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Strategies & Market Trends : DAYTRADING Fundamentals -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Koligman who wrote (5527)	11/20/1999 1:04:00 PM
From: Matthew L. Jones	Respond to of 18137

Yes, NY Times is free but requires registration. nytimes.com Matt

To: John Koligman who wrote (5527)	11/21/1999 6:50:00 PM
From: -	Respond to of 18137

John, Thanks for the heads-up on today's NY Times Magazine cover article "The Solitary Obsessions of a DayTrader". The cover photo/graphic is a lot of fun. Although the article itself starts out quite negative, it becomes a lot more fun once the featured trader puts the author, Mathew Kham, behind the controls riding 100 shares, to experience a trade for himself. The author, Mathew Kham, comes across initially as a real fuddy-duddy when it comes to daytrading, and he spends a good bit of the article venting his various negative predispositions about daytrading. The trader he picked, Dave Ghoel, comes across as a sharp enough guy, a daytrader who appears to be in the "advanced beginner" stage of development (he's only been at it since last November). A little surprising for his stage of development as a trader, Ghoel is still trading with a single monitor, and gets his charts from the web ("takes 20 seconds per chart"). He's using Level II, but does a lot of swing trading and overnights. He reports being up $200k this year, after starting at $80k initially. Kham starts out being unsure what to hate the most about daytrading -- the solitary, lonely confinement he assumes we're all suffering from; the hard-to-read blinking colors on the screen which is just a slot machine, what he perceives as the greedy behaviour behind the whole thing, his view of a lack of correlation between the work ethic and successful trading, the smirk of a successful trader, the obsession of it all with these daytraders, the connection to the internet craze ("biggest event of our time, blah blah blah"). He makes a point of highlighting Dave's lady's acute discomfort with his current obsession for the trading, and really starts out quite hard on the guy and his whole reportedly wretched career choice and situation. He even picks on Dave for selecting Arnie as his role model (Arnie would probably kick Kham's A__, Dave :) But, after actually being put into his own trade (100 shares of something that moves 4 points then comes in), Kham seems to become a new person -- able to see through his own predjudices... a light bulb obviously clicks ("hey, this is NOT boring"), to the point of him considering a daytrading career for himself. But not before he drags us through the whole Mark Barton tradegy once again. No doubt, he's a talented writer though - it's a fun piece. And good luck to Dave, he's well on his way. -Steve