Dear Babak, I am an admirer of yours and hope you hang in there. What you are going through now reminds me of an experience I had during the mid to late 1990s. around 1995 or 1996, I started getting really bearish. I was very vocal in expressing my opinion and there was no shortage of good reasons to support my reasoning. My trader friends all told me I was nuts and that I was missing an opportunity to make good money. Well, guess what, I was finally proven right and I cannot tell you the satisfaction I got from giving them the biggest "I told you so" ever. Whatever fortunes they might have made pale in comparison to the smugness I felt from finally being able to rub their nose in it. As for Jesse J, he obviously does not know the courage it takes to publicly state one's predictions and opinions, and while it is true he might be making all sorts of money, in the end you will have the satisfaction of being right. I personally look forward to your post in which you rub his nose in it. P.S. Remember that being right is more important than making money.
Except you didn't benefit from the smugness, or at least shouldn't have because you weren't actually right. Given enough time -- any market opinion or prediction will eventually be proven right, it is inevitable. I think it was Taleb that said, "Even a broken clock is right twice a day." What is not inevitable is the ability to profit from one's analysis/opinion/prediction/lunar line up. Making money is the only way that you end up "right." That's not my own idea, so I won't take credit for it, that's one from Livermore. I don't call turning bearish in 96 being right. It'd be more appropriately labeled a bankruptcy if one took any positions based on this "right" call. Ik P.S. My opinions about Jesse mirror your own. Survivorship bias. While Jesse is patting himself on the back, I hope I'm not the only one that remembers the post below: He made two calls. The second one refuted the first, his first one was right, he quietly ignores the second and screams about how great the first was. He has been "wrong" for about a month now and around 500 points off. Wrong being subjective to whether or not he made or lost any money on the above quoted call. If he lost some, then he was wrong, if he made some he was right, regardless of what he said. If neither of these is true and he doesn't trade then he is just a child starving for attention.
That was funny! I think your sarcasm's lost on folks here. The parallel to Babak's call isn't quite there, but you make a good point.
Try reading deet's post again and then look up "irony" in your dictionary. {alfonso mentioned "sarcasm"..........thats your second clue}
a 1st post no less. as for me, I must defend myself again, and I want to say hi to some of my buddies who I see have congregated at this thread! Good to see you here guys! read this post below, and note the post right after it. Ironic, the same DBphoenix, dgabriel and now IKspec, all the same person. http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?postid=253653#post253653 funny how right below my post, a post from db repeats the same quote that is repeated on this thread again today. Thus proving, they challenged me right there back then, and lost. And they/he is a bad loser, as you can see now. No folks, I was pretty much calling for dow 9000 as long as this thread existed. On a few days I wasn't so sure. That's the way it goes in the stock market. Just look at my post above and you will see my train of thoughts ran straight to dow 9000. JJ
I never got the impression that Babak was wedded to a position to the point of losing money rather than admit doubt. In fact, he backed off from his position mid-month when the data seemed to skew against him. And he pointed out more than once that he was not interested in short-term movements. Of course, all of this went past klutz/Jesse/dotslashfuture, but that's not what you'd call a surprise.