Monday, May 13, 2013

Day trader has some success

Comment:

There must be some trick to this. I tried it, but it didn't work for me.

On the other hand, given how this market has behaved, if you believed in the bullishness of it, it is hard to see how you can lose.

I took the proposition that the market was honest and rational. Boy, was that a mistake.

Published on Zero Hedge (http://www.zerohedge.com)

Meet Dylan The Day-Trader, Or When Fundamentals No Longer Matter

By Tyler Durden

Created 05/12/2013 - 17:28

Only 25, self-described 'risk-taker' Dylan Collins plays the markets with a pot of more than $1 million - $100,000 of his own money earned from trading over the past two years, the rest provided by his bosses and partners at AMR Capital Trading. As The Washington Post reports [1], Dylan exclaims, "trading is fun; for me this is the dream job;" but as they note, for most of us, day trading conjures up the image from the dot-com era of some dude in his pajamas with a two-day growth of beard logged on to a Charles Schwab account buying Nortel Networks and Pets.com on margin. But have no fear for - New York-based AMR, a division of G-2 Trading, is a lot more disciplined and sophisticated than that - specializing in "momentum trading," riding hot stocks up and cold stocks down, taking advantage of the irrational herd behavior that characterizes financial markets. "I understand the idea that maybe you'd want to do something more meaningful, but I don't think I need to worry about that at my age," Dylan explains as he exploits momentary mispricings and sudden spikes in volume. The thing about this kind of trading is that you don't have to know very much about the companies whose shares you are buying or selling. "So much of trading is just about intuition," he adds brushing off how quickly knife-catching turns to blood (as the BTFD strategy backfired on Sino-Forest and Digital Domain). History repeating or Darwinian justice?