i;m sure hoffman's strategy entails a lot more market savy than price and loss,if he's not all in and he sold at 1318,he would love selling at 1324 or 34,and martingaling doesnt have to be just put the trade on and forget ,you could get in and out on partials several times readjusting your base price while never changing your net position ,meaning short and still short ,or long and still long,that is presumably why it would be impossible to explain,without knowing exactly how the position was being defended
I have seen lots of traders blow out...some real bad ones. But the "getting teeth pulled" reason for his blow out is a hoot. Seriously. There is a reason guys like Hoffman and the other clowns out their selling useless strategies aren't gainfully employed by a trading firm/hedge fund. They would be fired within a week. These guys have all the qualities of the worst traders I have ever seen. Take tiny winners...huge losers...blame others for their loss. But like others on here pointed out, the dumb money/people who enjoy losing flock to them. Probably because of their fancy websites.
Great post. That's exactly it. Wanna-be traders who go to these sites do not want to put the time in and actually learn how to trade. They go to these fancy websites with the claims of "100% winners !!!" "We never lose!!!" and just think it's that easy. I guess anyone who believes this BS deserves to be parted with their money. These chat rooms where these clowns give out buy and sell signals are useless. "Buy the Dow here....offer it out 3 ticks higher". Is worthless. Most of them can not verify any trading profits, so they are on a simulator.
It's hard to argue he's got any market savy when he turns a 1-lot loser into an 850-lot loser in about an hour and gets liquidated by his broker, in a relatively orderly market. Especially in TF where you can get slippage on a 10-lot.
The fact that the owners of that site didn't part ways with the guy after that speaks volumes. They actually took a disaster scenario and are trying to spin it off as a positive....that people should look to this guy for advice. There is no excuse for a 1 lot guy to get up to 850 lots. Hell...going up to 50 lots would have been absurd. Also like you said, the market was orderly. It wasn't like yrs ago when Greenspan decided in the middle of the morning to move rates out of the blue.....and the SP rallied 50 handles in an instant. This guy had every chance at an out and blew up.
This is a beaut: "Our services are not structured around track records. We provide our services to assist members in learning how to trade on their own and not based on past performance" Of course....why would new traders want to learn from people who actually make money trading and have a track record.
Also, let's say he was able to double again, and got to ~1700 lots(even 1000-1200 lots.) How was he planning to exit that for a profit, coming into the lunch period? The 11:30 30-min bar that day did a whole 13.4k total, and that was an above average volume day, in a strong down-trend. It's both.
I traded Russell Futures briefly in 2005-2006. Unless things changed(from what you posted they haven't), trying to exit 850 is insane. The inside mkt is probably what....10 x 10 ? And if you go to sweep the bids, even though they might be showing 40 and 50 lots, they are not gonna be there when the bids above them are hit. And if he is going to offer out, what's the most he can put out there without spooking the players.....a 50 lot? Add in the fact it's lunch time he is going to have a much tougher time. If people catch on in a thin mkt like the Russell that he is caught bad they will push things even harder to try and force him out. I guess it's a good thing for him that his broker had the sense to liquidate him. Otherwise he would have kept building his position again and again. the guy was obviously on tilt.
Ya, it would not be easy or painless. He could use an iceberg and/or try to offset in something bigger. It's basically a time-risk vs. price-sensitivity trade-off: you can sit small on the offer and trade 1-2-3-4-5 lots into the bid and hope the market doesn't tank in the meantime or you can be agressive and fight your own position. If you're too aggressive you'll just end up giving free money to the index/stat arbs. I'm also curious what the risk managers at the brokerage were saying: "Hey joe this guy just got liquidated pyramiding up to an 850-lot-loser in the Russell, and he was trying to add more!" "What kind of idiot turns a 100 loser into an 850+ loser, in the f'n Russel?" "No, it started as a 1 lot" "..."