I bought damn near the low on both of those stocks. AMR and ACF, made about a 1.00 on each on 10 or 20k shares in a day or two. I was patting myself on the back for making a great trade, little did I know I would be kicking myself in the ass for that. Nice trades!
Indeed there are many stories out there about making lots of cash trading. Some of these stories are very true, others are completely false. Yes, it is completely possible to make this kind of money... However, you never hear about the stories where people LOST money. There are very few stories out there where people have lost cash. I have lost $7000 in just one day of trading. When you hear about guys making wonder trades, yes it happens. However, there is always another side to the trade...
Hillary Clinton turned $1000 into $100,000 pretty quickly. Most of her trades were shorts. She explained her taking the short side because "herd sizes were being reduced". I guess she thinks that reduced supply reduces prices. That's how stupid she thinks everyone is. John http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1707731/posts
<b>eagle</b>... I've got lots of "gone broke" stories from 2000 - 2001 era learned while contributing content to an option trading website. A lot of readers made huge money there from 1998 ~ 2000, most had no idea how it happened. Then late 2000 and beyond ensued. The biggest $$ loss I recall was one subscriber who ran +/- $1 million into $18 million strictly by selling deep ITM naked put options. He'd write puts $100 ITM and pocket huge chunks of profit as the Nasdaq soared. Prices moved so fast, early assignment of the contracts often doubled in value the same day. Well, he leveraged positions bigger as the account balance grew. When late 2000 - early 2001 arrived, this trader had taken some losses and built a huge net-short position of deep ITM puts on Nazz stocks. When price action caved in early 2001, he closed out all positions for a -$10 million loss. The story goes that he still made a little bit of money in the end, but gave back nearly 100% of realized gains over two years in one fell swoop. Imagine reading that month-end statement where it shows one day loss of -$10mil or 90+% of the account. How would that go over with you, your spouse and family? ** I have more of these stories to relate than you have time to read them. For every one "Waxie" Parness who made millions, one thousand traders wiped out their entire accounts.
Most active online brokerage accounts lost money or broke even during 1997- 2000 while mostly going long. It wasn't just market rubes trading $500 at Etrade either. I had the chance to look over thousands of accounts at three different brokerages (one full-service, one deep discount and one remains the most elite retail daytrade company). Only a few accounts stood out as mid or high triple digit other than my own.
I'm not that familar with Ag futures - is it easy for a broker to fabricate trades made at the hi or low of the day? The trades were in the 70's so most things were probably done manually. Seems like another method would just to set up two accounts and simulaneously buy and sell the same contract - wait for the price to move - then close the trades and assign all the profitable trades to one persons account and all the unprofitable trades to the "donor". That would pretty well hide the suspicious stuff especially if the accounts were closed out immediately and the investigation wasn't until years later.
Zangers return from 11k to 42 mil in 18 months is the greatest day trader return of all time. and he did it with 2-1 margin which makes it just damm right incredible. it will never be duplicated as he had the biggest balls on earth at the most opportune time in history and capitalized.AND ITS DOCUMENTED FROM TAX RETURNS TO MANY MAG'S SO IT'S NO BS. he's back up to 40 mil he says on his site and wants to hit 100 mil.