One question that often used to arise when I worked for the Hedge fund was : what is a "good" trading day? The temptation was to say it was the days on which you made a lot of profit, but the answer is actually more subtle - a good day is one in which you do the trades your systems tell you to do, at the right time and at a price that is in line with the system's expectations. The more trading systems that you try to blend together, the harder it is to run the various "voting models" under which they trade and to ensure that the net position is correct at all times and that each trade is correctly processed.
At present I have 5 systems running simultaneously and the blending process is not easy, especially since one of the systems is "counter-trend" compared to the others and so can give buy signals as the others are selling, and vice versa. But today was a day when everything went fine and for possibly the first time in a few weeks, everything went through perfectly. So that is a good day's trading in my book. Profit was actually just average, but there was definitely a sense of satisfaction in everything going through properly - too many times recently there have been little problems. Perhaps this was due to it being a quiet day in the markets till late afternoon and evening when a decent downtrend developed in both US equities and crude oil. The only disappointment was the 50 pt rally in the US equities just before the close that knocked about one-third off the day's profits in the last 10 minutes.
In the long gaps between trades today, I sorted out some more arrangements for the Italian holiday. A small change of plan - we are now booked in for one night near Grenoble. This is going to make Sunday's drive that bit longer, but I hope we get there by mid-evening. The point of this is to visit Alpe d'Huez the next morning as we set off for Florence. I have also come across loads of reviews of the various hotels we are staying at. They all sound pretty good to me - or at least suitable for our purposes.
Today's reading - an article on Galileo and Bruno on the rhetorical features of their respective dialogue style (I intend to visit both Galileo's tomb in Santa Croce and the Bruno monument in Rome this summer), an article tracing the history of King Alfonso's alleged blasphemy about God and the Ptolemaic system, and a bit more of the Spinoza biography. A decent pile of article to read has also appeared on my desk for the next few days.
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