i traded overnight full size sp's with no money im my account in the 80's and even into the 90's. if i was loosing i just had to take money down there to my broker the next day if i was up i put on another contract. i also remember my dad trading sugar in the early 70's and his broker wore a suit and tie had a phone on his desk and a chalk board with quotes. my dad made a fortune in sugar and he allowed me to trade silver with the same broker. i would go down there on the square every evening when i got out of school and be amazed thinking how smart that guy must be to be a broker. the office was a 10x10 ft square room on the ground floor below the masons lodge in downtown garland texas. it was painted the same color as the classrooms in my high school, mint green and had plaster walls. i made a fortune on silver and gold but little did i even know that the hunts had come into the markets. i was out of school and was doing just fair trading until the hunts. so i said to hell with building high rises dad we need to be trading. i talked my dad into buying a apple 3 in the 70's - the story was it would be good for cost estimating - little did he know i spend all my time with visa calc plugging in quotes manually. mb
Here's an entry I made in my diary on 6/16/1998: "Ameritrade options 25 + 1.75 per $29 min, 10% discount on electronic. Suretrade option 25 +2 Scottsdale 20 +1.60" I was an option trader in those days! I lasted a few months, that made me one of the best.
Bumping up an old thread here again, try not to get too mad. I'm sitting here sipping wine and popping benadryl reminescing about the old days. I like this thread, and another thread about "stone age" trading too. I'd love to go back to pre-internet days, I think I'd really clean up. The info was more scarce and flowed more slowly. We've had an information explosion with the expansion of the internet, and it's made trading more difficult. Look at some of the Market Wizards, (from the first book). A lot of them are struggling, Richard Dennis has had to shut down twice now. His partner William Eckhardt has written how the information explosion has affected trading too. I have my confirms going back to 1996. I'm going through some of the older ones now. Shaking my head at my option buying days. I thought I was so smart. Of course, all experienced traders know what happened with my account back in my option buying days, I don't have to say it. I can remember being on the phone to my discount broker getting my order in at 6:30 in the morning and acting all nervous over some shitty illiquid equity options that rarely trade anyway. I thought I was so important, some guy buying options while the rest of California was sleeping. The boys in Chicago charged me a hefty tuition teaching me to not be an option buyer. These days I could probably clean their clock though. Maybe I'll do it to spite the bastards. Anyway, what brought this post on was the WSJ print newspaper. I've been sitting here going through the stock tables like I should have done 20 years ago. I think the combination of my brain and a newspaper stock table could have taken over the whole world back then, if I had only acted on it. A computer wouldn't have been necessary. I'll tell you one damb thing for sure though, twenty years from now I won't be posting some " i wish I would have, could have, should have" crap. Get er done guys. the world is our oyster. Peace out.
Started trading Stocks and Options in 1986 using an acoustic coupler and charts for Gann analysis. In 1988 started using the brand new Reuters realtime charting service and quickly followed that with Kighght Ridder Tradestation (only 6 in all of London) on a massively powerful IBM 286. Withinn a few months Reuters had brought out the mobile pager giving live index, gold and Fx prices so started using that too. It was amazing watching live charting when everyone else was using quote terminals. Watching realtime stochastics was so advanced. It cost $16,000 just to connect 4 direct lines to my house. The cost of Knight Ridder data was something around $20,000 for the first year. And people think eSignal is expensive today!! Insider trading was consider one of the perks for professionals before the Fin Serv Act and after the act the old boys treated Chinese Walls like Swiss cheese. My how things have changed
just found this old-ish thread. pretty awesome stories. would love to see pics of said trading machines
2 years later I think (can't remember exactly) I coughed up $4000 (In 1988 dollars) for this beauty. Yes it's a LAPTOP too all 15 pounds of it lol