Somewhat funny story -- I recall in February 2000, about a month prior to the NAZ top, I shorted VTSS at $96. The next day it was $120. 25% gain overnight. A trade gone bad I thought. Later I did make $$$ by covering for a profit. Note today that VTSS trades on the pink sheets at about $0.25. Nice chart.
Yes, those were crazy times. I'm not sure about you, but I know that I didn't make near as much as I probably should have back in those wild days. Then again, I was paying $21.95 per ticket, plus outrageous ECN fees of up to 1.5 cents per share. Now, my commission rates are roughly 99% lower, which make a lot of strategies viable that would have failed miserably at the higher commission levels of 1999/2000.
Your mention of All-tech reminds me of all the trading firms that I have used, that are now out of business. I had an account at Alltech, Castle Securities, as well as a firm in Vancouver that I can no longer remember the name. All of them are now out of business. Certainly, it's safe to say that this decade has been as brutal on daytrading firms, as it has on daytraders themselves (no surprise there, I guess).
On the other hand, ARCA and ISLD went from minor players that were new to the business, into firms that basically provided the technology for the trading of the future at NYSE and Nasdaq. I wonder how many traders that have started in the last 5 years even know what ECN stands for?
Stuart and Margwen Townsend went from moderately successful entrepreneurs in the trading software business, to people worth 100's of millions of bucks. Seems like scanshift (from this thread), went from a whiner that complained about getting screwed by them, to the successful winner of a big lawsuit, validating his claims (my memory is getting fuzzy, but I think this is right - I forget his actual name/nick, but I think that nick is correct).
I wonder how many current traders would recall the name, Mark Barton, another big figure from 'back in the day'?
Barton put a dark smudge on the job description of 'daytrader', that would last for years. The media portrayed daytraders as reckless gamblers and dreamers hoping to make an easy living (not an entirely incorrect description for most, I suppose). After the bubble burst, hedge funds became the financial scapegoats for the media for a number of years. Unfortunately for the media, hedge funds didn't destroy the financial system in recent years, so they have now turned their attention to the nasty bankers as the evil characters on Wall Street. Always someone to paint as the villain. I wish the markets were as predictable as the media.
Who were the other big winners or losers in the decade? On the brokerage front, E*Trade and AmeriTrade seemed to take control of the discount brokerage business, but then they tended to collapse in the financial crisis, so it's hard to call them winners overall. => I think AmeriTrade had major problems as well, right, or was that just E*Trade?
Certainly Goldman Sachs must be considered a huge winner in the decade, along with Amazon (the current COO of Amazon used to be my boss in ~1996, two years before I began trading fulltime). Hard to point to many other winners in the financial industry, although Google was certainly another winner in the technology space.
What stands out as memorable to you (and others) about the decade just concluded? |
