Dr.Know has over 40 years experience in the US equity, options and commodity markets. Having traded on open outcry floors in the formative years of the early seventies and in the manic trading rooms of the 1990’s and 2000 years. Dr.Know has been in the thick of things and as a specialist trader, educator and presenter is able to lead you through the markets traps and pitfalls. He has created his own indicators and blended them uniquely in a successful formula to take advantage of the markets harmonic cycles and swings. Dr Know also edits the Wright Choice and has you well prepared for the day ahead - whether it be technical plays such as gaps, fundamental news plays or momentum or swing set up plays. Dr Know also moderates KnovaMarkets’s Commodity Talk Trading Room. If your focus is Futures this is the trading room for you.

If you have any level of interest in trading or learning about the commodity futures markets, I hope you will subscribe to at least one of my offerings brought to you by knovamind.com. Read on to see if we might have similar areas of interest. I like to claim that I have traded everything that walks, crawls, flies through the air, or is mined from (or grows out of) the earth. More on that later, but here is some information about where I have already been. We will see where I go from here.

I grew up in a military family and became accustomed to moving around quite a bit. I lived in San Antonio, Texas, Biloxi, Mississippi, Shreveport, Louisiana, Oxford, England, Austin, Texas, Springfield, Mass, Amarillo, Texas, Zaragoza, Spain, Ft. Sumner, New Mexico, and Lubbock, Texas before graduating from high school. As an adult I have lived once in Missouri and several times each in Texas, Illinois, and New Mexico.

I have attended Texas Tech University and The University of North Texas. I have about 170 hours of university credit and most of a Master’s Degree in accounting that I will probably never finish.

I have the world’s greatest wife and four great (mostly grown now) children.

I have been a construction and farm laborer, a postal worker, a brakeman for the Santa Fe Railroad, a software salesman (when software meant boxes full of punched cards), a constructing management consultant, a member of the Texas Merchant Marine, a defense department contractor, a testing laboratory technician, an open pit and hard rock miner, a truck driver and owner, an oil well owner and operator, a multi-family real estate project owner and builder, owner of an oilfield service company, a vending company executive, a printed circuit designer, an insurance adjuster, a sales and rental representative of construction equipment, and a commodity professional.

Over the course of a, so far, very interesting life I have tried many things, but I have always kept my interest in and returned to the field of trading commodities. I have owned brokerage offices in Chicago, St. Louis, and Dallas. I have worked for, or with, many commodity firms including Rosenthal and Co., Heinold, Peavey, Gelderman, Clayton Grain Co., Andco, Conti Commodity Services, Murlas Brothers, Madda Trading Company, Cycle Systems Inc., Cyclotech, Stotler Bothers, and others.

I am a second generation trader and broker who is eager to train the third generation that is showing some interest. It seems that I have always been interested in the markets. I first became interested in commodities at about age 10 when my father became involved in the great bull market in potatoes in 1958. Dad taught me to post his charts for him and I have been hooked ever since. Why, when this pattern develops does the market go here one time, but there the next? That is "THE ETERNAL QUESTION" for a technical trader. Fundamentals are interesting also, but the technical is my main interest.

I opened my first personal trading account in 1968 and was first licensed as a broker in 1974. This was prior to both the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the National Futures Association. You had to be licensed by the individual exchanges in those far distant days. From the mid seventies to the mid eighties was a wild time in the commodity markets. Beans made their all time highs and crashed back to their starting place as did sugar, cocoa, coffee, silver, gold. Oh, those WERE the days; Hunts’ silver play, Simplot’s mashed potato market, the Goldstein-Samuelson option scandal and many more.

Markets come and go. Iced broilers, eggs, Ginnie Maes, and plywood were actively traded. Contracts that were introduced, but never were very active included black pepper and even tomato paste. Gold, first legal U.S. contract in 1975, became a success as did the financials and index derivatives. The constant change is what makes the commodity markets so interesting. I think that the futures markets are finally becoming attractive again to the investing public and many markets that have been in the doldrums for years are active again. Exciting times are at hand again and I hope that many of the people who come to knovamind.com will be subscribers to my services. Specific questions may be emailed to to me directly at; dr_know@knovamind.com

KnovaMind welcomes Dr.Know as a contributor, bringing his unique outlook to us. Dr.Know has written a number of capsules that are available in the KnovaMind catalog. Like all KnovaMind Contributors he has never been shy to express his opinions, which are both stimulating and insightful. We trust you are in agreement and have provided a collection of his recent works below and in the Free Stuff area.

We aim to have our members constantly stimulated and informed. Each contibutor is selected by the partners of KnovaMind to maintain the highest of our ideals. Significantly, as with all our material it is provided in the most accessible, interesting, stimulative and fun way.

Each contributor has a number of free publications and articles for sale or periodicals available by subscription.

KnovaMarkets publishes the Wright Choice daily for futures traders. Dr.Know is the editor of the newsletter which is read by traders and investors alike all over the world. It is designed to keep you up to date with the World’s futures markets - from a trader’s point of view not just the company line expounded in traditional media channels. Please feel free to click through on the links below on previous newsletters and more information on the Wright Choice.

Good research is a necessary element of trading, as is the ability to decide on a course of action based on your research, and the ability and will to take the action that you feel is required to capitalize on that decision. The following story bears directly on many of the skills and outlooks needed to be a successful trader of any kind.

My wife?s Grandfather, Henry, was, from all reports, a very insightful man. He was a farmer, rancher and horse trader from Nocona, Texas. This is a fairly remote area today. It was a very remote area in 1914. Henry was obviously interested in news and information about the wider world and apparently was adept at condensing any available information into plans and actions to capitalize on such information. Sometime in 1914 Henry decided that the U.S. would be drawn into a war. I do not know what he based this idea on, but I will tell you about the plan he devised to maximize returns available to him if this came about.

Henry told everyone he came in contact with that he would pay $3.00 cash money for any healthy mule. Every stray mule within miles was brought to Henry?s farm by local cowboys and range riders. With those and others sold to him by neighbors and stockmen he eventually bought about 550 head. He then leased two sections (1240) acres well fenced and watered land near Gomez, Texas with an unharvested crop of sorghum standing in the field.

Henry left his properties in Nocona in the hands of his wife and one of his sons. He took another son and several hired hands and drove the mules more than 300 miles to Gomez. He stayed in Gomez for about 18 months breaking the mules to harness and training them to work as teams. With so many mules it was possible to match teams by size and color. Teams of two, four, and six mules were selected and extensively trained. Remember that at this time, this was the only horsepower, or mulepower, widely available.

When the U.S. entered WWI, Henry had a ready supply of badly needed, healthy, and well trained mules. The Army ?bought? by requisition about half the mules at an almost confiscatory price to pull artillery pieces and supply wagons. The remainder of the herd was sold at about 500 (1916) dollars per pair, with a premium paid for larger spans. This tremendous profit was the result of a very high risk trade based on what eventually proved to be amazingly accurate research.

Any trader today would be hard pressed to do as well with the vast array of information available from so many easy to access sources. As in 1916, the successful trader must decide which information to base decisions on, and then act decisively on that information.

This article is taken from a capsule "Preparation - a necessary trader’s pillar" by Dr. Know.

History is a great teacher in all things. While looking through some records I came across some weekly charts published by ?Commodity Price Charts? of Cedar Falls, Iowa, a name from the past in the futures industry.

I thought some of the people who are interested in Knovamind and Dr. Know might also be interested in this information. I will list in brackets the approximate prices for the week of Nov. 8 ? 12, 2004 so you can see the differences and/or similarities in price levels over a fairly long time period.

In the meats section:

live cattle (last week?s range was about $82.50 - $ 84.50) were then trading at $70.00 - $72.00;
feeder cattle (now $107.40 - $109.30) were $79.50 ? 81.50;
live hogs (now LEAN hogs $67.70 - $74.35) were $39.00 - $40.50;
pork bellies ($100.25 - $101.60) were $49.00 - $51.00.

In the grains section:

corn (now about $1.97 ? - $2.02 ?) was $280 - $290;
oats ($1.39 ? - $1.43 ?) were $240 - $2.55);
wheat ($2.97 ? - $3.14) was $4.10 - $4.25;
soybeans ($5.04 ? - $5.38) were $8.00 -$8.20;
soybean oil ($19.82 - $21.45) was $23.50 - $24.50;
soybean meal ($146.80 - $152.80) was $250.00 - $260.00.

In the soft or food/fiber section:

cotton (now about $43.10 - $45.60) was $51.50 - $54.00;
lumber (now random lengths, $290.00 - $319.00) was $170.00 - $175.00;
orange juice ($74.00 - $79.00) was $174.50 - $180.00;
cocoa ($1451 - $1638, now priced in dollars per metric ton) was $.11 - $.125 cents per pound;
coffee ($73.80 - $79.20) was $1.26 - $1.32;
#11 world sugar ($.0835 - $.0863) was $.0875 - $.11.

In the metals section:

copper ($1.31 - $1.3790) was $1.0600 - $1.2300;
gold ($418.00 - $435.00) was $392.00 - $ 400.00;
palladium ($208.00 - $217.80) was $117.00 - $120;
platinum ($850.00 - $859.80) was $480.00 - $505.00;

In the petroleum section:

crude oil ($48.30 - $ 52.50) was $13.25 - $14.74;
gasoline (now unleaded $1.2868 - $1.3470) was then (regular) $.4100 - $.4900;
heating oil ($1.3500 - $1.4830) was $.38 - $.42.

These charts were published on September 30, 1988. Please note that these were different contract months as we are now in November.

There are a total of 23 commodity charts noted from the publication. Of these, 11 are now at higher price levels, 10 are now at lower price levels, and one (sugar) is at about the same level. I think that cocoa (that was then quoted in cents per pound and is now quoted in dollars per metric ton) is also trading at a higher level, but I will let the readers decide on that one.

There is no particular correlation to, or contrast between, these past charts and the present ones. I am just interested in the difference, or lack of difference, in market activity over time. I study information about commodities and usually study some past market while thinking about future influences on markets. My interest in the historical aspects of the commodity markets drives my thoughts about why what is happen now is happening and how the markets will react in the future to past and present influences.

This article is taken from a capsule "Historical aspects of the commodity markets" by Dr. Know

The key to trader’s physcology I believe is being true to your self, true to your knowledge and true to the markets. That is being true to the risks and your place in the markets - knowledge and ability wise are two ongoing processes and need to be recognised as such. First and foremost I have structured the KnovaMarkets Commodity Talk Trading Room to be an educational site for traders of all skill levels and anyone else who is interested in trading commodities of any kind. Any question or information is welcome, beginning or advanced. The commodity markets have a way of reminding us all no matter how much you know it all, you don’t, we learn something new everyday!

I would like all subscribers to be aware that trading commodity futures is a very risky endeavor. It is one of those facts of life that most people who trade commodities lose money. It is also possible to lose more money than you originally invest in commodities - due to leverage, short selling, gaps etc. It is imperitive to know how to limit and understand these risks before venturing into the commodity world. There are many more reasons to be very careful when trading commodities. While you will not be trading with or through me, I want to make sure that all subscribers are aware of the risks involved when they move from studying commodity trading to actually trading. If you have any questions about risk, please ask.

I am a commodity broker and a Commodity Trading Advisor (CTA), but will not be using the registration information of subscribers to prospect for new accounts. That has been one of my great peevs through out my trading career - the disrespect of privacy and individuality. I saw joining KnovaMind as an opportunity to mentor people through the many pitfalls and warnings that are commonplace in the investment and trading industry. I see this site as a virtual ?Commodity Trading University?, or perhaps a virtual bullpen, where any and all participants will freely discuss all types of market and trading information, skills, and education. I will not use it as a marketing tool.

What has changed?

In the dim dark past most commodity brokerage offices had an area called the bullpen. This was usually a large open area in the middle of the main quote boardroom with rows of desks for brokers. New brokers got the desks nearest the noise of the quote board. As a broker gained experience and stature he got to move further away from the board. Most brokers moved out of the bullpen to a private office when they had enough experience and customers to justify the move to management.

The bullpen was a great dispenser of education, information, and market psychology. Almost every change in price was noted and commented on by someone. The range of reactions to each price change in a given commodity by the various brokers and customers was as entertaining as it was educational. I want this Trading Room to be your bullpen. Whether you are the ?greenest? neophyte, or the ?mossiest? mossy back, you are welcome. I will learn as much from you as you learn from me and the other subscribers

Your paid tuition (subscription) entitles you to ask any question or make any observation at any time. I will do my best to answer all inquiries and to make it as enjoyable as possible. I will have guests to speak on various subjects, or do telephone interviews. If you know someone with experience or knowledge that would be of interest to the rest of us, have him or her contact me. I will try to have them on the ?show?.

Welcome,
Dr. Know

 
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