Black Service All Star Interview: TokyoPUA
Oct 12, 2009 Stock Market News
Please give a warm welcome to Tokyopua.. A long time Member here and one of our most respected and active members of Black Service . Tokyo really goes into depth with this interview.. Prob the best response to my questions ive seen yet.
Tokyopua:
Not only will this guy steal your girl friend. He’ll probably do it with his eyes closed while trading at the same time. Tokyopua always brings some flavor into the chat room that i enjoy on the day to day. He’s been trading with me for 3 years+ now so definitely have respect for this fellow. He’s put in his time. He shares a trading strategy very similar to me and Mysher.
Whats Your Name?
Here @ ttt.net and real name.
TokyoPUA aka Ray Devans
How old are you?
37
Where are you from?
Originally from New Mexico, now living in Los Angeles.
How long have you been trading?
About 4 years, though only doing serious trading for about a year and a half now. its only been in the last year that I started watching the market all day and doing day trading.
What was your motivation/trigger to get into trading?
I had some stock options from a prior job that were going to expire in 30 days so had to open an Etrade account to trade them. Then randomly started watching Mad Money, reading Yahoo Message Boards, etc. Actually I did also randomly win a state stock trading competition in high school, but that was total luck, I never traded after that for about 15 years lol. I remember our team was like in last place and I had this rich girlfriend at the time who was in like 8th place. She bugged the hell out of me about how bad my team sucked, so I took control of the portfolio in the last 2 weeks, liquidated all our mistakes (this baseball dude had tried to buy Coke and got the symbol wrong I remember), and using max margin bought all I could of this stock I saw on the public TV station stock program (which was also at a 52 week low), some kind of paper company. Basically a hail marry that worked, next week it went up a few points and we went to 1st place in the state lol. Not a good idea in the real world because it totally violates position sizing rules, but had nothing to lose with that play money lol.
whats your trading time frame? (1 day? couple weeks?)
Pretty much all time frames, sometimes seconds, minutes, hours, days, sometimes weeks, and recently have been holding a core position in GNVC for months at a price of 0.79 (hopefully its like doubled by the time some people read this interview!). But mostly a lot of daytrades these days. Been doing about 20 to 30 trades a day for last month or two.
Do you trade anything other than stocks? Like Futures, options?
I do trade ETFs, options and even warrants sometimes, and always watch the futures so might start trading them sometime soon. I think learning to trade Forex will be important for US market participants because a lot of our recent stock market gains are actually due to a falling dollar, and with all the crazy spending going on the dollar seems destined to fall further in the coming years.
Are you trading for a living? Or is this just a part time gig for you?
I also am part owner of a small company but the economy hit that pretty hard so these days doing a lot more trading. Also, I coach guys about how to do better with women, currently doing a 20 hour bootcamp with a guy here in LA over a few sessions.
What kind of things do you do when your not being lazy and clicking buttons on your computer to make money?
Some hobbies include weightlifting, Judo, playing electric guitar, learning foreign languages, reading self improvement books, etc. Also, I am a pickup artist, TokyoPUA stands for Tokyo PickUpArtist. So pretty much these days that amounts to meeting stewardesses and tourists near where I live in downtown LA and doing things most guys wouldn’t believe are possible in short time frames lol. My side business is called Learn The Skills, we run a huge forum called Fast Seduction 101 at www.fastseduction.com, and sell some DVDs teaching guys how to succeed with women called Art of the Pickup at www.artofthepickup.com. Plus as I said above I do some live coaching where I take guys out and teach them how to talk to women, etc. Sounds crazy but a lot of the methods I applied to mastering the pickup arts over 10 years are what I apply to learning trading. I am a lot better at picking up women than I am at stock trading, so trying to close that gap lol!
Tell us about your approach to the market. What is it that you look for in stocks that you trade?
Usually a good chart, which is hard to describe in words of course. Also looking for momentum, so basically price movement on high volume relative to that stock. Like Mysher, I day trade news and breakouts a lot, so I run a lot of real time volume scans that are linked to 3 charts (5 min, daily and weekly) and when a new hit comes up if I see it I click on it, check the charts, get a quick sense of how much volume it trades daily, how much it trades usually on a 5 or 15 min interval and by looking at that and Level 2 I try to figure out if there is real momentum behind the move.
I try to check news on Etrade, Yahoo Finance and Briefing.com to verify the move. Sometimes I throw a quick market order in even before finding news and just see what happens. I may get out as quick as a minute if the move isn’t following through, or stick it out longer if I find news. On longer term time frames I look for nice charts, for example the pattern we affectionately call the “GSpot”, ascending triangles, symmetrical triangles, cup and handles, etc. I practice position sizing and almost never put more than 10 or 15% into a single position so even if the momo craps out it never stings too bad.
I also try to trade bounces on various time frames, and usually calculate risk to reward for these and set stops based on that risk to reward. BTW, understanding risk to reward and position sizing are possibly the two most important things a trader can learn IMO.
What kind of trading set up do you have? Are you just hanging solo with a single monitor. Or are you riding dirty on four 22’s?
Its kind of mish mash, but I have one big daddy 30 inch center screen with I think 2560 x 1600 resolution which rocks and mainly gets Etrade Pro running on it, then I have a 24 inch monitor to the left which usually has Thetechnicaltrader.net shoutbox, Briefing.com and some other chatrooms in it. I will sometimes toggle that to market internal graphs of the /ES futures and pivot points, $TICK, AD line, $TVOL, market breadth, etc. running on a Thinkorswim account I have. Also sometimes toggle it to a Tradestation account that I have to draw trendline alerts when needed.
TS runs in the background and alerts me with audio alerts when $TICK go above 1000 or below -1000 so I can know when the market is getting buy or sell programs, and also reminds me to check the $TICKs so I can get a feel if the day will be choppy, trend up, or trend down. My right monitor is a 22 inch monitor driven by a laptop, and have some more chatrooms there and also on my laptop 15 inch screen. I also have a 5 inch screen on a palmtop Sony Utype, and sometimes I just dedicate that to displaying market internals when I remember to boot it up. So that is 3 computers lol. Also have 2 phones that alert me to some plays like TTT.net plays and some other twitter alerts, so sometimes I have 7 LCDs going, ranging from 30 inches down to 2.5 inches lol.
Whats your favorite book that you read on the market that added the most value to your arsenal of knowledge?
Steve Nison’s Japanese Candlestick Charting Techniques is probably my favorite, though recently Brian Shannon’s Technical Analysis Using Multiple Timeframes has been good. These days also like John Carter books and Van Tharp books. But I have read a ton of stock books, I feel that you can never get enough market education.
What do you think about this whole Black Service operation I’m running here @ TheTheTechnicalTrader.net?
Its awesome, its actually a new paradigm in investing! I think given Ponzi schemes like Madoff, etc. we live in a world where people are safer if their money manager manages their money indirectly, so at the end of the day you can see the performance in your own account, not on some paper statement. And speaking of managed investments, if you get good at trading, forget having a 401K lol, I rolled over a small beat up 401K recently and doubled it in less than 2 months.
With your picks, we see for ourselves the performance and there is NO question where the money is, its not pimping Bernie’s NYC pad if you know what I mean. I think that your service will be increasingly popular due to this. Your annual results are the best I have seen of any of these types of services, and I have seen a lot! Plus the fact you are so young is pretty mind blowing. I have another lifetime membership with another service, but that dude is like 45, I was totally stoked when you gave me the lifetime membership, I was thinking “damn Fous is like 25, this is worth WAY more than my other lifetime membership!” I celebrated this weekend by having a few good beers, then meeting 3 hot women 
Oh, and the community aspect is amazing, everyone tries to help everyone else, its not like on YMB where people are out to screw each other. You learn a lot from everyone here, Mysher helped me better utilize volume scanning, Ket helped me learn how to do bounce plays, NSAflyer got me looking at stochastics, etc.
What other websites do you use to conduct research?
Yahoo Finance to check fundamentals like EPS, current ratio (I check this a lot to make sure I am not swinging a stock that could go BK on me at any time, try to trade stocks with CR>2. EPEX had a CR of like .3 and sure enough just went BK for example). MSN money is good for checking dillution history. Finviz a bit too recently. The kids over at the lion.com also have some good ideas, so while its not really research until you verify facts, I get some decent ideas from there.
Just curious, whats your favorite movie?
Probably the Matrix, loved the effects and the underlying message of unlocking our hidden potential. And trading stocks is a lot like sitting at those matrix decoding stations lol.
And curiosity lingers again. If you were given the shot to make your move on one famous celebrity. Who would it be?
Hmmm, maybe Salma Hayek? I just met a beautiful girl from Europe this weekend who looks a bit like Salma Hayek actually…
What was the best trade that you ever made?
Net profit wise, last year made about $11K on AIG, but that was on like an 18K investment over the course of a week or so so percentage-wise it was not the best trade. My best trade percentage wise was a couple of weeks ago, day traded GTXO.OB for about 284%, bought 16000 shares at .13 and blew them out at .37 for about $4k in profit in one day. Here is a link with a picture showing how that went down and what it looked like on multiple timeframes, 5 min, daily, and weekly as I mentioned I always look at:
http://thetechnicaltrader.net/forum/index.php?topic=1451.0
And of course.. Now tells us about your worst!
I lost like $5K on UYG options last year lol. I was new to options and I thought the financial stocks couldnt go down much more lol. I had a separate account just to trade options and it had like $10 in it so I about killed that account with that damn UYG, it was like a widow maker. Also, while I actually got out flat, a few months after I first started trading I was down like $27K after having gone all in on NVAX! Didn’t know about position sizing, made the usual newbie mistake motivated by greed and ignorance. So while I didn’t actually take a loss, it was my worst trade in the sense it was so stupid to go all in on one stock and get down that bad. I slept like crap for weeks, ruined a vacation to Tokyo that way, I was so worried about that stock. Did however provide strong motivation to learn more about technicals etc. so all is well that ends well I guess.
How did you find out about TheTechnicaltrader.net?
Had been trading over at 3stocksonfire, and saw Fous win the stock picking contest one month, then somehow found the link and just followed the performance since you stayed true to swing trading while that other site decided to become long term investors near the top of the market and their picks were losing me money.
Thanks for taking the time to conduct this interview. I look forward to sharing ideas with you in the years to come!
Hell yeah man, likewise! I had lost money trading on the day you announced the All Stars, so I felt like I had totally made up for that day and then some Thanks for selecting me, its an honor and I hope to keep learning and to help everyone at TTT.net keep making money!
