I want to post this Realmoney post here in full.
Everyone wants to "vent" every so often, so here goes. As a final word for the day, I wanted to visit the subject of trading. Since the bursting of the bubble, there haven't been many TV stories about those weird, eerie "traders" anymore.
But pause and remember what the stories used to be like. You remember the scene. The SOES sweatshop. The CNBC interview with the guy in laidback dress hunched over his computer screen, next to five other guys with similar screens, in a very dreary looking office where lots of things seemed very, well, monochrome.
Were there any stories of people trading from home? No. Any about people who traded and worked part-time? Full-time? Zippy doo-daa. Apparently such people don't exist because whenever a story on trading or daytrading ran nearly every time the people who were featured were full-timers in trading offices outside their homes.
Guess what?Most of the traders I know aren't like that at all. Nearly everyone in the supertraders chat room trades from home. A few work full-time, and several work part-time. Almost everyone I interact with during the day on Silicon Investor is in the same situation. They don't fit the stereotype at all.
So the next time you hear someone talk about a "trader" make sure to ask detailed questions about what they really envision such a person doing.
Oh yes, and until Gretchen Morgenson of The New York Times writes about a real live trader like that, I won't believe that most mainstream media understand trading at all.
Here endeth my venting, and my hat is off to all the ordinary folk out there trading and thinking from home, one of the most meaningful fruits of the true Internet revolution. |
