As the son of a Marine who served on Guadalcanal in 1942, I had an unusual childhood. The memories all came flooding back to me as the HBO program, The Pacific, which aired once again over this Memorial Day weekend.

Every scene in the ten-hour series I had already heard about around campfires, at veteran?s reunions, or in officers clubs around the world. At five, I learned how to open a coconut by tapping around the three eyes with a bayonet. At ten, I could shinny up a palm tree with a belt wrapped around my ankles.

I learned that you can shoot down a Japanese zero fighter by leading with four hand widths and aiming high. A tank can be disabled by ramming a log into its tracks. There was the survival training; practicing how to find water in the desert, setting a snare trap to catch small animals to eat, and starting a fire with only flint and steel. All the sniper training was fun, but was fortunately never put to use.

I can still thrill the kids by hitting a quarter taped to a tree 50 feet away with a Winchester lever action 30-30. We outfitted ourselves with surplus WWII equipment from the ?Supply Sergeant? for camping trips, which you could buy for a couple dollars. Now, you only find these things in museums. We ate left over C-rations.

Perhaps it was dad?s explanation of how to make highly alcoholic hooch out of canned peaches that led to my degree in biochemistry. In the end, I had my own Marine career as a pilot in Desert Storm. There you learn the true meaning of ?gung ho.? At 61, I stay in boot camp shape. This week, I am hiking 100 miles in in the High Sierras over 8,000 feet in eight days. I am carrying a 60-pound pack, and living on only 500 calories a day entirely composed of fruit and nuts. I love every minute of it.

Watching the series, I was reminded how feeble and meaningless my profession is, toiling away all year just to create a spreadsheet full of numbers, and how the men of seven decades ago were made of sterner stuff. Buying a dip on a bad day just doesn?t equate to ?take out that machine gun.? How times have changed.

You can buy the Hugh Ambrose book the series was based at Amazon on by clicking here.

I am happy to report that we are making great progress with The Mad Day Trader, rapidly evolving the service to best meet the needs of the professional trader. We have already closed huge winners in soybeans (SM), the iPath Dow Jones AIG Grains Total Return Index ETF (JJG), and short Treasury bond (TBT).

It is not easy for me to translate "traderese" in plain English, but the readers say it's worth the effort. As of today, trader Jim Parker will be posting his open positions on the website, which will be updated daily. We have temporary parked them under the Global Trading Dispatch menu tab under "POSITIONS" (just click here). Things will migrate further once we refine the product.

While the Global Trading Dispatch focuses on investment over a one week to six-month time frame, Mad Day Trader will exploit moneymaking opportunities over a ten minute to three-day window. It is ideally suited for day traders, but can also be used by long-term investors to improve market timing for entry and exit points.

Mad Day Trader uses a dozen proprietary short-term technical and momentum indicators to generate buy and sell signals. These will be sent to you by text message and email for immediate execution. During normal trading conditions, you should receive three to five alerts a day.

As with our existing service, you will receive ticker symbols, entry and exit points, targets, stop losses, and regular real time updates. At the end of each day, a separate short-term model portfolio will be sent to you and posted on the website.

The new service will generate long and short-selling signals for a range of widely traded exchange traded funds (ETF's). These include stock indexes (SPY), bonds (TLT), (TBT), foreign exchange (FXY), (FXE), (FXA), commodities (CU), (CORN), energy (USO), (UNG), and precious metals (GLD), (SLV). There is also a special focus on the leading hot stocks of the day. This will be followed up with a series of educational webinars that will be an important resource for the serious trader.

The Mad Day Trader service will be provided out of Chicago by my old friend and industry veteran, Jim Parker. Jim is a 40-year veteran of the financial markets and has long made a living as an independent trader in the pits at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. He has worked his way up from a junior floor runner, to advisor to some of the world's largest hedge funds. We are lucky to have him on our team and gain access to his experience, knowledge, and expertise.

I have been following his alerts for the past five years, and his market timing has become an important part of the "unfair advantage" that I provide readers. The time has finally come to offer Mad Day Trader as a stand-alone product.

A trading service with this degree of success and sophistication normally costs $20,000 a year. As a client of The Mad Hedge Fund Trader, you can purchase Mad Day Trader alone for $2,000 per year or $699 per quarter. Or you can buy it as a package together with Global Trading Dispatch, which we call Global Trading Dispatch Pro, for $4,000 per year, a 20% discount to the full retail price. Give yourself the unfair advantage you always wanted and buy the combined package.

As part of the initial launch, I will send out Mad Day Trader free to all current paid subscribers of Global Trading Dispatch until June 21st. That will give you the opportunity to decide if the new service can enhance your trading performance. When the free service expires, we will send you a link to purchase a full subscription. There will be no automatic billing of current subscribers.

Part of the deal is that I want to hear from you on how we can improve Mad Day Trader to make it more user friendly and coherent to better meet your needs. Sometimes, a couple of old warhorses like us forget how much our specialized language is incomprehensible to the outside world. Just send us an email with suggestions to support@madhedgefundtrader.com.