nyt, daytraders 2.0

interesting stuff from the article: the person who they follow makes 100-120k / yr for much of the past 10 years, charges $199/month for his website. i haven't checked out the website or others mentioned in there, maybe others can.

my other thoughts: if this is the guy the NYT focused on, are there REALLY that few traders who will talk doing well? i'm not doing press or selling stuff, but i assumed others would.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/business/28trader.html?pagewanted=1&hpw

 

What would you say the proper definition of day trader is anymore, because, imo, high frequency trading firms are nothing but a bunch of day traders.

Where's the line?

 

daytrader still = buy and sell in the same day.

well, HFT is definitely daytrading, although the people who do it wouldn't call it that. and don't forget, there were hundreds of articles during the start of the internet bust talking about "daytraders" who bought a stock, and didn't sell it the next day or two or three and then had margin calls and blew up...

i'm primarily a daytrader, and have several 'zones' that i trade in:

1) pre-market
2) 9:30-11:30
3) 1130-2:00
4) 2:00-end of day
5) post-market

the majority of my trades are either in one or two of the zones, no more.

i don't do many trades after the close of the market.

 

"The losers far outnumber the winners.

Exactly how far is clear from one of the most comprehensive looks at the subject in a yet-to-be-published study conducted in Taiwan. (The country is ideal for this kind of research because all trades go through one place, the Taiwan Stock Exchange, which is willing to share the information.) The authors sifted through tens of millions of trades, from 1992 to 2006, and found that 80 percent of active traders lost money.
“More importantly, we found that if you were to look at the past performance of these traders, only 1 percent of them could be called predictably profitable,” says a co-author, Brad M. Barber, a finance professor at the University of California, Davis. Everyone else, it seems, was on a short-term winning streak. Even those who did modestly well found their that profits were wiped out, and then some, by transaction fees like commissions and taxes."

 

Here's an excerpt:

"Asked about the Today Trader method of buying and selling, both men seem momentarily stumped, as if they never saw the question coming. Then they talk about the search for “set-ups,” which seems to translate roughly as “golden opportunities,” but they struggle to put a finger on what set-ups are, or how to spot them.

"It has something to do with tracking trading volumes of stocks and buying heavily traded stocks as they rise in price. But how to know a stock will keep rising? Intuition, they say. It tells them whether they’ve arrived at the party too late (in which case they won’t buy), at the right time (in which case they buy), or just before it ends (time to sell)."

Question:

Are these guys jokers?

 

"Even during the banner years, Mr. Bettinger [CEO of Charles Schwab & Co, Inc.] said, the company had to constantly replenish its base of very active traders."

I wonder what happened to the very active traders.

 

This article is awful as most "trading" articles are.