Now, to tell you about my interesting day, yesterday.
Yesterday, I traded a bit in the morning before driving north to Arlington, Virginia to visit with Lawrence Black and the folks at NetTrade. I read about Lawrence in a Washington post article this past month and wanted to meet him in person:
microtrading.com
I arrived at their office at 1:00 PM and sat beside Lawrence and watched him trade until the close. Very impressive. He uses the TradeCast software for order execution and trades a $1M+ account. In a matter of seconds, he would place 15+ buy orders in the same stock (SNET and ISLD) and would accumulate position sizes of up to 7,000 shares in a stock. In one case, I saw him go from 100% cash to owning 13,000 total shares in four different stocks.
He took many losses, which didn't seem to affect him at all. In all, I think he probably had profits on about 50% of his trades, with the profits from winners almost equally balancing the losses from the losers. His net profits seemed to come from the occasional big profit, like when he bought 2800 shares of HGSI at about $44 after it was mentioned on CNBC. I believe this trade netted him ~$8-12k.
While he was gone, I talked to one of the traders that trade beside him. He said Lawrence has made $200,000+ in a day on multiple occasions during the three months he had known Lawrence.
Other noteworthy information:
1) Lawrence is being interviewed by CNBC on Monday, 7/12.
2) The news magazine, 20/20 did an extended piece on him 3 weeks ago, and is being scheduled for broadcasting.
3) He makes 300 to 1000 trades per day. Although this may be a bit misleading, since one position of 5000 shares can be counted as 8+ trades based on the number of executions that it took to build the position. He said he averages ~$10-15k per day... in commissions. Not a bad customer to have! I believe he is considered to be one of the most active traders in the country.
4) I don't know his average daily profits, but he made over $1M in profits during the first quarter of this year.
5) He will take positions as large as 15-20k shares.
Anyway, very interesting visit. Look to see him next week on CNBC and sometime during the next 6 weeks on 20/20.
-Eric |
