Here it comes...to be expected I suppose.
headlines.prodigy.com
8:56 PM (ET) 7/29
Day Trading a Volatile Profession
NEW YORK (AP) --Intense, volatile, and risky, day trading is a profession at the center of the stampeding bull market that's mesmerizing Americans -- sometimes at great financial and emotional cost.
Full-time day traders ride the tiniest ups and downs of the stock markets, squeezing profits by rapidly buying and selling shares via Internet links set up at rapidly growing day trading offices. Many have abandoned regular jobs to join the rush for market gold.
Just 5,000 in number, they make up an increasingly powerful force in the markets. Another 250,000 others, also caught up in the national pasttime of market watching, do the same from home full time.
Mark O. Barton, the day trader who shot and killed nine people at two brokerage firms in Atlanta on Thursday -- a day when the markets plunged -- traded at one of the firms where he opened fire. Barton, who killed his wife and two children before the rampage started, committed suicide later Thursday after police pulled over his van at a gas station.
Day trading certainly isn't a job for everyone as it requires strong nerves, an ability to make snap decisions and sometimes to take huge risks.
A trader might buy hundreds of shares of stocks, worth thousands of dollars, then sell them minutes later as the stock rises or falls, hoping to make a quick profit.
"The way this market is so volatile, it's just really stressful," said Nick Granko, an Oklahoma City day trader who quit selling used cars six months ago to try his hand at the stock market.
"You get emotionally attached to stocks. It takes a lot of nerve disengaging your emotions from trading," he said in a telephone interview. "Cutting your losses is one of the main things."
But because the game is so new and the spoils so seemingly endless, day trading is attracting many people unsuited for the game, traders say.
"Unfortunately, I feel most people who get involved in day trading don't understand the risk involved and don't fully anticipate the time it takes to achieve consistent success," said Robert J. Rak, moderator of a number of day-trading Web sites.
Granko said he's seen traders at his firm "who have no business being in there. They don't know what they're doing. They're afraid."
Omar Amanat, an owner of the New York day trading firm Tradescape.com, has watched as his offices have grown from 25 traders a year ago to 180 currently. He said Wednesday, before the shootings, that his firm also gets dozens of calls and e-mails from wannabe traders, many with little experience.
Nowadays, dozens of traders in baseball caps and shorts pack into Tradescape's darkened rooms, their eyes glued to computer workspaces littered with empty soda cans and coffee cups.
It was just two years ago that stock market rules were changed giving greater freedom to small investors to do the kind of trading that professional brokers do. Also new are the electronic networks that day traders use.
Recently, securities regulators have express concern that some day trading companies, which provide work space and training to would-be traders, could be misleading them about potential profits. Regulators have stepped up scrutiny of the firms.
"Day trading is not as simple as it appears," said Ari Kiev, a psychiatrist and author of "Trading to Win: The Psychology of Mastering the Markets," published in 1998.
"It is easy to get into it and all the ads for it make it seem like it is less expensive and so forth. But they don't really tell you how risky it is," he said.
The shootings began at All-Tech Investment Group, a firm that recently paid $278,000 in Massachusetts to settle claims of deceptive advertising and making unauthorized transfers of customers' money. At the firm, day traders put up at least $50,000 in equity to open an account, and most pay another $5,000 to attend All-Tech's 30-day training course.
The company's Web site on Thursday said the job "appeals to executives, victims of downsizing or lay-off, retirees, graduating college students and anyone who recognizes the unlimited earnings potential and quality of life which an Electronic Day Trader may achieve."
The firm also promoted the job as allowing "people to work a 6 1/2 hour trading day, to take vacations on demand and to leave for the day on a whim."
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Associated Press Business Writers Eileen Glanton and Rachel Beck contributed to this report.
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