Читать книгу The Guts and Glory of Day Trading - Mark Ingebretsen - Страница 24

Which doesn’t mean the costs of that year haven’t left their mark. Some months later, Lo left Canaccord and resolved to trade on her own. The idea for her Web site, The Intelligent Speculator, came about after she had sat in on several other online chat rooms. But for a variety of reasons she wound up not liking them. The Intelligent Speculator would be intended as a hangout for experienced traders like herself who were adept at reading trend lines and candlestick charts.

Indeed, after all the wildness and chaos that occurred in 1996, Teresa Lo now strictly limits herself to day trading. The S&P e-minis (or futures contracts) she now trades exclusively are similar to options in that they provide considerable leverage. Because S&P e-minis track an index, they tend to move continually in price. In fact, their short-term volatility is far greater than popular exchange-traded funds such as “Cubes” (QQQ), which track the NASDAQ 100. Because of this, Lo and her fellow traders at The Intelligent Speculator are able to exploit the contracts’ volatility at numerous times during the day. Lo herself makes about three round-trip trades daily.

E-minis trade over a direct matching network called Globex2. This system, similar to electronic communications networks for stocks such as Island.com, provides enough liquidity for her to readily exit positions the instant the charts show that the market is moving against her.

Meanwhile, the bulk of her wealth is safely ensconced in T-bills. “People think day trading is glamorous and exciting. But it’s really the last stop before you quit trading altogether. Usually you’re so risk adverse that you only hold positions over 10 minutes or so. Once you’ve been in battle for so long and you’ve seen so many terrible things happen, you really don’t want it to happen to you again.”

Trading S&P e-minis online while she instructs both beginning and advanced traders, Lo has her methodology down to a science. “I use a 20-period exponential moving average (EMA) on the 15-minute chart,” she says. “A lot of people use the 20-period EMA. So I just watch the bars because I know what they’re going to do.

“I’m certainly a much better technical trader now than I’ve ever been. So I don’t have to take big risks. There’s only so much the human psyche can take,” she says. “It’s all relative. It’s not whether you made millions or billions; it’s how much money you started with and how many times you’ve multiplied that money. To someone like George Soros, a million-dollar bet is not that much. But to me $20,000 was all the money I had. By trading conservatively I don’t have the same rewards. You never see those six-figure paydays. But you get paid every day. It’ll just have to do because I can’t take those risks again.”