i couldn't care less about what happens to the person on the other end of my trade.. no trader interested in making money should. tampa, if you have a problem with it that is a real psychological issue you have there. imo, it goes a LONG way to explaining the erratic nature of your trading, as it's explained in your journals.
No, because it's not a 1-to-1 relationship. You may be entering a new position while "the other guy" is exiting a profitable one. Or it could be the other end of an arb or institutional trade. To personalize the market as "market vs you" or "one trader vs another" or "this is war" as so many traders try to do is just silly. I prefer the markets as a giant pool of risk and probability constantly moving between calmness and turbulence.
couldnt agree more...in this business its VIP to have a killer instinct all the time because this is a business which will rip your eyes out and throttle your chiclets down your throat for a penny.
I feel bad because the world is being made the shithole it has become, but that's just the way life is. I still see myself as more of a victim than a perpetrator: Millions of morons keep flooding the welfare system with offspring, and responsible people like myself have to pay for it. Do they feel bad? No - they just follow their instincts and never even think about the lives they are destroying. Down in the village the inbred hicks keep opening brothels whose main advertising venue seems to be the noise terrorism they inflict upon us with their high power stereo systems. The same goes for deliberately modified motorcycles and boats racing back and forth and back and forth for no reason but to pollute the environment with toxic chemicals and noise. Do they care that they cause people like me to grow tumors and have heart attacks? I don't think they know that such conditions exist. They just follow their instincts. Now I would want to hear one good reason why I should have a problem with providing liquidity to a bad trader? On the contrary, I make his loss a little smaller by offering him a slightly better fill than he would receive if I were not here (for example if he had run me over with his boat doing 200 mph in the zone where little children play). If anything, I feel bad for improving his bottom line by those few cents, because that will enable him to reproduce and rampage a little longer before he finally goes broke and ends his vegetative existence. Even if I contibuted a little part to driving him closer to death, I would still be doing him a favor. It's not like those individuals are happy doing what they do, they just follow their instincts. And their genes don't care for their happiness, the only thing they are built to maximize is their own reproductive success. And like some others have mentioned, I don't think there are a lot of professions that are more ethical than daytrading. Think about it. If you try to make a living as a noise terrorist (construction worker, rap "musician", etc.) you force damage onto innocent bystanders. If you sell cigarettes you take advantage of the mental shortcomings of the average human and cause him a slow and painful death, plus you also damage innocent bystanders through second hand smoke. If you sell any form of physical merchandise (short of something like tomatoes from your back garden) it contributes directly to the destruction of our natural resources. If you trade, then all you do is provide someone who has made an independent decision (to trade the other side) with a slightly better fill. Other than that, you don't change anything.
The straw that breaks the camel's back is a non-linear relationship. Even if you were somehow responsible for placing that final straw, it's not your fault that he cracked. Many other topologically transitive factors contributed to the final event.
i think i have a different opinion than most when it comes to reproducing. i am not part of the crowd that believes in having kids just because that's what everyone does. i believe you should only reproduce when you have a family to take care of the kid, the financial means to provide for them, and last but not least..if you think your genes are worth reproducing. i know i'm gonna seem like an asshole, but i believe if you have shitty genes, do your future child a favor and don't reproduce.
come to think of it, not only don't i feel bad, but i reckon it'd be kinda need to be able to claim, "see that guy there, i put him out on the street".. ROFL
Boy howdy! The sad part is that people like you (whose genes would probably enable a child to live a happier than average life) might find a minor flaw or might not ever feel financially stable, therefore they might not have children, whereas the most worthless ones, who never even ask these questions, are the perfect gene-replicators, since they focus all their energy on squeezing out legions of babies, and by the time it catches up with them and they finally perish there are already 10 to 15 copies of them being raised with government funds, ready to continue the cycle as soon as they turn 12 and their hormones kick in. This aspect of life disgusts me personally, like a snake eating a kitty disgusts me, but we must try not to take all these things too personally. That's just the way animals are, and we have no right to destroy them, because we have no way of knowing whether we are right or wrong. If we start taking ourselves too seriously, we might become another Hitler. He had the idea to breed superior humans by eliminating what he thought were bad genes. It is pretty obvious that he was wrong for the most part. I still have to wonder how he could deem the Jews inferior when they were obviously the most intelligent and successful humans (generally, on average). The only thing I really can't stand is communists (or socialists, or democrats for that matter) arguing everyone should have a right to free medical care, free food, free luxury cars, etc. Because that's just plain stupid. You can run a country like that for a few decades, but after that the suffering will be much greater, and then (I believe current projections show this will happen in the USA by 2041) it doesn't help that you have the right to free food. If there is no more food left you can wipe your ass with your right to food.