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

To: Allan C. who wrote (15127)	2/3/2002 4:26:21 PM
From: Dan Duchardt	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 18137

Allan, To imply that traders were "parasites" would mean they would have to be successful!! Even unsuccessful parasite wanna-bees can do their damage in the process of failing. We can say all we want about the good things active traders do, in whatever time frame they do it, but I have yet to hear any satisfying argument to suggest that what has been going on in the market the last few years has been good for investors. Evidence suggests that some of the best of that old crowd have largely stepped aside from that once profitable endeavor. I know a lot of people who have not been very active in the market who have taken a huge hit in their retirement accounts, far in excess of the accumulated losses of the "new career" pumpers. Don't you know? 90% of all short term traders lose money (and 10% lie) This is well documented in the many extensive government studies (ok, only one small report) I expect this is a huge distortion of the reality of the situation. I believe the numbers to be representative of the "new career" retail traders like most of us here. There is another whole set of professional traders (e.g., brokers, broker-dealers, investment bankers, etc) who made enormous amounts of money during the frenzy with their trading activities, far in excess of the losses of the "new career" types. A lot of that came out of the hides of working people who have been told for years by all the professional financial planners that there is no other way to secure a comfortable retirement than to feed their hard earned money into the market machine and let it crank out those 12% returns every year. I don't bad-mouth traders, and I'm still engaged in the activity of trying to generate a profit from being one. I might even succeed, but I'm not going to pretend that what I do is good for the investors out there who have to stomach the wild swings in stock prices stimulated by speculators, both professional and retail, in order to leave their money "invested". Dan

To: Allan C. who wrote (15127)	2/3/2002 7:16:05 PM
From: Raymond Duray	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 18137

Philosopher, LOL! Yup, ya nailed it on the daytrader myth. My post-partem from last night (spew to a few) was actually more about commodities trades and distortions of the real economy. I've had a lively series of responses so far, but absolutely not one on topic. Everyone sees this through a myopia of stock trading. Interesting. I'm going to have to think about what this means. I tried something similar over at the Boom Boom Room. They all had the hotz to capture Baghdad. I tried to hint that maybe they weren't clued in to the difference between the chest thumping rhetoric about Iraq and actual Great Game approved national policy. They were totally in denial of what should have been clear. It's fun when I can see the wrong assumptions and thus hidden vulnerabilities of these trader types. Advantage-Ray. Ciao!