Any Traders? (Forex, Futures, Stocks, Etc)

[snoogins47]

Hey folks, out of the seemingly five people that still post here, I bet two remember me. I haven't played poker hardly at all recently, been focusing on my 'real' career. However, I've got a new hobby, and it's a doozy and a fun one...

Any traders out there? From hedge fund managers, to play-money scalpers, anybody there?

I farted around in paper trading: currencies, stocks, etc. but never paid much attention. Four months ago, I decided I was going to start devoting some time and energy to it, and see if it might not be something I could do.

Well, I mostly ignored stocks, futures, etc. But I've been focusing very seriously on Forex *FAKE MONEY* trading, and managed to run up a fairly tidy profit over four months (I AM RAKING IN THE FAKE MONEYS), but profit or no it's a really interesting fascinating new little world I dove into. I have the benefit of having an almost 24/7 solid, trained, successful brain to pick and person to compete with/bounce concepts off of, which is nice, but I was just wondering if anybody else has dabbled in this stuff at all, even play money? My brain seems oddly wired like a lot of you fellow degenerates so I was figuring it might be cool to chat a bit about it

[HalfSugar]

I've not got into it yet but I'm seriously thinking about it as I have some friends that do. I'm about to start a pension fund which I am considering self-administering which is how I would do this.

I think the main thing that I have learnt from speaking to my friends at length is that you need quite a lot of time to be successful. You basically have to do as much research as you possibly can in order to get in to/out of the right stocks at the right time.

The other thing you need is a decent fund to start with otherwise the relative size of the transaction fees is too high. Basically the rake changes depending on how much money you invest and the more you put in, the better.

I barely have the spare time now to do anything so I am not sure whether I will get involved with self-administering a scheme or just let it sit in a low risk set of funds. Where do you do your current trading? I think www.iii.co.uk seems to be a big favourite over here in limey land.

[HalfSugar]

The other thing I am thinking about actually is just overpaying my mortgage. I've basically just freed up quite a lot of money per month having completed my student loan (8 years after graduating) so I have spare cash that I can divert.

I have not yet run the numbers but I figure that the interest saved by overpaying my mortgage (which I can do up to 10% pcm without charge) is quite likely to out-perform any long term share trading efforts unless I run really good for a really long time. Since the high street interest rate here is 0.5% base having any sort of savings is a total joke right now so paying off my property sooner and perhaps trying to add a second rental property might work better. Saying that, the hassle factor of being a landlord massively puts me off.

[snoogins47]

Aye... Much like poker the 'vig' is much harder to overcome when the stakes are lower. Of course, investing scales higher much better than poker. That's one thing I've found fascinating about Forex trading: with a lot of brokers the 'vig' is merely a spread between the bid/ask prices, with no actual transaction fees. The average spread, vs the average price movement over the course of a day, week, hour, whatever you're shooting for, can change significantly and is an important thing to keep track of. With stocks, throwing $500 into an account and trying to trade, giving up $8 a transaction is just death... seems the only way to make that make any sense is to play the buy/hold game.

And yeah, it seems to me there's a huge learning curve... sorta the opposite of my earlier gripe on poker. Poker doesn't scale upwards anywhere near as easily, but it scales down greatly: a beginner with a bit of training and discipline can make a tidy profit at lower stakes. In trading, it's a very similar game whether your account has 3 zeroes or 7. Most of the people I've talked to that are even profitable part-time traders seem to have said it took them at a minimum about 2 years of trading, practicing, studying, learning, etc. before they could be profitable.

I do all my (note, again, fake money for now lol) trading at Oanda, just because it was one of the first reputable ones that popped up and got good reviews. It's strictly forex over there but the software is pretty sweet.

I hear you on the savings/mortgage thing. I've always wanted to make my first actual property purchase a duplex type thing, and the idea seems very attractive but the headaches are astounding and I probably just don't have it in me ;P But you might well be right that overpaying the mortgage is the way to go. I guess for me it's like, I'm very interested in trading for its own sake, the challenge, etc... not yet for a long term investment strategy, since I barely have enough spare income to bother with that idea

Another thing too... I'm just doing a practice account. I'm trying to take it very seriously, study, keep risk low, and try to turn a profit, but it's just all fake money. And good lord, even the stress of caring about THAT is off the charts. I'm check my trades/quotes constantly no matter where I am. I wake up in the middle of the night checking prices. It's 1am and I'm seriously considering setting an alarm for about 5:30am so I can be up for the Canadian Unemployment rate announcement and the US Non-Farm Payrolls announcement. It's hell! ;P

[golddog]

The other thing I am thinking about actually is just overpaying my mortgage. I've basically just freed up quite a lot of money per month having completed my student loan (8 years after graduating) so I have spare cash that I can divert.

I have not yet run the numbers but I figure that the interest saved by overpaying my mortgage (which I can do up to 10% pcm without charge) is quite likely to out-perform any long term share trading efforts unless I run really good for a really long time. Since the high street interest rate here is 0.5% base having any sort of savings is a total joke right now so paying off my property sooner and perhaps trying to add a second rental property might work better. Saying that, the hassle factor of being a landlord massively puts me off.

Correct, pre-paying the mortgage is effectively saving at whatever interest rate you're paying, diluted by the number of years until payoff.

The other nice thing (potentially, if you're planning to stay where you are) about it is the possibility of being debt-free much earlier in life.

Retire early, travel, whatever, but it sure will be nice when I'm 50 (or so) be completely debt-free. Or, like Sugar says, take on another mortgage as an investment. Maybe buy a second place in Vegas for the winter. Look me up.

To answer snoogins' original question, I've been an investor for many years, but not in the way you're thinking. Mostly just slowly accumulating pretty stable securities through DRIP programs and letting the dividends pile up over time. Don't trade much and look for margins, seems like a lot of work just to squeeze out an extra dollar here and there.

Not life-changing money, but I've been able to put away a nice little amount should there be an emergency. If not, the dividends should be a nice income stream in retirement.

[snoogins47]

Probably a very smart, sensible, sane way to go about things.

But this is a poker forum. I was looking for some young hotshot day-trading scalpers that are convinced they found a way to beat the system! That's so much more exciting! ;P Well, maybe some middle ground, too.

Really though, while it IS a difficult, stressful way to maybe squeeze out a few extra bucks, my brief little foray into learning about it is fascinating, and I'm somewhat surprised I haven't seen more and more about poker player types at least dabbling in it. It's definitely a different skillset, but a lot of the traits of being a successful poker player seem to carry over into being a successful trader, not the least of which is being a lucky a**hole. That's probably why I've had a solid return, and why I'm going to end up trading for real money shortly. I'm a lucky a**hole. Many here can vouch for that.

But seriously, risk management is risk management is risk management, and things like expectation, roi, risk of ruin, all that stuff is hugely important and carries over well... and trying to gauge things like market sentiment based on everything from commercial traders releases to news reports to random news articles and blog posts is really a trip, but interesting for those of us who are so proud of our ability to read people at the tables

[golddog]

...I was looking for some young hotshot day-trading scalpers that are convinced they found a way to beat the system! That's so much more exciting! ;P Well, maybe some middle ground, too....

Do what Charlie Sheen did in Wall Street. Just skip the getting caught part.

Oh, and do not, under any circumstances, watch the sequel.

[Dave B]

I manage $11 billion of fixed income securities and issue $70 billion of bank debt as a trader/portfolio manager.

Instead of paying down your mortgage, I would buy high yielding investment. One that some of us like is Annaly Mortgage that pays a dividend of 14%. Energy stocks are stabile and typically pay dividends of over 5% for some more safety.

In the US, mortgages are low interest, tax advantageous and have costs to originate. If you can invest at a higher return and build a sinking fund, you have much more flexibility by owning assets to offset the mortgage, then prepay it whenever you feel like it....or let the assets continue to grow.


You really cant go wrong either way.


If you want a fun way to gamble safely and get some higher returns.....buy an energy stock, like Duke Energy @ $20 with a 5% dividend, then write a deep in the money call option like Jan 2014 $10 strike @ $10. You now own the stock @ $10/share and will earn 10% until the other party exercises their call.

[jimmer]

Any traders out there? From hedge fund managers, to play-money scalpers, anybody there?

I've actually been playing around with this for 12months or so. I too opened an Oanda account too and put $200 in it. As i'm from the UK (and Oanda is Canadian) my money is not protected by any institute or federation, but I can afford to lose this money and as I can trade as little as $0.01, it suits my requirements (as a micro stakes forex trader!)

The plan was to play around with this money for a few years and if things look positive - think about investing a larger amount.

Since my wife died 23 weeks ago, I haven't had time to scratch my own ass alone spend time playing poker. However i starting to realise Forex trading fits in with my lifestyle as I can still get my gambling fix, but don't need to sit for hours in front of a computer (or in a card room).

From Sunday evenings to Friday evenings I can trade any time of the day or night and even if i've only got 10 minutes spare while waiting for a train i can still do some research which i can then continue with at a later point.

I keep most of my trades between 2 days and 3 weeks, and I have instant messaging straight to my iphone with stop loss and target points etc so if prices move too quickly i can close them.

I can see soooooo much potential in forex trading and am actually thinking whether i should be thinking about looking at this more seriously.

Btw. Unsure if you are aware of babypips.com ? I got most of my knowledge from there. I then go onto youtube to look for the lastest vlogs etc. (I never do their tips, but often use their theories to produce my own trading stratagies).

Unsure what your trading plans are snoogins47, but it sounds like we are at about the same stage in our forex learning, so if you fancy discussing this in more detail, sharing ideas and coming up with a few trading oportuinites then let me know.

[BeerWench13]

BUMP

I've been working with stocks since the bottom dropped out in October of '08, mostly buying since the cost was so low. I've also taken a few that bottomed out for one reason or another and sold them when they hit the profit margin I had set. Nothing substantial really. I bought a pork company's stock during the swine flu epidemic and sold it 4 months later at a 300% ROI. Not all have been that profitable. I'm sitting on a stock that, when I bought it was a little software company that has now gone global. It's currently +228.94% from when I purchased it in 2010. the closing bell hasn't yet rung for today though.

I've made missteps too, so don't let me mislead you. Note to self: Stay away from foreign banks during a recession and don't believe all the "green" hype revolving around recycling companies.

Anyway, I've not done much else other than buy and sell with a set profit margin (unless it pays dividends, then I'll sit on them a little longer). The hubby's been dabbling in mutual funds, but I find them very unsexy. The next step is trading gold and currency.

[golddog]

...The next step is trading gold and currency.

For beer, I assume.