Читать книгу The Guts and Glory of Day Trading - Mark Ingebretsen - Страница 13

To be sure, during that period many of the other 12 suddenly found their accounts diminished by hundreds of thousands of dollars. (Others quickly adapted and have since seen their accounts grow to new heights.) To put those heavy losses into perspective, it’s worth reflecting again on who these traders are. Whether extraordinary in their abilities or not, they are the kind of regular people you might run into at the supermarket or dry cleaners. Yet by they own volition they have entered a world where each day, when they turn on the computer, they put their entire net worth on the line. Moreover, each day their potential gains and losses sometimes far exceeded what most Americans might earn in a year’s time. In the course of buying and selling each day, they moved millions through the markets.

Yes, it’s true: Had the bull market not come about, many might not have taken to trading at all. But because these 12 traders and thousands like them have taken to trading, they’ve managed to change the equity markets forever. By some estimates, active trades account for half of all trades made each day. Moving money from stock to stock, wagering their skills in daily battles against the very best of Wall Street, that tremendous sea of capital put in play by day traders has challenged the market’s most powerful players – namely the market makers, the institutions, the hedge funds, and the brokerage houses.

What’s not commonly known outside of Wall Street circles is that all of the traditional power players – the hedge funds, the institutions and so on – themselves employ traders who buy and sell on behalf of their firms. And those traders employ many of the same basic tactics used by the 12 traders you’ll read about in this book. Over the decades, those tactics have yielded billions of dollars for their firms. Why then should it seem so incredible that individual traders using essentially the same tools can achieve the same results?

In the coming chapters you’ll learn much about this new kind of investor and how they adapt their strategies to face markets that appear to grow ever more turbulent. Precisely how they’ve come to feel at home in the brave new world they’ve helped create is perhaps the most valuable lesson of all that they can teach us.