Right now, plans for friends taking care of our dog just fell through, so we have to make the rounds of possible kennels. It's a good day to get a lot of offline stuff done, and we'll try to get it all done today. Hopefully, I can devote all day tomorrow to trading.