Oliver Velez of Pristine does a fine job as the keynote, expressing his frustration with the common and current wisdom, and proclaiming the trading art as still in its infancy. His booth has a fine display of buff studs. Someone jokes that he hired Chippendale dancers to man the station.
Hey, I was helping out at the Pristine booth, too. Buff? Studs? I don't know about that. I thought the Pristine folks more resembled a mafia family! Many of the Pristine and Executioner employees are from NY City, have NY accents, look Italian, and were wearing suits. Glad I knew them or I would have been worried!
Two 20 year old work the onlinetradingadademy.com booth and you wonder, what the f*** do these 20 years olds understand about the markets?
As you probably realized, the 4+ girls at the Online Trading Academy booth (wearing white polo shirts that were a size too small) weren't even company employees. They are known in the convention industry as "Booth Babes". Companies will hire young, attractive local girls (Hooters waitresses?) to work at their booths and attract attention. In my opinion, it appeared to be successful! However, I would have liked to hear them answer a daytrading question, or even explain what daytrading is!
All in all, the Expo was a great success. I was excited to see so many individual traders interested in daytrading. Also, it was the perfect opportunity to learn anything and everything you wanted to know about the available tools and technologies in daytrading. You could also meet many of the big names in daytrading, including Oliver Velez, Philip Berger, Stuart and Margwen Townsend, Ross Ditlove, Lawrence Black, Harvey Houtkin, among others. (please excuse any name spelling errors!).
Prior to the Expo, I was concerned that the recent bad press (SEC, Atlanta, etc.) would be a terrible and lasting blow to the industry. However, the Expo has erased these fears. I saw thousands of current and prospective daytraders learning everything they could soak up from the Expo. Learning opportunities were everywhere. I'm sure the next Expo, planned for February (?) in New York City will be even more successful.
Threaders that I met at the Expo included: TraderAlan, Palo Alto, Dotty, OZ, bahasurf, fftrader, chas, Dan Clark, Alan Donziger, Bob Wassel and a few unmentioned lurkers. It was great to meet all of these wonderful people in person, and I hope we can all do it again with an even greater thread turnout in New York at the next Expo. Unfortunately, we didn't get any thread group pictures, but maybe we'll correct that oversight at the next Expo, as well.
-Eric |
