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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: niceguy767 who wrote (80818)	11/23/1999 3:37:00 PM
From: Bilow	Respond to of 1573096

Hi niceguy767; I just got out of AMD again, this time at 26 1/2. Thomson is showing a big sell order at something like 26 5/8, and I figured that the half was a pretty good price. So I owned AMD for 26 minutes, and made 5/16... I may be learning to trade these NYSE issues. Instead of Level-2 information, it's a matter of watching the prints, looking at the chart, checking out the institutional action, and watching the size. (And, of course, keeping one eye on the SPOOs.) It is a lot less intense then the incredible bursts of keyboard activity required to scalp Nasdaq-100 stocks, which is my usual puddle. A cool thing about trading fast is that you get very good feedback as to how good your picks are. Instead of having to wait 4 or 12 months, you know whether you are doing okay within a few seconds. While scalping Nasdaq, I have a rule that I won't hold a loser longer than 2 minutes. I only wish that I had learned that rule earlier, and every time I exit with a small loss in a position that then went in my direction, I have to remember back to how I learned that lesson. A cool thing for long term traders would be some sort of game that allowed them to be shown the left part of an unidentified stock chart, and then they would have to decide whether to buy or short. From there, time would advance, and they would practice their stop loss, or average down, or what have you trading practices. I think that it is practice that makes traders better, and the fast trades are perfect for that. To try to learn trading when one trades with 10-year horizons, is hopeless. There just isn't enough data to get any kind of confidence intervals on one's trading for those long term trades, let alone the testing of new trading techniques. The cool thing about high speed trading is that I get to make minor modifications to my behavior, and then test it against the market. From an engineering point of view, I have quick feedback, and, consequently, a relatively sweet control loop. -- Carl