and the spread in the naz futures was 20 points. And that was cool cause you could make money on momentum moves very easily.
Yes-- the same percentage of people daytrading then wound up being losers. 95% of daytraders then lost and 95% of daytraders now lose. Thank you for your time.
Anyone who made money and ultimately lost all of it wasn't much of a trader IMO. Many were people who thought they could trade but were confusing brains with a big bull market. It's always been my belief that you have to play both long and short to be able to make it long term as a trader. Way too many people I saw in the office just wanted to play long ... some came in not knowing much about trading to begin with ... they saw it as "easy money". I started full time in 1996 and made it through the crash in 2000 and the next couple (down) years quite well. After 11+ years now I feel less stress trading than ever before. To me it's like a football team .. you have to run and pass the football to maximize your options for scoring .. no reason to limit yourself to just one option. And as you become more confident in your offense (trading) and are able to recognize changing defenses (markets that change) you become more confident in your ability to adapt to what you see. So those that play only the long side eventually run into a market environment where they have few options to make real money. They often take higher risk entries and then start to lose money as they start pressing an approach that's a low probability option in such a market. And back then (mid to late 90's) it was $25/trade plus ECN fees. INCA was 0.015/share back then, meaning at times you'd pay $40 on a buy (or sell) for 1000 shares. So if you made a teeny on a trade you'd net about $20 if you got executed both ways on ISLD, the best case scenario. If you did go another route .. like INCA or any other ECN you'd have higher charges. So when I see people today complaining about commissions of 0.005/share I have to laugh.
My roommate, who was an Harvard MBA student at the time, traded with 5k. Within 3 months, his account was more than 28k. Well, then one day, he managed to lose EVERYTHING plus some more when this one internet company blew up and tanked hard. What company was that? eToys.com
I wish I had recorded the television commercials back during those days to. Remember Stuart the Ameritrade Guy? I did keep a bunch of the day trading books that came out back then. There was one called "Dumb Money" that was so bad I threw it away. I wish I had kept it. A person I knew through message boards that lived in Canada saw a sign on a bank wall during those days that said, "Invest today, no worries tommorrow!" It was right near the top too, if I remember correctly. I think he said he convinced the bank manager to let him keep the sign and he has it to this day. Goddam, I miss those days. They were the best.
I just remembered a story from back in 96. It was back when the Motley Fools were reccomneding Iomega stock, back then it was a Naz stock ticker IOMG. The stock started tanking right after they reccomended buying and the activity on their AOL message board got so much that they had to open two Iomega chat rooms. Back then real time quotes were a bit of a novelty, so most of the people in the chat room were asking someone to keep posting the latest trade. The Motley Fool area of AOL had different categories of chat rooms, and there was one for day traders, the name of it was "Day Traders/Penny Stocks". It was the first chat room I had ever seen.
I daytraded CSCO with 7k and managed to turn it into 56k. It was a simple strategy. . .if the futures were in the green then it was time to go long CSCO. I would enter the buy order and then set it to sell at a certain dollar amount later. If it didnt hit the sell order on that day, it was sure to hit it the next day. Fun!
It was like the wild west. Making money was just too easy and dumb luck trumped skill, least in my case. I turned 7K into 200K+ in 8 months. Then the market turned and fools like me having zero trading skills got chopped to pieces. By fall of 2000 I had 40K left in my account, finally gave in and admitted I hadn't a clue, took my money and ran. Looking back at it I think that experience ruined any chance I had at learning to become a trader. I just don't have the patience as a result of making all that easy money. Being more of a longshot gambler has worked best since. Any, and every effort at learning actual trading skills has failed, and failed miserably. Easy come, easy go! But man, it was a hell of a ride while it lasted.
The first time I ever traded a stock option was in late 1991. A friend of mine ran a desk on the CME floor and he had an S&P customer who sat on MSFT's board. The board member said some software thingie was going to be announced and the stock would pop. My friend gave me the tip and although I'd never heard of Microsoft I bought 10 calls. I think I broke even after commissions as the stock did very little on the purported "announcement." Often I wonder what those shares would have been worth had I called them......
Do you know the feeling you get, when you're eating fillet mingion, sipping cristal, and snorting up a giant pile of blow - all while being fallated by three incredibly hot 18 year old sluts? It was kind of like that.