My guess would be that they had demo accounts up in front of them. No access to real funds or trades. The phone calls were to a trader in the next office who would either place the real trades or just demo trades for results tracking. I highly doubt this is an experiment using real money. Remember, the turtles were given the rules to trade by. The winners followed the rules. Newbies trying to generate their own ideas is a horrible experiment. No way this has a chance to succeed. Just good entertainment showing the raw emotions of trading.
ill liked watching them cringe lol with such small orders god help me if i ever get nervous trading 5k...
They are phoning up a real broker "Mint" based in Cannon Street. Similar setup as ICAP but on a smaller scale. The money is real and as they have 25k each and can only risk 5k on a trade, they can't go too wrong. I'm sure they would have been taught strategies at Cass Business School. More importantly for everyone on the show, they want to make a career of it, so obviously don't want to lose any money as it would affect any future prospects in the industry. As another poster pointed out, the people on the show lack experience as they haven't put on enough trades and haven't followed the financial news to be able to gauge sentiment in the market.
Most of the money on those short time frames was just changing hands, not being lost. 90% of the time that's what happens. Trick is just (just!) to make sure you're on the right side of the equation.
There were a couple of times where it sounded a lot more like a phone-based trade confirmation than actually phoning in an order. I imagine you're probably right - they do this for the benefit of heightening the drama and making it all that much more watchable - and the actual trades are placed electronically. I'm going to keep my opinions of some of the "contestants" to myself - trading is pretty f'ing challenging way to make money and I've never met anyone who didn't have a lot of screw-ups along the way. Including myself... Entertaining show, looking forward to Chapter 2.
some thoughts: > one of the people wonders "is it possible to trade ethically and still make money"? yes, if you're not an author / salesman. > i'd likely not have succeeded if i had no experience, and tossed in there for 8 weeks. > if they were on a real desk, they'd know the proper way to place a phone trade. i memorized ten years ago the rough "A = alpha, B = beta, C= charlie, D= delta" code, which i know isn't completely proper, but works for me. if they have 2 weeks of prep, is it hard to teach the proper way to buy / sell via phone? i did like hearing one of them use the word"spot" though (which i do). > at least they're using stops! that's really good. >"worst trading conditions in a generation"? no, only if you're long-term buy and hold! for their conditions, it's difficult, of course, but short-termers should be thriving. > they're responding to news events 3 steps after the fact... > he's trying to get these people to hedge short-term trades with trades of 500-1000 shares? that seems kinda nutty. anyhow, it's on youtube now, and the person who put it up is "milliondollartraders".
Hey, looks like we can watch BBC 2 live online!: http://atdhe.net/watchtv.php?b=2 Next (2/3) part is on Monday 4 pm Eastern (9pm UK)
They are doing it all WRONG! It makes no sense to SCALP intraday and use PHONES I thought SCALPING meant you were trying to get an optimal entry in a short timeframe, how is that possible with PHONE orders