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

To: Wayners who wrote (207)	1/18/1999 5:06:00 PM
From: Larry S.	Respond to of 611

OK, I'll jump in here. As a long term investor, and a recent short term trader, I'd like to offer the following comments: Some will be very successful day trading, most will get seriously hurt. I trade about 25% of my equity investments, The rest are in good quality buy and hold accounts, whether individual stocks or mutual funds. I tend to trade about the same dollar amount in a stock, regardless of the price. I usually don't double down, though did last week with YHOO. My objective is to make 10-20% on an investment, and I am very willing to let the winners run. I do not use stops. I probably should, but don't. I only buy stocks that i like on either a FA or TA basis, tend to stay away from the crazies, so will give myself more latitute on the down side. Usually this has worked out, sometimes i got tagged big time. but because each investment is a relatively small % of the total portfolio, it hasn't been too bad My buy and hold accts were up 38% last year My trading account was up 10% after having been down 50% in September. I make a fair number of medium sized bets, never bet the farm on one. It scares the bejeebers out of me to hear so many people talking about daytrading. There are going to be big losses by some people. The thing that really scares me is the damage that will be done in the next market meltdown. Last week I tried to buy LCOS at market thru Discover. entered my order when the stock was trading at 92-93. I finally got a fill report about an hour later at 108 !!. After an hour on the phone, listening to crappy classical music, I got thru to a live broker. I eventually did get a new price of 98, which still seemed high but it was a fast market. My point is that with the market moving so fast, and with the internet brokers getting bombed at certain times, there will be instances where people will just not be able to get out of a position. And a small loss will become a big loss, trades will blow thru stops. Calling brokers will be worthless, waiting 1/2 on hold while the market plummets or jumps is no fun. Just a word of caution. good luck all. larry