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Strategies & Market Trends : Market Gems:Stocks w/Strong Earnings and High Tech. Rank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: Scrumpy who wrote (55182)8/10/1999 9:15:00 AM
From: Jenna  Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 120523
 
Shorting is fine, but shorting one or two stocks to death can be harrowing waiting for that pot of gold at the end of the long, long rainbow. There are problems, money losses as these companies are determined to stay up and anyhow you can make way money from shorting stocks like AMZN, EBAY and the like and then going long when they have their little rallies, not to mention the other sectors. If I weren't so conservative with my puts (never over 10) I'd probably do double (but maybe the occasional double loss so I forgo the heartache.

From experience I know other traders short and/ go long position who consistently make in the low 7 figures a year, have a good life, and they don't tell me either, fairy tales are for children. I see their portfolios because they discuss some of their holdings with me. The first time I met someone like that it was a nice guy who was an executive in an insurance company and found he did better trading. He was making almost $90,000 a year but he was very pressured..now he makes 2-3 million a year and spends half his days on his 47 footer. He's one of the 'lesser millionaires'

Another one was an ex-gambler from Vegas who came to Florida to retire and 'discovered' the oil sector just a few short weeks after selling his net holdings and made a killing, So don't be impressed with these stories. There is another here in Boca who is a 'money manager' of sorts for the extremely well heeled and besides his newsletter, extremely costly ($10,000) a year, takes 30% of what he brings in for them and also lives in a huge estate on the Sanctuary which is Boca's finest, is 44 and has amazing talent to spot the longs as well as the shorts. He utilizes extremely sophisticated methods, has never heard of SI until I showed him the theads. None of of them have the time to waste with SI, which although is a nice place the heavy hitters don't hang out on SI.

After the second and third time I met these people I saw a pattern.. They were smart but relatively conservative, they knew how to analyze companies technicals and fundamentals, made little noise and held if they had a good thing (they were not into the nets like I wasn't since end of April except for the puts/shorts but in a bigger way). One guy writes a column for Telescan, and he doesn't need extremist trading habits. If more people were like him the failure rate for traders would not be so high. Don't be too impressed, that gets addictive style and even if these two are doing so well, which I doubt, the followers and latchers on are losing. You have to take this all slowly not get hooked because the fall can be very painful.

It's the 'all or nothing' approach of extremist trading that is causing 90% to fail, especially those who latch on to some of these companies where I visited only one day before the tragedy. After two weeks they are already trading. Trading gurus should be checked out, grandiose claims should be doubted. We try our best here to research and call and find the better trades during these times but its painstaken work and takes hours and even then you have to grab your profit and be on your way. Lots of traders were ignoring trades like ALO, ZOMX, APA, PAX and SGY in favor of the nets because they moved faster.. but in actuality they didn't.

Learning to trade is a slow process that takes about 3 years until you got it about right, the quick killing is really literal...its a killer if you go about it wrong or get impressed with the 'quick and easy buck'..