Hi ( first time poster here ) To all of you. Has been interesting reading this and the question I have is has taxes evolved or changed like trading and commission prices have over the years? Have taxes played a huge roll in your trading over the years?
Great thread guys. Helps us young 'uns who were almost raised on the Internet to see how this all got going. __________________ Please, I'm not a daytrader, I'm an "Intraday Liquidity Provider" IF YOU HAVE TO ASK THAT, YOU SHOULD NOT BE TRADING OPTIONS!!
INTERNET? You guys are living in the past. I'm getting all my quotes and sending orders by using Telepathy now.
Oh yeah, taxes have "evolved". Here's an example that immediately comes to mind. In the old days you get down to the last month or two and you've got a large profit for the year. You do a deep in the money option spread. For example the stock is $100, you buy a $75 call, sell an $80 call. You do it in size, because there is very little cash required to do the deal. When the stock moves you close the losing side, and offset with another deep in the money option. This establishes a large loss, thus creating a serious reduction in your income. You take the profit the next year. In the end you've just rolled your income farther forward, thus delaying taxes. This isn't legal anymore. But it was fun while it lasted. Used to do it with futures too. In fact, when they made this illegal for futures is when they gave the favorable income tax treatment to short term commodity futures profits. OldTrader
People who claim not to "work hard"... Or who trade part of the day... Or are not deadly serious and focused... Are total PHONIES and will fall by the wayside. If you are not a workaholic... Just f*ck off... Because you have NO future in the business world. Actually... Scalping circa mid-90s was like shooting fish in a barrel... It was EASY to flip 2000 shares for 1/8... That's $125 - $30 commish = $90 profit... Over and over and over. Flipping for a 1/4 would happen regularly... And this hogwash that Specialists "had you by the balls"... Well... it's the opposite... Your place in line in the NYSE bid/ask was more or less sacred... And there was a REAL paper trail of what happened... So you could "bust" a trade or get a cheated trade fixed with a phone call. Today there is no line and no trail and NO RIGHTS for the Customer... And with all the fragmentation... EVERY player from your broker to the exchange... Is playing games with your orders... And accountable to no one... Because it's impossible for ANY Customer to figure out what really happened on any given order. I make more money today... ONLY because I have 15 years of experience and KILLER infrastructure... To do high volume scalping... BUT... If I was just starting out with 50K... 1994 was a waaaay better time than 2007.
There was a time when hooking a ball into the woods cost 10 bucks. One dollar for the lost ball and nine tax dollars that was paid along side buying the ball with short term profits.
I opened with Claton in late 83...120 a car. You could always count on "Ill call you back" for the fill price. Then I went with Gruntal and got my sat dish from CQG...$2600 a month. I had to have all the exchanges...NY, Chigago and even kept up with the KC Value Line. I traded anything back then...meats, grains, metals...I even traded plywood and Italian Bonds at night. Paid $18k for my first computer. It was a Vector with 64k of ram. I used it to back test a trade prog for the KC Value Line (it was cheapest margin of the index's). Had 4 losing days in 2months...I jumped in and lost $16k in 5 days. ha Crash day I was sick. I made $65k in fifteen minutes on the S&P. If I had stayed in another 15 I could have made $300k. I think the spread was like a point-point and a half that day. Shootin 10's it was like $5000 just to get in. What balls I had back then. I remember well my first puke in late Jan of 86...I think I still have my picture and the dining room table. Wound up short about 30 S&P's after constant adding as the market went straight up for about 25 days. Short the Swiss Frank just as the bottom dropped out of the dollar and short crude at the time they had the biggest snow storm in Europe in 100 years. Just over $165k down the tubes. Took me 3 months to get even. What balls I had back then. I only trade the Emini now and, although I was slow to come over from the pit, I love this electronic trading. Alot less stress for me somehow. Oh, I can still pinch a dime in half with my butt sometimes, but I dont seem to need all those balls anymore. Hope everyone has a great year in 2008.
I remember getting quotes from FNN. This was before www, you could log on to FNN and from there go to some of the bigger universities for research. It was an intranet. After that I had BMI with sat feed and Ensign DOS....I think that cost like $300/mo. I called my orders into Lind Waldock when the SPU was $500/full point and margins were like $7-10K. Never forget, one day I was trying to get short, as soon as I got a fill, I would tell the clerk my stop, and he was going "already there, you're OUT", this happened like 3 times in the same call.........get short and then immediately stopped out (I was a noob and my stops were WAY too close). Anyway, after the third try, I entered one more time. The market was moving really fast, so I thought my stop was hit. About an hour or so later, I get a call for my "Fill". My stop did not get hit and I got executed on the MOC order (Back then you entered orders like "476.50 stop, MOC, OCO" which meant (Stop me out at 476.50 or market on close, one order cancels the other), so I made like $3500! I kept thinking they were going to call me and tell me it was a mistake. PS This is a great thread.
"I Have Been Trading Since Before The Internet-1990" Me too. I remember getting quotes from the FNN ticker and a touch tone phone. My first real time quotes were from what I think was the forerunner of eSignal over a satellite dish. I was also traveling then so to keep up while on the road I bought remote control software and had my own 800 number connected to my desktop at home. I would call home and view my desktop screen with my laptop. A 9600 baud rate modem was top of the line at the time. Screen refresh rates for this setup were measured in minutes. I bought Trade Station while it was still in beta for roughly $3,000. Either it Windows 3.XX or both would crash nearly every day. My desktop had 8MB RAM. I remember once while Globex was still new, when you had to phone in your orders to your broker who then entered them on the Globex terminal. Very late one evening I woke up and saw I was deep in the black on a GBP futures trade. I phoned my broker to exit but no one answered the phone. Even after hours of calling. When I finally got an answer the next morning it was too late. The position was now at a loss. Fortunately for my broker (who fell asleep) he was in Chicago and I was in Tennessee. Cause I was ready to rip his f***ing heart out.