Humor4u

If you install the " Save to Google " extension for Chrome, you can now import your Chrome bookmarks into the Google Save site. Just open the sidebar menu from the Google Save site, click "import Chrome bookmarks" and wait a few minutes until all your bookmarks are saved online. Reload the pages and you'll see all of your Chrome bookmarks next to the pages and images you've previously saved. Folders and subfolders are converted into tags. Let's assume that the folder "Google" has a subfolder called "Blogs". The two folders are converted into two tags: "Google" and "Google > Blogs", while the bookmarks from the "Blogs" subfolders get both tags. For now, there's no way to sync Google Save with Chrome bookmarks and the Bookmark Manager extension doesn't integrate with Google Save, even if they're closely related. { Thanks, Mukil Elango . }

Wouldn't it be nice if we could rewind the good times and fast forward when things aren't so good?  While life doesn't (yet) come with a game console, we do have the ability to pause the action in our life.  It turns out that ability to hit "pause" makes all the psychological difference in the world. Traders commonly make the mistake of treating their emotions as problems.  They want to banish frustration, greed, fear, and boredom from their experience.  The reality is that these emotions provide information: they are there for a reason.  We can either become aware of emotional experience and make use of it, or we can try to banish it and run the risk of having those emotions drive our next decisions.  The problem occurs, you see, when we are not fully aware of our emotional experience, when we're not mindful.  That's when frustration or boredom can drive actions that we would never take otherwise. Hence the value of the pause function. Pause provides ...

YouTube's HTML5 player looks different. There are new icons, text is bolder, menus are much bigger and the settings menu no longer closes when you pick an option, unless you change video quality. When you click "copy video URL", "copy video URL at current time" or "copy embed code", the player copies the text to the clipboard and no longer displays it. Here's a screenshot of the old UI for the contextual menu:

Friday, April 29th *  I'll be talking with the Benzinga pre-market prep show at 8:35 AM today.  We'll take a look at the psychology of the current market. *  I love this post regarding innovating and finding new trade setups from Ivanhoff. *  Stocks bounced nicely from overnight weakness yesterday but then stalled at prior peak levels and sold off sharply into the close.  Breadth was not especially poor; fresh monthly new highs dropped to 915 and new lows rose a bit to 235.  Technology/NASDAQ shares broke below their earlier April lows; housing stocks (XHB) also took a hit.  That's not the kind of action you'd expect if the market was pricing in economic strength.  Fewer than 50% of SPX shares are trading above their 3, 5, and 10-day moving averages.  Let's see if that can bring in buyers, as prior short-term corrections have been able to do. *  A few things different about this most recent market drop:  1) higher volatility on th...

One of the most common questions I hear from traders is how they can trade more confidently.  Nothing is quite as frustrating as developing good ideas and then not having the confidence to properly act on those ideas. Where does confidence come from?  In this recent article , I address this question and why it's important.  Once we view confidence as a way of processing self-relevant information, we can literally learn to be more confident in our trading, our personal lives, and in our careers. I've found three important contributors to lack of trading confidence: 1)  Not putting in the work - When we try to borrow ideas from others, we never really deeply understand those ideas.  The process of independently generating an idea ensures that the idea makes sense to us.  That gives us staying power during temporary periods of adverse price action; 2)  Negative self-talk - When we focus on everything we could have done better and everything we did wrong...

I uninstalled Flash Player on my computer, now that most sites no longer need it. Adobe's Flash Player is still bundled with Chrome, so I had to disable it from the chrome://plugins/ page. One of the only Google services that still requires Flash is Google Play Music, but only if you don't use Chrome or Internet Explorer 11. I tried opening Google Play Music in Firefox and Safari and got this message: "Missing Flash Player. You need the latest Adobe Flash Player to listen to music." There's actually a Lab experiment called "HTML5 audio" in the settings and it's grayed out and disabled. It claims that it allows you to "listen to your music without the need for Flash. Support for this lab is still experimental, and it may not work in all cases," informs the description. Well, it looks like the Lab experiment only works in Chrome, not in other browsers. It's hard to tell why HTML5 audio is still an experiment and not a regular...

A while back I wrote about rock musician John Mellencamp, who decided that his band had gotten into a rut.  As a challenge, he required each member, including himself, to learn a new instrument that would be featured on songs for the next album.  That album explored an entirely new sound for the band and became one of their most popular.  The band talked about what they wanted that album to sound like , departed from their usual music to make it happen, and extended their success.   A savvy trader recently pointed out to me that the quant fund Two Sigma held a competition for their staff to program a robot to play winning air hockey.  That assignment had nothing to do with trading whatsoever, but it forced the staff to learn new technologies, new programming languages.  That investment in development can eventually help the fund research and develop new opportunities. At some point, you've grown within your skill sets and it's time to learn new skills...

There must be an internal contest at Google for creating Chrome extensions that save links. After " Save to Google " and " Save to Inbox ", there's now a Chrome extension for Google Keep that lets you create notes about the page you're currently visiting. "The next time you're on a website that you want to remember or reference later on, use the new Keep Chrome extension to add it — or any part of it — to a note in Keep. Just click the Keep badge to add a site's link to a note, or select some text or an image and create a new note from the right-click menu," suggests Google . If you have an Android device, you can now create notes directly from your favorite browser: just use the sharing feature and pick Google Keep. You'll be able to write your note right inside Chrome and other browsers, without having to open Google Keep. Another useful feature in Google Keep: you can now add labels to your notes as #hashtags. For example, yo...

Google Inbox has a new bundle called "saved". When you click it, you get this description: "Don't forget the articles, videos and other links you want to get back to. Use the Inbox Chrome extension or mobile share button to add links here." The Inbox Chrome extension has been launched today and it's only useful for saving links and sharing pages via email. Now you no longer have to send yourself messages with links to pages you want to read later. The links are added to the inbox and they're also saved as reminders. It's strange that you can't add links from the Google Inbox interface and you have to use a Chrome extension or the share feature from Android. Another interesting feature groups the messages related to a Google Calendar event. "Inbox now gathers emails from a single event together and shows you what's changed at a glance. When you tap on an event, you'll see a comprehensive overview, all in one place,"...

YouTube gets closer to virtual reality. Last year, it added support for 360-degree videos and now it supports 360-degree live streaming. "And after years of live streaming Coachella for fans around the world who can't attend the festival, this year we're bringing you the festival like never before by live streaming select artist performances in 360 degrees this weekend," mentions YouTube's blog . The new interactive live streaming feature will be especially useful for concerts, news and sport events. You can better understand what happens there by customizing your viewing experience and changing your perspective. YouTube also added support for spacial audio, but only for on-demand YouTube videos (not for live streams). "Just as watching a concert in 360 degrees can give you an unmatched immersive experience, spatial audio allows you to listen along as you do in real life, where depth, distance and intensity all play a role," informs YouTube. The...

Google Play Music is no longer only about music, now it also lets you listen to podcasts. The podcasts section is already available in the web interface and it's rolling out to the Android app in the US and Canada. "We'll connect you with podcasts based on what you're doing, how you're feeling and what you're interested in. Similar to our contextual playlists for music, we want to make it easy to find the right podcast - whether you're a podcast aficionado or listening for the first time," informs Google . Here are some podcasts that are available: "Freakonomics Radio", "The Nerdist", "Radiolab", "Stuff You Should Know", "TED Radio Hour", "This Week in Tech", "WTF with Marc Maron", "Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!". When you subscribe to a podcast, the Android app will automatically download the most recent episodes or notify you when there's a new episo...

Google Search has a new card for tracking packages. Google has always displayed a package tracking link when searching for a tracking code from UPS, USPS, FedEx and other carriers, but now you can search for [ track package ] and enter the tracking number. Click "Find carrier" and Google shows a link like "Track via UPS" or "Track via FedEx". If Google can't find a carrier, it will show this message: "Can't match this number to a carrier". The same card is also displayed when you search for the tracking number. Another option to track your parcels is to search for [my packages], [my purchases] or [my orders] and Google will show a summary of your orders, including the tracking links, but only if they're available in the confirmation emails. When you search for [track my packages], [track my purchases] or [track my orders], Google also expands the most recent order.

Friday, April 22nd *  Excellent post from Jesse Felder questioning the wealth effect from recent central bank policy . *  Stocks pulled back in Thursday's trade, with fewer than 50% of SPX shares closing above their 3 and 5-day moving averages.  Despite the pullback, even my shorter-term measures remain in overbought territory, as seen below: *  Note how the pullback in bond prices (rise in yield) was accompanied by drops among consumer staples (XLP), utility (XLU), and real estate shares (IYR).  Because these sectors offer enhanced yield and because government bonds offer so little yield, rate views are playing out in these stock sectors.  This is a very relevant dynamic for traders/investors. *  Retail (XRT) and technology (XLK) shares have been underperformers lately; much of the recent strength has come from commodity related sectors (XLB, XLE, XME).  Strong commodities (DBC) are another macro theme playing out within stock sectors; the relati...

Above we can see that the volatility of stocks across market sectors has come down significantly since the February lows.  Since 2012, when realized sector volatility has been in its lowest quartile, the next 20 days in SPY have averaged a loss of -.40%.  When sector volatility has been in its highest quartile, the next 20 days in SPY have averaged a gain of +3.54%.   During historical investigations, I consistently find that intermediate-term returns are significantly tied to volatility and correlation regimes, particularly when the statistical overlaps among realized volatility, implied volatility, and correlation are eliminated. The reason for this is that the psychological dynamics of market tops differ from those of market bottoms.  Stocks make tops when values become sufficiently stretched to the upside that buying interest dries up.  In that context, the weakest sectors begin to fall off, breadth wanes, correlations go from lower to higher, and volat...

Here are a few things I'm currently working on: *  I'm looking at the Ichimoku Cloud indicator and whether it has any unique value in predicting future price behavior in stocks.  The challenge is in finding unique value, as any indicator is likely correlated with others and with past price change itself.  So inevitably you're looking at the value of the residuals (the indicator minus the overlapping input of other variables), not the relationship of the indicator to market behavior per se.  I've gathered the data for number of all stocks on NYSE each day that are moving into and outside their clouds and found some interesting things.  For instance, if very few shares move into their clouds from levels above and below, returns are much more bullish than if many shares enter their clouds.  Returns are also different when you look at the number of stocks trading above versus below their clouds.  The whole exercise has become a way of thinking about momen...

I paused a video in YouTube's app for Android and got this message: "paused videos keep buffering if you leave the app". There's a background buffering feature and YouTube shows the how much data has been buffered. For example, "buffering 11.8/39 MB". YouTube videos are actually cached, so that's the reason why YouTube's cache can become huge. When YouTube caches the entire video, you'll receive a notification which shows that the video is "ready to watch". This is useful if you have a slow Internet connection: play a YouTube video, pause it, leave the app and wait until the video is cached. Then you can watch it. An article from Indian Express mentioned in December that "Google will introduce pause buffer feature soon allowing users to pause video, leave it to buffer, even leave the app or site and let it continue buffering". Google CEO Sundar Pichai delivered a keynote speech at a Google India event in New Delhi...

Google Drive's apps for Windows and Mac got better . You can now select which subfolders to sync with your computer. Until now, you could only select the top-level folders. Google Drive's sync options show the size of your individual subfolders and the space remaining on your computer, just in case you're running out of free disk space. Another new feature shows a warning when you're deleting or moving a file that's shared with other people.

The latest version of the Google Play Music app for iOS brings a new icon, a timer feature in the settings and an updated search bar that helps you find music faster. There's a new "sleep timer" feature in the settings, which stops the music when timer ends. For example, you can set the timer and play your favorite tunes for falling asleep. A similar feature is available in the built-in Clock app for iOS and it works for any music app. The new app icon is less recognizable than the old one and it's also asymmetric. Here's the old icon: Apparently, Google's music service will add support for podcasts next Monday.

If you're using the Save to Google  Chrome extension, here are a few tips: 1. Select some text from the page before clicking the star icon to use this text as a note. You can change it later. 2. You can change the title of the page you save in the small box that's displayed after clicking the star icon. Just click the title and it becomes editable. 3. Pick an image to illustrate the page. From the same box, you can click the arrow icons to choose an image from the page. 4. If you don't like the images, there's a default thumbnail that uses the first character from the title. Click the right arrow icon until you reach the end of the list. 5. Add a tag to group similar pages. 6. If you clicked the star icon by mistake, click the delete icon to remove the page from your list of saved pages. 7. Use the Google Save site to manage your saved pages. You can select multiple pages to add tags or delete the pages. If this link doesn't work for y...