Читать книгу The Guts and Glory of Day Trading - Mark Ingebretsen - Страница 6

Can day trading make you a millionaire? No way, says a June 12, 2000, article in Forbes magazine. The article cites a study by the former North American Securities Dealers Association (NASD, the administrative and regulatory arm behind the NASDAQ stock exchange), which found that 77 percent of day traders in fact lose money. (In 2007, the NASD merged with the New York Stock Exchange's regulatory body and changed its name to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA.) The average profit over the course of eight months was a paltry $22,000, the study revealed, or a little more than you’d earn if you were an especially annoying telemarketer. In all, the NASD survey scrutinized the accounts of 124 day traders. It found only two cases in which traders earned $100,000 or more. That’s less than a mediocre stockbroker makes on commissions, the Forbes article noted. The implied message, seemingly: It‘s better to steer clients into bum trades than to make those bum trades using your own money.

Pay a visit to the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) Web site and you find more dire warnings about day trading. “Be prepared to suffer severe financial losses”, a headline on the site warns. Beneath the headline, the text reads, “Day traders typically suffer severe financial losses in their first months of trading, and many never graduate to profit-making status.” Moreover, the SEC notes that “day trading is an extremely stressful and expensive full-time job.”

A TV commercial for Barclays Bank that’s aired frequently on CNBC reinforces the idea that day traders are in deep denial when they think they can make a living by trading their own accounts. The ad depicts an unwashed, unshaven, and slightly unhinged trader at work in his pajamas. We watch as he racks up profits of $16 or $64, even while his life savings stand in danger of evaporating at any moment.