What I do for a living I don't even want to talk about.
When I first began trading I had so much fun. It did not matter whether I was making money or losing money. Trading was the career I had been searching for my entire life. I was on a year long high, a non-stop honeymoon, permanent orbit. I thought everyone ought to give this a try and I told them so.
Today I feel exactly the same about trading. I still haven't come back down. BUT, I have learned that most folks either think you are nuts, a gambler, or they have no comprehension of what you are doing. Most actually fall in the last category.
The general public, the "educated put something aside for the future 401K group", which includes the vast majority of the "investing" public equates being in the stock market with owning a mutual fund.
When people ask, my wife loves to say "He trades the market". The general reply that follows is, "So you are a broker". "No", I say, "I just invest." "OH". I see a big thought circle above their heads filled with mutual funds and I let the subject die right there.
Think about the questions that newbies ask. These are folks that have some amount of money. They have read at least enough to know that if they make the calls themselves it's not mutual funds. They have to put the money in some "account" somewhere and somehow get someone to exchange it for "stocks". Some are far better read and educated than that. Yet even though they know a lot of the buzzwords they don't even begin to understand trading (and most are smart enough to know this). Thus, they look for others with experience to begin to really explain trading to them.
Now imagine a person is who checks off a few boxes at work and has his/her entire retirement invested in a 401K earning 5-6% a year, impossible for them to have even the faintest idea what we do. Even more impossible to try to explain.
If a person is not in the world of trading, unless they just twist my arm off and hound me relentlessly, I will not even discuss the subject of trading. :-D
KK |
