This Is Not What I Really Want To Do And Not What A Lot Of You Want Me To Do, But Time And Circumstances Warrant Change, An Assessment And Thus, A Hiatus. (12/17/2023)

This Substack is going to pause for perhaps two months as I rethink scope, format, and potentially subscription options.

This image was provided by Life Magazine in 1961. I do not own any rights to this image nor do I seek to profit from them.

While shutting down a business unrelated to trading, I ran into a snag with tax returns, and it will likely dampen the holiday season as I sort it all out, perhaps under a bit of duress, but I will wrestle with it along with my CPA as I get this particular monkey off of my back and move forward. That put a new chink in my business calendar.

In 2002 when I began writing about my trading, at that time totally with stocks, I built a huge following on a top 10,000 website at the time, and I was compensated for writing in addition to my trading, which allowed me the flexibility to expand a screening database I had constructed for every stock, ADR, and mutual fund in existence. I also screened them for Fibonacci patterns using artificial intelligence software. At that time, I could identify the strongest and weakest industry sectors, and daily I came up with the five best long pattern entry stocks out of over 8000 equities ADRs or funds, including ETFs as they evolved. The Buffalo Trader blog was born from that effort. Along with the blog and because of the popularity of my writing, I got a gig with a radio show for a once robust finance news radio network for five and a half years beginning in 2005. I am pretty sure that I was the first trader ever to simulcast live trading from my computer on the web while doing a radio broadcast.

Partner disagreement killed the network and that program in early 2011. My blog at one time had almost a 250,000-person readership. I did all of that commentary after 2007 for free, as the website owner shut down his site to build financial and accounting software. That was incredibly frustrating when the network collapsed, but I had to deal with it.

The platform and the software I used were completely compatible with the standard data format at the time. In late 2013, Reuters eliminated the old format and created another less adaptable one, thus destroying all of the “piggyback” software vendors, and my database and neural net analysis capabilities. I was on the path of commercializing that effort for public use, right as that happened. In 2014, that pursuit ended.

Had something like Substack been around then, I could have rebuilt the database with other commercially available software and had a pay-window apparatus in place without having to build a website. Without such a platform in 2014, I was told by a fairly well-known internet marketing expert that to regain my readership numbers, I would have to work for 2 years with no net pay, even with a finely tuned inbound e-mail funnel. Given the old saw about $1 of annual revenue for each email address, you can add up the cost of rebuilding the readership. That is somewhere over $250,000.

Cutting to the chase, the content on this Substack, even upgraded with my commentary, is not sufficient enough in my opinion to be worth paying for. Had the old database and software-based pattern analysis been transited to E-Signal or some other compatible data format, I would still be running that process daily, writing about the results, and have a very subscription-worthy product.

I am rebuilding my property business to a new format, and that is going to require me to focus on building a team to process the work so that I can complete the transactions required. It is probably best that I redirect my time at present to automate that business.

I will continue trading as always! That will not change. I will continue to work on charts and keep up with key price levels, volume profiles, Fibonacci patterns, and Fibonacci price extensions. What I am going to do during this hiatus is figure out the best way to expand the coverage of markets and not just the mini-NASDAQ 100 futures. I think that would have broad appeal for traders and institutions. It would also be worth paying for. What I will NOT do is run a Discord channel or some other chatroom nonsense. I think it is better for the trader to focus on building trading plans and to develop discipline rather than chat in a room and not focus on price action.

Changing my format recently helped me to gain a 54% increase in subscribers in 58 days. I was also helped tremendously by Linda Lebrun of Substack ( @Linda ) who continued promoting my Substack against all odds. It seems nearly all of my subscribers came from inside the Substack platform. I failed to gain any traction on Facebook or MeWe, and Twitter only added a few views. The one thing I did do during this run because I enjoy writing and have been committed to my subscribers, is to write at least 5 days a week and to add weekend commentary. I was, above all, consistent in my efforts. Linda’s efforts did not go unnoticed.

This Substack will not go away, but I need to reassess what works while I continue to reconstruct another business. To the nearly 40% of you who read this post every day from the beginning, I will not hang it up, but I will endeavor on this hiatus to make it better.

I want everyone on my Substack subscription base, and of course, everyone else, to have a Merry Christmas and a happy healthy, and productive 2024!