My girlfriend and I (she is actually my fianceé but it is a pain to type the letter é every time; after we are married I will upgrade her to wife but until then it is girlfriend. If you don’t like it, start your own blog) met up with a friend of ours who is making up our customized wedding invitations. We weren’t going to be too extravagant with these, but I have to say that our friend did a fantastic job and they look great.
Anyhow, she brought a long a bunch of doodads as she is a graphic designer. They were really handy tools to have.
It got me to thinking about what sort of handy dandy tools I have in any of my own hobbies. I have a few of them, so here they are in no particular order:
Magician
I have been studying magic since 1994 when I saw a magician at a church picnic, although I got my first magic trick (the cups and balls) at a birthday party a few years before that.
As a magician, I have gone through a few stages. I have wanted to do larger physical illusions, did close up magic for a number of years, and am currently on a mentalism kick.
Due to my time spent doing street magic, I had to economize my toolset. I couldn’t bring large illusions with me because I didn’t want to drag them around like other street performers. I also had to be careful about what tricks I wanted to do because being outdoors, light props would blow away in the wind.
My own particular personality is such that I lean heavier towards sleight-of-hand. I got into sleights in the late 1990’s and have stuck with them ever since. I have tended to shy away from gimmicked props (such as a trick deck). I have a few gimmicked props but rarely use them. The reason is that the number of tricks I can do with them are small, and if I ever don’t have it with me, my repertoire is limited.
Conversely, with sleight-of-hand, I can do a whole routine with a coin or an ordinary deck of cards. If I don’t have these items on me, I borrow them. The ability to do impromptu magic is one of my favorite qualities about my style of magic. True, I do require some special props but my favorite routines are the ones where the objects are normal and can survive inspection.
Mentalism is a different genre. It leans heavier towards misdirection and less towards sleight-of-hand. However, many of the effects that I do use sleights. And if they don’t require them, I frequently toss them in. People will often attempt to reverse engineer some of my effects but the reality is that this is a fruitless effort – I use some sleights that I perfected from my close up days and therefore catching me out is difficult.
I like to use cards, coins and post-it notes. Those are my favorite props. Sometimes I have to modify them in order to make them work better, but they always survive inspection. Nowadays, all of my props fit into four boxes at home. That’s considerably less than a few years ago when I had larger things when I wanted to do larger illusions. Luckily, mentalism packs small but plays big.
Stock Trader
As an amateur stock trader, I have very few tools of the trade. I have read a ton of books and consider them all valuable, but at this point I try to execute on what I already know because I get fewer and fewer returns with new information.
I only use the following pieces of information:
- A stock charting program, TC2000, which I use to view charts of stocks.
- My broker, Scottrade, which I use to buy and sell stocks.
- I read three blogs about trading.
- I read five or six other sites about financial information.
I have found that with trading, more is not better. For the most part, the market moves either up, down or sideways. If I trade more, I just lose more money and so following the major trends is what works for me. If the market is going up, I go long and ride it. If it is in a bear market, I go short. If it is sideways, I hold on. Attempts to hop in and out are wrought with failure.
I spend a long time doing research for each stock. I used to spend two hours a day doing research, now it is closer to 2-3 hours per week. Usually, before I buy something, I have been tracking it for a few weeks to a few months. I have a few pretty good indicators of market turning points from down to up, but not nearly as many from up to down.
Still, by simplifying my strategy, I have greatly improved my trading in 2011 compared to 2010, 2009 and 2008.
Well, I was going to write about a couple of more things, but that will have to wait for a future post.
Read Full Post »