Dan on January 23rd, 2006
I briefly touched on the dreams I’ve had a few times, but nothing in any depth. I’ve found that dreaming in polyphasic sleep is much different than monophasic dreaming. It seems that the brain speeds up the processing so that the perceived passage of time is much faster than real time. I will frequently wake up from a dream and feel like I’ve been asleep for 1+ hours. Even so, the preceived length of dreams tends to be much shorter than during monophasic sleep.
The vividness of dreams has increased. While in the dream it seems very real. However, as soon as I wake up it seems much less real than it would have during monophasic sleep. I only know that it seemed more real during sleep because I’ve made observations in multiple dreams about it being real and not a dream.
The subject matter has changed a bit. I don’t want to say that they are more unique than before. That would be a lie. However, they are different. For example, the other day I woke up from a dream within a dream. I though I had actually woken up and was very disturbed because my vision was disrupted and I was having trouble moving correctly. After about 10 seconds of this I actually woke up. I never have dreams within dreams.
The memory of the dream usually fades even faster than monophasic sleep. If I don’t concentrate on remembering it right away it will be gone within minutes, unless it’s something very unique like the dream within a dream.
This just goes to show you how different polyphasic sleep can be. It brings about quite a change to your body and has a strong affect on how your brain functions while asleep.
Dan on January 22nd, 2006
This weekend has wrecked havoic on my polyphasic sleep cycles. Since Friday I’ve overslept at the 2AM sleep. Saturday and Sunday were pretty much allowed. I woke up at my alarm and then fell back asleep. My body seems to really like the extra sleep in that time period so I’ll be making that nap 1.5h starting tonight. On both Friday and Saturday I reduced the frequency of naps to make up for the 8.5h and 6h oversleeps respectfully. Today I slept an extra 4.5h, so I’m only dropping my 6AM nap. I need to move back to my normal cycles. If I keep this up moving back to 4h/25min cycles could be hard.
School starts this week and I’m still not sure how my sleep schedule is going to work. I walked around the buildings yesterday and it looks like I’ll be able to find some remote location to sleep at. Once it warms up out I can sleep outside on a bench, but for now I’ll have to find a couch tucked away somwhere.
Dan on January 21st, 2006
When your body tells you something you should listen to it. Last night was my second extended oversleep due to missing an alarm. I took my 2AM nap late at 4AM and proceeded to sleep to 12:30PM (8.5 hours). Every time I’ve either not used an alarm or slept through it I’ve taken 8-8.5 hours. I think this is my body telling me something: that I’m not getting enough sleep. I’ve been practicing polyphasic sleep now for a few days shy of a month, so I think I’m through the adjustment period. The kicker is I NEVER slept through an alarm before in my life. The only two times I’ve done it were on polyphasic sleep.
Another thing I’ve observed from my 8h sleeps: the feeling of being cold disappears. I’m going to look into it today or tomorrow but I have a feeling that it’s due to a hormone imbalance. Whatever it is goes back to normal after 8 hours of sleep and doesn’t return for about a day after returning to polyphasic sleep. Usually after a long sleep I get a small amount of pressure in my head until I take a nap. The first nap I took today was at 2AM and afterwards I felt great. It’s almost time for my 6AM and I’m feeling really good right now.
So what am I going to do about this? Today, nothing. I’m going back to 4h/25min polyphasic today. However, I may extend my 2AM nap to 1.5h. That has always been the hardest nap and I feel that added extra time to it may help me throughout the day. Also, on Tuesdays and Thursdays I will be going about 5.5h between naps due to class (assuming I can find a place to nap in the afternoon at school). I think adding in extra time to a morning nap could help me focus better. Another option is reduce the frequency of naps and add a core sleep of either 3 or 4.5 hours. That may work out even better than 1.5h and 5 25 min naps.
My conclusions so far are mixed. While 22 waking hours a day are nice, the extra 5 hours aren’t as useful as the other 16 normal ones. I’m often tired, lethargic, or just not motivated during the night to accomplish the same things I do during the day. That’s not to say that I don’t enjoy the extra time. I’ve used it to watch my favorate TV series, 24; researched trading; written blog entries; and gone grocery shopping without crowds. When I do oversleep the days seem extremely short without those extra hours. I think that adding a core sleep and reducing the nap frequency will still give me added time and improve the quality of that time. Plus having longer waking periods between naps allows me to focus on a topic for more time.
In one way or another I will continue with polyphasic sleep. I doubt I will ever return to the 8h routine unless outside influences dictate it.
Dan on January 18th, 2006
Assets and liabilities are probably the most misunderstood, yet most commonly used terms used to evaluate what you own. When you truly evaluate both you may be surprised how much money you unnecessarily waste. Money that could be going into investments is tossed away into our consumer culture.
First, let’s look at the common defination of asset and liability. Assets are considered anything of value that you own and liabilities are the opposite, debt or obligations that cost you money. Many people have the mindset that assets are good things and liabilities are bad. While by defination this is true, once you step back and look at both you’re realize it’s not black and white. You can have bad assets and good liabilities.
For example, anything that depreciates is a bad asset. Exampes include vehicles and consumer goods. Vehicles are frequently your worst asset. I don’t even consider them an asset, I consider them a liability. Everything about them costs money. They depreciate very quickly and you have to pay for maintenance, insurance, and fuel. Very very very few vehicles increase in or even hold their value. If you’re in a financial situation where you’re just making ends meet the first thing you should do is get rid of a newer vehicle. Stick with ones in the $1,000-3,000 range. Low end vehicles tend to hold their value much better. If you run into a high cost maintenance item, such as a transmission rebuild, you can scrap the car and get another. In the mean time you can invest all the money you would have spent on monthly payments. In no time you’ll be earning a large enough return to make those monthly car payments!
I can go on and on about bad assets. Most everything people own is a bad asset. The top level good assets are ones that generate cashflow, such as investment real estate. The next level down would be your personal residence, assuming you own it, and other assets purchased as investments. Below that everything becomes a bad asset.
Liabilities work the same way. A mortgage on a rental property is a great liability! It helps you leverage your money to generate a much higher return than you could have obtained by purchasing the property outright. Any liability used to leverage an investment can be considered a good liability. HOWEVER, be warned that over leveraging is a very bad position to be in. This could be real estate with an interest only mortgage (VERY dangerous), borrowing money to use for speculative investments (equities, commodaties, etc), or using a margin investment account without properly understanding and addressing the risks. Other debt and liabilities are bad, such as credit card debt or a vehicle loan.
To sum up, if you reduce your bad assets and liabilities and put that money into good assets and liabilities you will rapidly find yourself increasing your networth. Once you find yourself in a comfortable situation you can continue enjoying those bad assets - without the liabilities since you’ll have the money up front.
So what do you do? First, STOP SPENDING! You don’t need all the junk that the media pushes on you. If something isn’t required for you to live a normal life (such as dishes) don’t buy it if you don’t have the extra cash to pay for it. Invest first, spend later. Next, get rid of the junk you already own and never use. You can put that money to good use instead of having it depreciate away in the corner. My favorite resource for getting rid of stuff: Ebay. Prices are low and fees are high but the market is liquid. You can sell almost anything on Ebay.
Once you get that money invest it! Don’t spend it. Put it straight into a money market, mutual fund, stock, bond, option, property, whatever! Put it in a place where it can grow untouched, somewhere that you won’t be tempted to spend it on the newest fad item.
Dan on January 18th, 2006
I’ve been following the SuperWoodie CCI indicator for my forex trades, frequently entering during the early Asian session. So far this has shown to be profitable, with yesterday being the best so far (70 pips). I find that I tend to exit early when watching the 5 min chart for pullbacks. Right now that seems to be the only thing I need to work on with this strategy.
I’ve also been working on probability analysis of the markets. Over extented periods of time the market drifts towards a random set of data, but isn’t quite there. For example, 55% of the time the next bar will close opposite the current one (eg if the current bar is up 55% of the time the next will be down). In a truely random system that figure should be 50%. Perhaps my data set isn’t large enough? Or perhaps the market isn’t random as some claim. I’ll be taking Statistics I this semester. This time around I’ll be paying attention and hopefully I’ll learn some useful tools to help analyse the market.
Another thing I’ve been working on is analysing currency pair correlations. I compare two pairs and see how their movement is related. Pairs with one currency matching (such as GBPUSD and USDJPY) tend to follow the same pattern with some deviation. I’ve found that some pairs move before others! This acts as a predictive movement and can help forecast the next move. I’m still in the early stages of reviewing the indicator I’ve programmed but it looks very promising. I started a thread with charts to discuss it here on StrategyBuilderFX forums.
