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To: Fred-beaches who wrote (17097)	2/18/1999 2:28:00 PM
From: Jock Hutchinson	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 25814

I'll be happy to tell her that. In fact I will tell you that her claim is an outright lie. And I will tell you why. Try working out the number of trades she needed to make where she made a $24,000 profit using her parameters of 18 percent both ways. Let's be very generous and assume that she made twice as many winning trades as losing trades. Tell me how many total trades it would have taken to have made a $24,000 profit on $10,000. For a bright guy like you, it shouldn't be too difficult. If you don't come with an answer in a couple of days, I'll let you know. Worse yet, if she wins half of the time, and loses half of the time, she will go broke very quickly. Why? Because an 18 percent loss does not even come close to offsetting an 18 percent gain. Instead, only a 21.2 percent gain will offset an 18 percent loss. (We went through this nonsense over a year ago on this thread when a bunch of dunderheads insisted that a 50 percent loss is the same as 50 percent gain. Not even close. A 50 percent loss needs a 100 percent gain to offset the loss.) Plain and simple, over time, this is an outright ludicrous way to invest and an absolute guaranteed loser.