FinancialAdvisor's College Class (FACC)

[AnderL]

I got stuck in that game too. I started in the OTC years back and had that "nearsited disease". I used to say I was hypnotized by the intraday. My trading went from end of day buy and sells to intraday to trying to flip for a penny or two. But I learned a great deal. I remember the first time I found out that a company can issue more shares. I figured it out the hard way and lost a lot of my gains in the process. I don’t go back to the OTC anymore. I just don’t like trading that way. Either it’s not my style or past mistakes have influenced me to the point where I have a negative view of it all. I have better gains in highly liquid investments for smaller gains risking more capital with much safer results.

People who daytrade without some kind of probability matrix that favors profits more than losses and trades it consistently will loose every time. Program trading is high on the markets but if you truly took into account all the daytraders who got smart and built their own programs I bet on average the daily program trading is around 80-90%. The institutions build programs that identify the signals retail traders use and run programs against them. I know people who do it. It's some kind of programming war on a massive scale. The best a speculator can do is trade in the direction of the winning programs or go back to basics and watch the long term moves. $5000 in LEAP calls in 2002 would have netted someone anywhere from a few hundred thousand to a few million if people realized that the Fed was reflating the markets.

I will say that FA can make some good calls but there is a lot holding him back from making great calls. I can’t say that my opinion amounts to much because I'm just an anonymous poster on some message board server out in Internetland. If he really was willing to learn solid technical analysis he could be shooting around 60% on his short term trading. But all this reveling in other people’s bad calls or posts they made on these boards is bad sportsmanship. I know it is difficult to express exactly what you trade on these boards because everyone views the markets at various timeframes. Some might hold for a day and end up holding for a year, or might want to hold a year but get stopped out after a week. Opinions change and all that matters in the end is if you hold a gain or a loss on your tax statement. No one makes good calls all the time. Eventually their ego gets in the way and they loose. I had to figure that out the hard way. The best I could do is get into a system that works and get me more than X% a year. I then go out and get speculative with some of the gains.