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I hate day trading - its too damn stressful


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2019 Jun 5, 10:08am   1,542 views  10 comments

by FortWayneAsNancyPelosiHaircut   ➕follow (2)   💰tip   ignore  

So sold some stock today, just to watch the price go up after sale, not a lot, but a significant amount that I could have made 5 more grand on the same stocks. This damn thing is stressful at times. Was watching stock price every 5 minutes refreshing finance.yahoo.com

Whats your coping mechanism?

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1   Rin   2019 Jun 5, 10:16am  

Don't do it.

At most, 5% of traders can make it as a short term trader. Trust me, I worked for a hedge fund where futures and currencies were held between 1 to 8 hours at a time.

Our first trader, a fairly young graduate of London School of Economics, had nerves of steel like no other. He left our firm when he hit his $10M payday for far greener pastures and we spent nearly all of our resources, just to find a prop trader as good as him. Trust me, they're rare and none of 'em make less than $5M per year even working for someone else. The last I'd heard from that first guy was that he had two mansions in England, one in the city and one in the countryside, along with a mansion in the Caribbean. And yeah, he doesn't need a mortgage, he's all cash.

For the regular person, stick with intermediate swing trading where you have a monthly or quarterly time frame using very little leverage outside of options.
2   Heraclitusstudent   2019 Jun 5, 2:38pm  

I make 3-4 trades / yr , max.
3   🎂 Tenpoundbass   2019 Jun 5, 2:57pm  

Trade at night in your underwear, while drinking a beer.
4   Ceffer   2019 Jun 5, 3:07pm  

Cheer up, you are an employment nidus for online brokerages, and your charity/largesse is appreciated.

I have an older friend who should have retired but is a longtime victim of day trading and other various online gambling addictions. He's been fucked more than a 20 year veteran of one of Rin's Montreal hooker retreats. He would not pay his payroll taxes, on the theory that he could do better with the money than the 10 percent penalties. He didn't. I tried talking him off the ledge on investment schemes a few times to no avail, and then just gave up.

I think my only ignore is from the erstwhile Bellingham Bill, who got mad at me because I called him a gambler.

I had a neighbor who moved away in my hood, and I think he was a gambler. Go to a gathering, and he would pull out his cell phone with his brokerage stuff and start talking about it. It was game over and you would have thought all these guys clustered around their phones talking about their hot tips were arranging a gang bang somewhere. The neighbor had a coronary bypass, and was still working 60 hour weeks though he should have saved a huge pile and retired.

The message about day trading is don't. if you have lots of excess, then devote 10 percent or so for gambling, but put the rest in the boring but steady investments. You wind up living in a non-Zen hell of 'coulda shoulda woulda if only' with day trading, not to mention the pointless tread mill of time and energy wasted on pointless surveillances and chronically teased survival anxiety.

They should have a version of the 'House of the Rising Sun' that substitutes day trading.

"They call it the 'day trading sun'
And its been the ruins of many a poor boy
And god I know Im one
"
5   Blue   2019 Jun 6, 9:03am  

Its hard to win without some sort of insider information. Not even professional trader beat Index in the long run.
6   FortWayneAsNancyPelosiHaircut   2019 Jun 6, 9:05am  

Thanks man I’ll stick to those occasional swings. Taking your advice here.

Rin says
Don't do it.

At most, 5% of traders can make it as a short term trader. Trust me, I worked for a hedge fund where futures and currencies were held between 1 to 8 hours at a time.

Our first trader, a fairly young graduate of London School of Economics, had nerves of steel like no other. He left our firm when he hit his $10M payday for far greener pastures and we spent nearly all of our resources, just to find a prop trader as good as him. Trust me, they're rare and none of 'em make less than $5M per year even working for someone else. The last I'd heard from that first guy was that he had two mansions in England, one in the city and one in the countryside, along with a mansion in the Caribbean. And yeah, he doesn't need a mortgage, he's all cash.

For the regular person, stick with intermediate swing trading where you have a monthly or quarterly time frame using very little leverage outside of options.
7   mostly_reader   2019 Jun 6, 10:51am  

Rin says
Don't do it.

At most, 5% of traders can make it as a short term trader. Trust me, I worked for a hedge fund where futures and currencies were held between 1 to 8 hours at a time.

Our first trader, a fairly young graduate of London School of Economics, had nerves of steel like no other. He left our firm when he hit his $10M payday for far greener pastures and we spent nearly all of our resources, just to find a prop trader as good as him. Trust me, they're rare and none of 'em make less than $5M per year even working for someone else. The last I'd heard from that first guy was that he had two mansions in England, one in the city and one in the countryside, along with a mansion in the Caribbean. And yeah, he doesn't need a mortgage, he's all cash.

For the regular person, stick with intermediate swing trading where you have a monthly or quarterly time frame using very little leverage outside of options.
Here's a stupid question about those who survive. Is it just technical analysis that they do, or do they work with something less tangible? Or a combination of the two?
I dipped into technical analysis in my "curious about day trading" days. That curiousity took me far enough that I've developed a reasonably high-grade trading platform which also double-purposed as analysis tool. You could embed in it pretty much any strategy that you could describe in words - single stage, multi-stage, statistical analysis of absolute indicators, or indicators that are relative to historical behavior of this particular symbol - you name it. Could consume streamed data and make decisions on level of milliseconds (this soft real-time is probably an overkill because HFT wasn't the intent) I'm describing it such details just to show that it was (well, is) sophisticated enough to work with very complicated strategies.
I then experimented with quite a few known (and self-invented) strategies on historical data. None of them would be successful long-term (success criteria was to show gains over each of 3 4-months periods, beating index as a result for the year, both net change result and deviation over individual trades are important). I never deployed it real-life because.. well, because index fund is both better and safer.

There were some limitations/assumptions: 1) the strategies only worked with statistical data and didn't attempt to quantify sentiment 2) I assumed worst-case overhead for a trade (buy for "ask", sell for "bid", pay broker's transaction fee), so scalping or HFT wasn't an option.

I wonder how do successful day traders make it. Is it because they work with institutions are not restricted by those limitations? Or is it ordinary survivor's bias and they are just lucky until they are not? Or they are exceptionally good at sensing "event horizon" and switching to a different strategy? Or is it something else?
8   Rin   2019 Jun 6, 12:09pm  

mostly_reader says
Is it just technical analysis that they do, or do they work with something less tangible?


TA (no, not tits and ass) helps the trader discover potentialities. And that's really about it, because everyone has access to that data.

mostly_reader says
Or they are exceptionally good at sensing "event horizon" and switching to a different strategy?


Without giving away firm secrets, it's something close to that. When we created our software, it was based on the LSE guy's trading strategy of needing to identify risk positions. And then, with that in mind, he rearranges his positions so that if the risk kicks in, the counter positions were ready to breakout. Our software used ideas from applied chemistry to make those assessments. It was not an ML (machine learning) thing, it was based upon chemical processes. Seriously, no one else could reproduce this guy's results which is why he's worth his weight in gold.

Blue says
Not even professional trader beat Index in the long run.


Many of them are not that great. Realize, a person can easily take a list of dividend aristocrats, throw a series of darts at his favorite names, and still yield a long term strategy. A great trader, however, will be able to discern which dividend stocks are at risk, and splits his holdings, based upon those 'hunches'. When done correctly, he's beaten the State Street ETF w/o missing a beat.
9   mostly_reader   2019 Jun 6, 12:44pm  

> Rin
Thanks
10   CL   2019 Jun 6, 7:55pm  

Interesting talk, all.

Speaking of Bellingham Bill, I used to enjoy his fiscal perspectives. Whatever happened to that dude?

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