The Seven Characteristics of Positive Deviants are:
1. Passion
2. High Moral or Social Purpose
3. Seeing Holes vs. the Net
4. Moving Towards, Not Away
5. Rapid Cognition
6. Checking the Edges
7. Low Regard for Social Convention
This is from the Positive Deviant Network (, I really feel these traits capture my personality and character.
I always felt in the various careers I had that there was something missing, I am quite a creative person and frequently found ideas I had generated would be claimed by my peers as their own (perhaps in order to advance their own careers or to score points with their seniors). At the time this was a frustrating experience, not to gain credit or profit from my own ideas, but it never really bothered me that much, as I knew that the occupations I was involved in were not for me. Looking back, it is of course a form of back-handed complement, when people take your ideas.
Just briefly I have been interested in the markets for a few years, started dabbling with trading about 2 years ago, having funded an options trading account. I made some and lost some, there's been a lot of churn.
A few months ago I realised that although my account is down, the main loss on my account had been down to commissions. If I had the commissions back I spent I wouldn't be far from breakeven. I use thinkorswim and following this realisation negotiated a 50% reduction in commissions (I only wished I tried that earlier!)
Over the years I noticed that I have an ability of seeing things sometimes other people don't see, an ability to look at things in a more abstract way and sometimes spot things ahead of others. In my work life I currently have a mundane role offering little fulfillment, this being a remnant from the fact that it took until I was 31 years old to realise that it's a career in the markets as a trader that I seek. I am channeling the frustration I feel in my work life into my development as a trader. The markets are the perfect arena for someone with original ideas, since if those ideas work I can exploit and profit from them.
I've read a number of trading/investment books, though I found Alchemy of Finance was particularly fascinating and some of the ideas within it have inspired me to develop my own methods.
Over the period I have been trading I have realised that there are many other ways to look at the markets other than the traditional moving averages and the multiplicity of indicators that exist. For me, the way forward has been to develop my own indicators. If I create indicators that work and I am the only person using them it ought to create the edge I need.
What I've done is looked at a range of different types of financial products (bonds, stocks, commodities) - and defined not the price of those but something closer to what I believe to be the true value - I then incorporated those numbers into my indicators in various different ways. There are many relationships between groups of investments that are not easily defined since it's difficult to visualise these on a chart.
So what I have attempted to do is define the value of various underlyings and incorporate them into a formula along with the specific underlying to be measured. This in an attempt to try and assess whether or not the underlying is over or undervalued. There is a possibility that my indicator is original but there's absolutely no way I can be certain.
This is an early version of my double top double bottom (DBDT) indicator, you can see that these double top and double bottom reversals occured sometimes prior to those in the actual market (SPY). In this case I have charted my indicator in black against SPY in green. I was encouraged when I developed this as I felt that it could become a powerful trading tool.
Following that I started reviewing the indicator to see if it would work on shorter timeframes. Since part of the indicator is the instrument to be …