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Strategies & Market Trends : Are you considering quitting your dayjob to daytrade?! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SkyDart who wrote (171)	1/18/1999 8:50:00 PM
From: Moominoid	Respond to of 611

Those that have enough money to sustain them thru the training period [which can take years] have to then deal with the psychology resulting from losses in their formative period. Which is why it would be a sensible strategy to allocate most money during this period to buy and hold and play with say 25% in trading. That's roughly my set up. I only really trade my US stocks and I'm certainly not "daytrading". More like "weektrading". Daytrading the US market is impossible to do from this distance (Australia) unless you can keep awake all night. So far after brokerage I probably haven't done much better than buy and hold - by comparing my returns to a benchmark portfolio. Any gain has probably been eaten by brokerage. I'm a little vague because my cash ratio, margin has changed a lot and I didn't keep track of it so a really strict comparison isn't possible. But I have learnt a lot. The only non-zero sum way to beat the market which doesn't require extra skill or information is to take on more risk ie higher beta stocks and leverage. Of course you might also be wiped out there before the long-run where this could beat the market occurs. But one way or another you will need greater than average skill, information, or risk to beat buying and holding the index. David