Tokyo Ghetto

It’s been a while since my last post because I’ve been quite busy and I vowed to stay away from the computer unless I was working. So what have I been up to? Enjoying Tokyo of course! It’s a metropolitan city so I’ve been enjoying fantastic food, great shopping, fun night life, exploring whatever there is to explore, and when I have time… a little bit of sleep. Getting around is quite easy here as the subway system is great and it takes you pretty much anywhere in the city. Taxis are too expensive and unnecessary. Besides, it's fun observing people on the subway. Everyone is either glued to their cell phones doing who knows what or reading magna (yes, even 40 year old men). And when it's packed you can see men trying to ever so subtly rub themselves up against the women. My friend told me he likes to do it too, lol. So I guess that's why there are separate sections of the train reserved only for women during peak hours.

For the dudes cause I’m sure you’re curious: The girls here are by far the most beautiful in the world. The girls on the street look as good as the models and actresses (movies/tv and adult) you're used to seeing. They make themselves up real nice and dress very stylish. You have to come here to see for yourself.

Here is a photo of the place I stayed in for the past week. It’s a Japanese-style apartment meant for out-of-towners who have to work in the city during the week, minimum stay of 7 days. I’m very fortunate to have a Japanese friend here. He’s been able to get me great deals on accommodation and travel which I could never find online on English booking sites. My flight up north to Hokkaido is going to cost 30000 yen (325 USD) including 1 night at a hotel, whereas the best deal I could find myself was 60000 yen without hotel. And the new hotel I’m staying at now is costing me 5000 yen a night and it’s in a better location than the 10000 yen one my travel agent in Canada got me (which was the cheapest). So if you know someone in Japan you definitely should have them book your trip as it can save you a lot of money.

As for trading, it has been quite disappointing lately and I hope it’s just the slow summer months. I’m finding it quite difficult to trade from 10:30 pm to 5 am because I’m dead tired by mid-session. But now is probably the best time to travel because I won’t be missing much in the markets. There isn’t much to say about my trading at the moment so I’ll tell you a little bit about my equipment setup.

I put together a server in a 2U chassis and shipped it to a co-location service in Chicago (not in the exchange). It’s an over-clocked Intel i7 920 @ 3.4 GHz, Asus P6T, 6 GB Patriot DDR3, and a 30 GB OCZ Vertex II SSD running Windows XP. Since I use multiple Sterling accounts I had to use a hack which lets me remotely log into my server with multiple logins at once using RDC (which is only available in Windows Server editions). The ping to the Sterling servers is only 3 milliseconds compared to the 23 ms I had from my home. I use Remote Desktop Connection and Radmin (made by the hackers who wrote sub7). The reason for using Radmin is because it allows me remotely view any resolution I want on my laptop whereas the max resolution I can use with RDC is that of my laptop. Did I make sense there?

I haven’t posted any pictures yet of the city but I will in the next post. But for now I’ll post some pictures of the Tokyo Stock Exchange for the traders among us. The place is empty since it’s all electronic now and the only people there were at some type of TSE regulatory meeting. Click image for sideshow


Oh yeah, why are none of my friends commenting? All the traders are going to think I don’t have any. lol. It's not just a trading blog guys!

I’m going to head out of the city in a couple of days and enjoy the historical and traditional cultural side of Japan. Peace