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Strategies & Market Trends : LastShadow's Position Trading -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: U Up U Down who wrote (29316)	1/15/2000 7:18:00 PM
From: AlienTech	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 43080

>>"It does look suspiciously like a game of musical chairs, and you do wonder when the music is going to stop," he said. "Because three-week holding periods is not investing in my view, it is speculating." << I suppose I heave learned from my mistakes and that is why I post stocks with very good fundamentals at almost bottom entry prices. Although I still got kicked with FLAS and BYND. And over all off all the stocks they are still up 200% or so.. But it is hard to follow what you have learnt the hard way alone when everyone around you is following the crowd and in fact actually making more money than you by doing the speculating and gambling. But atleast now I rarely trade and its been a lot better on my health and I am not as hyper anymore. So I suppose at least when the goings good all you get is better health, but when you hear some people making 7 figures playing options in QCOM and CMRC and others who get in on the P&D's you do wonder.. money, is it worth it?

To: U Up U Down who wrote (29316)	1/15/2000 8:18:00 PM
From: tom pope	Respond to of 43080

>>Investing in the stock market for the long term, the strategy that has made the most sense and the most money for people over the years, is all but dead. nytimes.com; Yes, I read that article, and many other similar ones. I can only say that my investment performance became acceptable only after I began to trade frequently, which basically meant that I began to monitor my accounts more closely. In other words I finally understood that investing/trading was a business, not something that you glanced at once a week. All my accounts have done well since I developed that perspective, but the one one that has done the best is my day trading account with MBT. I still don't believe how it's possible for what started as a small account to have grown as it has. What I've never understood about the critics of day trading is the charge that when the evil day of the crash dawns the day traders will be swept away in the sea surge. Not if they're really day traders. They'll be out of the market. Those swept away, by definition, will be the buy and holders.

To: U Up U Down who wrote (29316)	1/16/2000 7:40:00 PM
From: Jay Lyons	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 43080

Geaorge- Don't know if you get TSC (I think it's invaluable), but here are Cramer's thoughts on the Times article you posted. Morgenson has been on a vendetta against traders for quite awhile, in my opinion. She also wrote the article that was extremely negative about MB Trading. Jay Trading Is Evil? Don't Believe It By James J. Cramer 1/16/00 6:28 PM ET Call me trader. I admit it. I like to trade. I enjoy it. It has made me money. I wouldn't do it if it didn't make me money. I would do something else. I am a rational human being who does what is optimum, just like the texts from Ec 10 talk about. Many of you are like me. I read your email telling me so. Every day. Sometimes several hundred a day. Let me state something that seems obvious to you, but seems completely preposterous to some in the media: Many of us have profited from this great bull market. Many of us have investing gains. But many of us also have trading profits. They tend to look the same when they are in the bank. There are no asterisks adjacent to the profits bearing a legend that says "these are only trading gains." Join the discussion on TSC Message Boards. These profits work to pay for tuition or retirement or dinners out or boats and homes or vacations, just like investing profits. These profits are accepted at Home Depot (HD:NYSE - news) and Wal-Mart (WMT:NYSE - news) or Amazon (AMZN:Nasdaq - news) or Carnival (CCL:NYSE - news) or Disney (DIS:NYSE - news). I know, it sounds like I am stating the obvious. But I am stating the obvious out of pique. Because on Saturday morning on the front page of The New York Times is still one more article about what a bunch of fools we all are for doing it ourselves and taking control of our money and selling stocks for other stocks. Underlying this "Investing's Longtime Best Bet Is Being Trampled by the Bulls," article, by Gretchen Morgenson, whom I regard as the apostle of the "individual as moron/public as fool" school of thought, is the notion that trading is somehow evil or stupid. We have seen so many of these articles before, under that byline, that my eyes should glaze over by now. But this time she uses some statistics put together by my friend Steve Galbraith, who covers the brokers at Sanford Bernstein, to talk about the dangers of speculating. I know Steve's work. It seems to me he got duped into the "musical chairs" analogy that he coughed up, because he knows better than most how much money has been made trading during this period. What is behind this rearguard action against people taking control of their finances and managing their own money to their individual betterment? Let me give you two schools of thought, one benign, one malignant. Perhaps these negative articles are spurred by an incorrect lumping of daytraders with people who buy and sell stocks after doing homework that is now available to all. Whenever I see the U.C. Davis people, who studied daytrading, quoted, I always get suspicious of this mischaracterization. Daytrading out of high-pressure firms where heavily margined folk do their best to beat market makers is a nemesis to profit. I share in that pejorative. I am all for any article that calls attention to the dangers of that kind of leveraged daytrading. These high-pressure firms produce crummy results. But the type of behavior Morgenson criticizes is much broader than the rough-and-tumble world of daytrading, where only about one in 10 wins. She is criticizing the basic trend that has taken hold in America these last 10 years, the notion that individuals can pick stocks and make money. She, like many in the media, is obsessed with the notion that someone else can do a better job than you with your money. She seems to think that you should give your money to someone who knows better. She seems to be under the impression that you are losing money, not making money, and if you would just give it to your broker at the old full-service brokerage firm, you could do much better than if you do it yourself. This judgment is a false one, based on a lack of reporting. The revolution in financial self-control has created a generation of people who care more and are far more intelligent about their money than Morgenson or many others in the press realize. Where are the empirical data that shows that individuals are recklessly trading? Where are the statistics that show people are overtrading their accounts into oblivion? On the other hand, I am happy to make available thousands upon thousands of emails I have received from people who not only have taken over control of their finances but also have vastly superior returns to many of the customers of the traditional brokerages. Isn't it time the media recognized that a smarter, more informed client, albeit one with a trading bias, is much better than a clueless, sheep-like investor who knows little and leaves it to others who don't care as much about her money as she does? Or is the media so blind to the changes that such a recognition is simply an impossibility? I'm afraid it's the latter