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Strategies & Market Trends : ahhaha's ahs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: sixty2nds who wrote (16850)	5/6/2010 9:14:06 PM
From: ahhaha	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 24758

How ugly was it? I was a boy plunger, using margin. I thought I had it under control after nearly getting cleaned in the '59 sell-off. Now there was a recession. You can hardly find it on the chart. I was a beginner then, under age, a signed for operator from the accommodation of Glore Forgan. I used money I had gotten collecting old Lincoln and Indian Head pennies that I had sifted through from the fed reserve branch. The '63 plunge evolved over days but it had the same waterfall to it as today, that is, relentless. You had to just sell, but i was trapped psychologically by margin. Eventually, my broker had to sell me out at a complete loss. How did it set the table for your comeback? Are you kidding? It took me years of scraping to put together another stake which I again completely lost even though I used a minimum of margin in the '69 sell-off. It took another bunch of years before I could start up again, and I was doing all of this while in college. Geeze. Finally, listed option trading started in '73 and I quickly learned how fast the option market can clean you out. By then I figured out that I had to get on the other side, but you can only realistically do that by being an MM on the floor. To make a long story short I got cleaned out several more times without using options or margin. I almost got cleaned out when IBM's Gerstner bought that POS LOTS from Manzi. I was short a boatload of LOTS, a dying firm which I knew intimately. It was in complete collapse when out of nowhere garbage scow IBM came in and bought them, all for Lotus Notes. I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe that IBM would make such a poor move. You can't trade and you can't be confident because you can never know how stupid people can get. It's unbounded.