Читать книгу The Guts and Glory of Day Trading - Mark Ingebretsen - Страница 16

And she should know. Because the methodical, conservative – she’ll even call it boring – style of day trading Lo uses today is eons removed from the mind-numbing gambles she took when she was in her late twenties and early thirties. That was when she traded heavily in markets as diverse and esoteric as Canadian penny gold mining stocks and Nikkei Index options. Then, as now, Lo’s trading style was built on the theory that markets often behave irrationally. They skyrocket up, and then they crash and burn. And if you jump in at the right time – as Lo has succeeded in doing – you can make a million or more in just months. The trick, of course, is knowing when to get out.

Lo witnessed these kinds of manic market gyrations for nearly 20 years, when she was growing up in Vancouver, British Columbia, a city famous for its penny gold stock exchange. During that time, the world economy also was in one of its more unruly periods. In the ’70s and ’80s, high interest rates, speculative frenzies, and shortages of basic items like gasoline and sugar created regular boom and bust cycles.

“Ever since I was a kid,” Lo says, “I remember these weird things about people. I’d stand there and watch moms wait in line for sugar and gas. During the real estate boom, you’d make somebody an offer on a house, and then the piece of paper with the offer written on it would trade hands four or five times.”

Gold, too, was routinely traded as a speculative commodity. Lo remembers seeing people lined up before the banks opened in order to buy gold. Her own father was at times an avid gold trader. “Every day when the quote came through, everybody had to be quiet,” Lo recalls.

Indeed, her father, a career military officer, lost money when the markets for both gold and real estate crashed. The memories of those wild market gyrations stayed with her. “I found it so curious that everyone was so preoccupied with buying gold, real estate, whatever,“ she says. “Now, when we look back, we can see that all of those things were parabolic bubbles, where the prices just moved in a trajectory that was completely unsustainable.”

To find more examples of parabolic bubbles, you need only follow the many penny gold stocks that trade on the Vancouver Stock Exchange. “With penny gold stocks,“ Lo explains, “when there’s a new gold discovery the price will rise from 20 cents to $3 per share. That’s a lot of money. But if you look at a chart and how it moves in terms of the trajectory, it’s no different than what happened to Iomega or Qualcomm more recently.”