About trading there sure is a lot to learn from Livermore. Are you blind to the fact that Reminiscences is the most-often quoted book of what really captures trading? By the greatest traders of all time? The lessons to be learned are both about making and losing money. In fact, if you've read Reminiscences and "don't get it" I'd say the joke is on you - unless you're a quant.
Welp, it looks like he was wrong. Sure you we can see how the rest of the move plays out but the fact is pretty much opened up flat IRC. That's part of the problem with predicting market moves. You will be wrong. I understand he likes the setup to the short side and his bias is leading him there. But where there is boldness in the market call, I imagine there will be stubborness if/when he is wrong. My take on it it is that he is a permabear that will die by a thousand knifecuts if there is no downmove.
He is wrong when his call is wrong. Its going to play out this week. He did say today, but it could take a few days for this chart to pan. He is still short the ES and holding... http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_ZdctlOEsq...b9UI/s1600-h/dc_capital_01+Dec.+13+00.09x.GIF
He said we'd gap down on Monday and we didn't. In fact he said we'd gap down huge. We were gapped up. He was wrong. If you look at that chart you posted of his, this trade has not gone according to his expectations as we had a massive move up today. He was wrong on that. In fact we are now closed above his trendlines on that chart. He was wrong. Yet on his blog he still has the trade on. He has made a ton of reasons to be in the trade. A gold bug can give you a ton of reasons to be long gold. History has shown that for ROI gold is a very poor vehicle to be invested in. What I mean by this is his vision may be clogged. Where is his stop? 950 on the ES? 1000? Sure chances are high for a down move tomorrow after a 400 point rally, but that doesn't by any stretch of imagination mean that his call was right. Not even close.
It seems like his previous good calls on the bear side made him overconfident and he just got caught heavily short right at the bottom of the market (ES 666) waiting for the "apocaliptycal terminal move". And you guess what, he is blaming the massive beating he is taking on the PPT and adding more short positions on the way up. This kind of behavior perfectly fits what Term described.
http://www.marketguru.com/Atilla Take a gander at this guy's track record. Down almost 75% YTD. And it will be worse after today. Undoubtably the worst analyst and trader I've ever witnessed. The blogsphere is filled with wannabes trying to make a name for themselves.
Welp, Here we are... several months later. I still follow his blog and I show the new traders around me: see, this is what you do not want to do. I can't follow his performance, but I can follow Sol's. Sol, whom Atilla traded his account for on the down move in the fall, made $3.9M in closed profits. He is currently as of today sitting in 3.5M in losses roughly a 90% drawdown. How did he get here? 1. Lack of discipline 2. Lack of understanding of how the instruments he traded worked (I.E. the decay of FAZ, the fact that he has been worked over in almost all of his options trades). 3. Too big of an ego 4. Lack of diversification (if you're going to be running a 4M book, I would hope you'd be hedged in some function in case you were wrong). I have never seen them say once, "I was wrong". If you're sitting through a 90% drawdown, you were wrong. Very wrong. He's currently trying to dig out of it with these SPY options plays. They may work out for him, but if they don't, he's going to be sitting at a 100% drawdown. Regardless of how they perform in the future, I don't think anyone can ever say that these guys are "good traders". Feel free to check my math as I may be off: http://xpositions.blogspot.com/ ES - 650,000 NQ - 1,830,000 FAZ - 305,110 FAZ - 340,850 FAZ - 268,500 SPY Put - 112,000 SPY Put + 9,000 MSFT Put - 35,000 Total: -3,532,460