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> The real story is that the plebes realized they could make 2% per day by day trading and selling short. Can you please elaborate? I'm curious. Why was the mo

by 55555 8y ago

> The real story is that the plebes realized they could make 2% per day by day trading and selling short. Can you please elaborate? I'm curious. Why was the money so "easy"? Simply because there were so many amateur traders?

asdff 8y ago
Intraday trading is much less risky than holding a position overnight. A lot of movement happens in the first and last 30 mins of trading, and over lunch. You can exit unproductive positions quickly, whereas if you couldn't day trade you'd only be able to sit and watch how the cards are falling.
- Nasrudith 8y ago
  Can't you just set autosell conditions to do the equivalent of the function with less time sensitivity? If you can't handle a $10 drop cut out at a $5 and lock in savings if it rises by $15.
zackmorris 8y ago
Well 2001 was before trading bots for one thing, so most stocks had a daily heartbeat that was easy to follow. Several days a week the volatility on AAPL was easily +/- 1% each day, so we just bought low and sold high. I averaged 2% per day roughly 4 out of 5 days per week, losing 2-5% on the occasional day I was wrong. Also it was easy to predict when people would sell their stock on Fridays before 3 day weekends for example, so we'd sell Thursday afternoon or whatever. Also we bought right after the dot bomb happened on 9/29/2000 when most all the tech stocks fell by half or more in one day, so there was a constant upward trend where people wanted to start gambling in stocks again over the next year: https://money.cnn.com/2000/09/29/markets/techwrap/ https://money.cnn.com/2000/09/29/markets/techwrap/ You can see the drop here, I can't figure out how to share, but enter something like 9/28/2000 through 9/30/2000 in the date range: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AAPL/chart?p=AAPL https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AAPL/chart?p=AAPL You have to remember that these events aren't random. I personally feel that they're controlled by whoever holds the purse strings, so a handful of extremely wealthy illuminati were getting nervous towards the end of the dot com and housing bubbles and made the call to pull the plug so they could re-buy after everything crashed (see: It's a Wonderful Life). We're overdue for that with the mobile and web 2.0 bubble. The main difference today is that older folks like me remember the lean times so more startups today have pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and are somewhat immune to these market manipulations vs propped-up brands like pets.com in the 90s. But don't think for a second that crashes (or booms) like these with a 50% move in one day can't happen again. As long as I'm on my soapbox, I wish that I could dabble in a little machine learning and look for correlations that tend to swing together or oppositely one another. No matter how much the bots tend towards noise, there are still markets that are connected that should be easy to spot. I don't know what else I would try though because I stopped following the market after the housing bubble when people started trading foreign currency and Bitcoin etc. I could have bought $20,000 worth of bitcoin when it was $10 so it's all just monopoly money to me now. I feel that chasing easy money is maybe distracting us from real human progress. But what do I know, I'm just the poor sap stuck in the universe where I never made it big hahah.
- rightbyte 8y ago
  "Easy money"? It's called luck and luck is hard to come by.

by 55555 8y ago

asdff 8y ago

Intraday trading is much less risky than holding a position overnight. A lot of movement happens in the first and last 30 mins of trading, and over lunch. You can exit unproductive positions quickly, whereas if you couldn't day trade you'd only be able to sit and watch how the cards are falling.

Nasrudith 8y ago
Can't you just set autosell conditions to do the equivalent of the function with less time sensitivity? If you can't handle a $10 drop cut out at a $5 and lock in savings if it rises by $15.

zackmorris 8y ago

Well 2001 was before trading bots for one thing, so most stocks had a daily heartbeat that was easy to follow. Several days a week the volatility on AAPL was easily +/- 1% each day, so we just bought low and sold high. I averaged 2% per day roughly 4 out of 5 days per week, losing 2-5% on the occasional day I was wrong. Also it was easy to predict when people would sell their stock on Fridays before 3 day weekends for example, so we'd sell Thursday afternoon or whatever. Also we bought right after the dot bomb happened on 9/29/2000 when most all the tech stocks fell by half or more in one day, so there was a constant upward trend where people wanted to start gambling in stocks again over the next year: https://money.cnn.com/2000/09/29/markets/techwrap/ https://money.cnn.com/2000/09/29/markets/techwrap/ You can see the drop here, I can't figure out how to share, but enter something like 9/28/2000 through 9/30/2000 in the date range: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AAPL/chart?p=AAPL https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AAPL/chart?p=AAPL You have to remember that these events aren't random. I personally feel that they're controlled by whoever holds the purse strings, so a handful of extremely wealthy illuminati were getting nervous towards the end of the dot com and housing bubbles and made the call to pull the plug so they could re-buy after everything crashed (see: It's a Wonderful Life). We're overdue for that with the mobile and web 2.0 bubble. The main difference today is that older folks like me remember the lean times so more startups today have pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and are somewhat immune to these market manipulations vs propped-up brands like pets.com in the 90s. But don't think for a second that crashes (or booms) like these with a 50% move in one day can't happen again. As long as I'm on my soapbox, I wish that I could dabble in a little machine learning and look for correlations that tend to swing together or oppositely one another. No matter how much the bots tend towards noise, there are still markets that are connected that should be easy to spot. I don't know what else I would try though because I stopped following the market after the housing bubble when people started trading foreign currency and Bitcoin etc. I could have bought $20,000 worth of bitcoin when it was $10 so it's all just monopoly money to me now. I feel that chasing easy money is maybe distracting us from real human progress. But what do I know, I'm just the poor sap stuck in the universe where I never made it big hahah.

rightbyte 8y ago
"Easy money"? It's called luck and luck is hard to come by.