No. Back then I was working 60+ hours a week in the medical industry, and investing was more of a hobby as I built up my savings. I had been doing a lot of research and concluded that Chinese stocks in 2013 were the cheapest they had been in the last 40 years (from a valuation perspective). US markets were making all-time highs, yet Chinese stocks were still 40% below their 2007 high, and traded at around 7-8X earnings, while the US markets traded at around 18X earnings, despite China outpacing the US in GDP growth by a wide margin. So I took my entire $50,000 and bought the 2X Chinese ETF (XPP).. ..it really wasn't that risky of a trade, especially considering that I was single with a nice income to back me up. I also decided to put 40% of my parents savings into the trade as well. Well, lo and behold, suddenly Chinese stocks took off and didn't look back, and I kept adding on the way up. At one point, between my parents and my trading account, I made $70,000 in one week on the combined position. It felt incredible. The greatest part (and what ultimately lead to my downfall) was that despite this massive run-up in my account balances, the Chinese stock market valuations were still incredibly cheap by Western standards (P/e of 7X climbed to a p/e of only 12x). After comparing the chart to the multi-year bull market in US stocks, and previous bull markets in China and Japanese stocks, I concluded that we were only in the 3rd inning of this move, and that new a new bull market was born in China that could possible run for the next 5 years. And that type of thinking, I have now found out, was a mistake. If you run backtests of S&P 500 trading strategies, you find that buying weakness in an uptrend backtests well (buy the dip). Similarly, buying after extended sharp upmoves doesn't work well ...this is not necessarily the case when dealing with Chinese stocks...Chinese investors love stocks after they have already made huge up moves, and they hate stocks once they have started falling. I mention this, because my thinking at the time was that even if the Chinese stock market made a major top, I would be able to get out because US stock markets historically have nearly always made a double or triple top before falling meaningfully, so I would be able to get out with not much damage. Not the case with China. In 2015, my XPP position fell -12% in one week in 2015. Like I said earlier, I was working a very demanding job at the time, so by the time I actually had a chance to sit down and look over my accounts, I had already taken a big hit. I said to myself, "okay, once the market tests the multi-year high it made last month (again, US stock market logic) I will bail on the entire position." Well, that moment never came. Little did I know, that mom and pop investors all over China were levered just like I was, and once the selling started there was nowhere to go but down. The only good part of the story is that I didn't buy the top - 18 months after plowing into my genius idea I was back to square one with the same amount of money in my trading account that I had started with. Learned a painful lesson though, that is for sure. I actually think the experience was very beneficial in a way though - nowadays, no matter how good something looks, my first thought is ALWAYS "how much money can I possibly lose here?" Since that awful experience, I have never lost more than $5,000 on a trade, due to my risk-management mindset. The downside of this new wiring, is that I probably no longer have the gumption to put the petal to the metal which is necessary if you want to be the Dan Zanger or Larry Williams of the trading world. Just trying to be a consistent singles hitter nowadays, not a homerun hitter. Backtesting and quantifying things had helped tremendously.
I guess I was on the other side of your trade in 2015 with YANG (3x ETF China bear). I made nice money with it on this position trade when China market crashed. I think it was my best position trade ever. Most of my trades are daytrades. In subsequent years, I tried doing YANG again in small portions and I lost. I have horrible stories with TVIX...Total nightmare. All lessons we learn from trading horribly.
Getting wildly rich turning a small acct into a fortune is rare. Getting financially independent is a reasonable goal which many people are able to accomplish if they stay disciplined with a long term focus. Maxing out your 401k + Roth contributions year over year while investing/trading will increase your odds significantly. Zanger's only audited trading records he provides show gains of $2,531,00, not bad considering what he started with but many made >$1M in the dot com bull. He admitted in an interview that he lost 75% of his gains in the 2000 bear market. He makes well over $1M as a trading educator + his news letter. Speaking of 'Yang'. I was working at a bank as a field tech back in the 80's on a network problem, their in-house main frame computer geek was wearing a yellow t-shirt with bold print that read "my Wang never goes down". * Wang made enterprise computers - the big old main-frames back in the day.
Don't concern about making 10 million, concern about being profitable. If you can do that, it goes where it goes.
%% Stock market millionaires are more common; + tends to take longer than one bull market...…………………………………………………………………... Stocks are not a gamble+stock market investors/millionaires are much more common than day trade millionaires.
Give up on millions, for us normal people the risk a new nice car on a single $1000 per pt trade, but fear and greed levels to nervous break down levels.
William's run was in 1987, i wasn't trading back then. But if it was anything like 2008 which i did trade through. Then it was easy to make money with any momentum strategy. Those kinds of years are outliers, sadly most years are not anything like as easy as those to trade. By easy i mean the market gives both a higher win rate and a higher profit factor. There is more follow through on momentum trades.
This is true and the only real possibility of huge gains, but it's much easier said (in hindsight) than done. First, it's not that easy to capitalize on a bull market. Bitcoin was mostly stagnant from 2011-2017. There were a few big short-term runs then the final (for now) blowoff in 2017. You could have easily lost your gains during the downturns and chop (including 2018-19 in cryptos). Zanger took advantage of one of these markets--the tech bubble in the late 90s--probably the best opportunity in my lifetime (that sadly I didn't take advantage of...didn't have much to invest back then anyway). Unlike many others, he preserved a good bit of his winnings, but note that he's never profited from any of the other markets you mentioned. The idea of jumping from one huge trend to another sounds great (just read the ad copy from vendors), but in reality, very few people do this. I seriously doubt you'll find anyone who made a killing in the late 90s stock market, cashed out, caught the precious metals boom in the early 2000s, flipped houses from 2003-2006, decided to short stocks and real estate in late 2007, bought loads of bitcoin when it was introduced in 2008, etc. Most people limit themselves to one (or at the most a few) markets or investments, and the huge runs are only obvious in hindsight. Most people also get in too late. Also, I know of a few (very few) index options traders who are pretty profitable, but they're tunnel vision guys, constantly monitoring and sometimes tweaking their strategies...they pay absolutely no attention to cryptos, Chinese stocks, biotech, etc. I think that's true of most successful retail traders, who are a lot more rare than most vendors or ET posters think.
And truthfully, while there will always be big trends here and there, they're getting harder and harder to capitalize on. The algos are getting faster and smarter all the time and arbing the profits before some retail guy can make a fortune. You'll never see "Turtle traders" reliving their success from the 1980s with simple trend-following over multiple years. It was a great strategy at the time, when few people were using PCs or mechanical trading strategies, but it won't work again.
Huh?? What does Algo got to do with trends? Look at the indices for the last 10 years! Had you simply bought and held an index fund throughout that time, you would have made a fortune already.