You sure put me in my place.
Nope. You're doing that all by yourself.
When in a downtrending market, I try to sell the rallies. And in an uptrending market, I try to buy the dips. (psst, the market has been moving in a generally south direction lately).
In order to benefit from a trend you must hold. That isn't trading. Also, you will never know what the trend is. You draw a line from the past to now and conclude the trend is down or up. What good is that? Maybe today the trend will change. "Maybe" kills you because the effective decision procedure to determine trend goes all the way down to infinitesimal time frames.
To trade you have to assume you don't know the trend, but at some level you have to assume that a position you've taken will continue favorably and evolve into a trend. When the trend breaks, you sell. The problem is that in any time frame when does a trend break become effective and actionable? It becomes actionable at an expected -5% ROI.
Hell, I'll take 2% profits over your 50% loss on JDSU any day of the week.
You don't know what I do, but I know what you do. You lose because you trade. All traders lose sooner or later. Your only hope is to buy JDSU and suffer while it struggles and maybe goes bust. If it goes bust, you have to buy and hold something else with the same possibility. It's your only hope. If you don't do this, the stock market will always keep you poor.
Well, that gets right to my original message to you. All of that knowledge and godlike posturing and you still can't make the market work for you.
Correct. Even you hacks know that you can't make the market do what you want it to do. You can't put your requirement on it and survive. But you can require of it that it do what you want, or you won't play. Can you see the difference? I doubt it.
And somehow, this hack amateur mule manages to eek out 2% profit.
Don't start patting yourself on the back just yet. Your 2% won't last. That's just part of how the game suckers you into believing you can beat it.
You really do think that you are cooler than an ice cube, don't you? You truly do think that you have the one and only key to the universe. Incredible.
I know math and I know from experience that the math can't be escaped. The math says that you can't win trading. That's the key to the stock market universe. What's incredible is that in spite of the unspoken record that 99% of the traders are losers in period 1, 99.9% of the traders are losers in period 1 + period 2, 99.99% of the traders are loser in period 1 + period 2 + period 3, ..., you go on trading. |
