OMG , i let them shake me out of all my positions on todays carnage, , now I have 2.7 million I have to pay cap gains on. I hate when that happens
In a past life I managed a bunch of high-power sales execs. They brought in multi-million dollar deals for the company. They could take a client problem and craft a complex solution (of half bull-shits and some software products the our company made) and get millions of dollars for it. Some of our highest earning sales guys would make upwards of 1.5M to 2M a year. They were egotistical a-holes who would sell their own daughters if they thought it could help the deal. If you asked them how they did it, their answer would be I'm just too good and you're not. You could learn jack from these guys and they were a pain in the ass to manage. I get the feeling that traders may not be any different. Good traders are so obsessed with maintaining their returns that one can learn very little from them. It takes a Jack Schwager (wizards author) or Edwin Leferve (reminiscence/stock operator author) to document the works of good traders, so that the rest of us can learn from them. So there ya go! The traders themselves are probably not worth following. Because they're gonna tell you jack and who knows what's going through their ADHD heads of theirs! The "documentarian" on the other hand who may have the time and articulation skills (but probably hasn;t had any significant trading successes) should be the one that needs to be followed!
Thank you Xela for explaining. I often read in books and other people comments online regarding finding an edge or repeatable pattern to make money trading. So when I do my daily chart review, because I like day trading, I am looking for repeatable patterns and I notice when price touch a resistance price drop (sometimes). To me this is a repeatable pattern. I am unprofitable trader, so I sure can be wrong. This is good discussion. I will do some research on what is the pattern everyone talks about because I do see things on chart that seem to happen repeatedly (sometimes, but enough to quantify as potential profit making).
lawrence-lugar, Calm down man, you really are going over board. I saw your negative comments you made about me before you deleted it and you screenshot and capture my face and made negative comments about my profile picture. Keep it professional man and chill out. Or go play with other members, leave me out that stupid stuff.
I didn't delete/edit my post...if I did, it was because I was instructed to by the admin. (or edited for me) This site has a relatively serious, square, zero tolerance policy against goof balls or weird jokes or observations.
IMHO, if you are unprofitable day trading, why don't you try swing trade? I think the patterns are less noisy, at least to me anyway. Regards,
Been trolling this board here and there and never bothered to comment but tonight, I tell you guys a story...lol I started daytrading back in 1999 at Schonfeld Securities as a prop trader. It took me 2 years to learn and I did very well in 2001-2004. I missed out on the dotcom bc I was trading 100-500 shares. I saw guys make millions. If you made less than 500k you were a piker...lol.. In 2007 I decided to trade with my own money. I wanted to test out w 25k account and trading your own money was totally different. I ended up almost wiped out with only 6k left and then all of a sudden I had the best run I can think of or read about. Jan 2008, my lows was $6000 and I closed then month back to 26k. Feb 2008, I made 60k. My firmed closed down bc everyone lost money except for me. They returned my money and I opened an account at T3 with 10k bc I wanted to see how they were. March- May I made 10k each month. My account was at 40k. My leverage at these prop trading firm was 30-1. They said you can get 50-1 but that’s if you are low risk. I wanted to trade a bigger account so I put down 100k at Echo in May 2008 and still keep my account at T3. I would use the T3 account as my primary and when I see a great trade I would use my Echo account. My Echo account was 5mil. I got them to give me 50-1 bc they didn’t know I was volatile. My first trade at Echo in June 08 made me 17k and ended the month up 100k profit. Then I was feeling good and traded this account mainly. July I made 500k. I told myself “Ok, I’m up 700k this year let’s stop.” It’s more than what I could imagine ... So I took august off. September comes around and I tell myself.. let’s risk 100k and if I lose the 100k I stop. September was a crazy month. I didn’t know how it can be like this. I started out day 1 5k, day 2 10k, day 3 25k, day 4 50k. that Friday I saw a great trade and said fuck this “I love this trade.. it’s 5star trade .. I’ll risk my 90k profit this week and go all in. I made 110k that day and was like wow.. I’m up 200k this week. I got more scared each day. The following week I made 3 days and had a bad day. Lost 75k. I was gonna stop but the market was too good. Now I called up risk mngr and asked for a raised in BP. I had 1.5mil in this account and I wanted 10mil. They only gave me 7.5mil BP. I follow this with an 800k profit day but closed the month up only 900k. Yes, I made 800k usd with 7.5mil BP. October 2008 I made 1.1mil and at my highs I was up 3.8mil in this account. Remember, I started with 100k account in May and by Oct I was up 3.8mil. Pretty crazy run huh? I traded 10-20k shares of banks like GS, JPM, WFT, C,SKF (3x fin), tech stocks like aapl, goog, amazon, and metal stocks. I usually have 10-20 positions on at a time. Beginning of Nov I decided to stop trading big and took my most of my money out and put into a long term TDAmeritrade account. I had 2mil and used margin.. Yes I figure in 6 months these stocks would rebound 50%. I bought 10k jpm @ 16, 10k gs @81, WFT @13, bac @6, etc.. I bought everything Ma, V, Aig, Axp, SPY, Tech... the Dow was around 8000. Then 3 days after Obama got elected the mkt crashed around 10-11:30. all financial stocks crash 50% or more. I saw my account drop 250k every 10mins. While trading my echo n t3 account I was making easy 5-25k everyday but the main acct was losing so much that 5-25k profit were like pennies. Long story short I had margin called on my TD account bc BAC was 99cents.. JPM was $9, everything dropped hard. My TD acct had $143000 left. My echo n T3 suffered loses bc i was going max long or short trying to arbitrage the move in my TD account. Both my account suffered death like losses ... Lol.. I just closed my account n took rest of the year off. All that work amounted to not making anything.. The next yr was my worse year where I lost 250k and I was done with... I nevered had the funds to trade big again and in 2010 no one wanted to hire w/o putting your own money out. I resorted to trading futures with a 2-5k account and let me tell you.. trading a small account is very very difficult. I worked a reg job and the money i saved I used it on trading ES futures. I learned a lot and always think I finally got this but my account never went passed 25k. If it did i was too fixed on making money and traded too big. Futures you cannot trade big bc a big drop in ES wipes out 80% of your acct. That happened to me.. So, what am I doing now? I’m broke.. no more money but I did learn a lot the past few years. I know I'm not fast enough or good like i was few yrs ago. I know more now then I ever have. I cannot day trade like I in my younger years. In the next few months I’m looking to open a futures trading prop firm w some investors and I manage and teach them. My trading days are long gone... btw, all of my trading in 2008-2010 was done in Vietnam with slow internet speed. I moved back to NJ in 2010-2017. I’m looking to open the office in Saigon.
Brother, thanks for this post! I read it over 10 times. Lot of us can learn from this. Most of traders are probably experiencing meteoric growth in their portfolio like you did in the Oct'2008. The irrational exuberance is in all of us. The number of bear and market crash news is vanishing. This is the time when greed needs to change to fear. Hindsight being 20/20, the re-entry? You went all in on the wrong dip? attached is a chart of SPX during the bottom days. Trading in the wrong dip is my nightmare scenario. I'm curious! Didn't your hedges work? Nonetheless, great story my friend! I wish you the best of luck moving forward!
The dip on Nov 23, 2009 was when the financials crashed. The market bottomed in March 2009 but the XLF was way above the lows. I was long the stocks in early Nov 2009 and was up or flat on it until the week of Nov 23. I was so dazzled by the move that week that every morning I would make my usual 5,10,20-40k day trading. But when I saw the crashed I couldn’t short it bc it happened in 1hr. I even bought the XKF as it was dumping near the lows but what I did wrong was as the stocks were dumping I was up down say -40k but I already booked 40k profit for that day. So being down -40k was nothing. What did happened was I got an alert for a margin called. I had to get out because I thought it could go lower and I was long these stocks in my daytrading acct. I didn’t want to owe money on my LT acct had they liquidate me out. I sold at the few points from the bottom and I was devastated. Once it bounced and I was -40k to flat I got out to regroup.. Then I made the stupid trade of all trade. I was trading on tilt so I let my emotions get to me.. I thought these XLF would go to O.. I shorted everything Max!!! I lost 250k in 30mins and the next 3 days lost a total of 1mil. That was the end n I shut off account.