Читать книгу The Guts and Glory of Day Trading - Mark Ingebretsen - Страница 9

Trading for a living seems elegantly simple by comparison. Moreover, it’s the sort of career or second career that you can begin immediately. First, learn all you can about investing. Read books. Tune into Web sites like Finance Yahoo, TheStreet.com, Quicken.com, and CBS MarketWatch. Listen to CNBC in the morning while you take a shower. Set up a personal computer with a fast Internet connection. And finally, open an online account with $50,000. And you’re set to go. As one successful trader (not profiled in this book) told me, “This is the one thing that I can do where I feel like I have control over everything. I don’t have any employees. I don’t have to worry about suppliers.” Seated at his computer, he, like other traders regularly matches wits with Wall Street’s best and brightest. And quite often he wins.

To be sure, becoming a successful trader can take months or even years. And some people simply aren’t cut out for the job. For those entirely new to the subject, the appendix contains a primer on trading. But for now let’s focus on that $50K in start-up capital, the minimum amount most trading coaches say you need to get started. It’s the Information Age equivalent of a stake in a poker game.

But in today’s economy, it’s not really that much money. Fifty thousand dollars wouldn’t buy you very much of a business, for example. And without a separate source of income, such as a spouse’s salary, you’d be hard pressed to pay your business expenses and your living expenses in the early months.

Therein lies the allure of day trading: It’s an opportunity to turn a modest sum into a fortune, and in a short time. “If you’re good at it,” notes Brendan DeLamielleure, “there’s not a higher margin business in the world.” Call day trading the new American Dream. Its allure is especially strong for those who’ve served time in unfulfilling jobs, those who’ve been downsized, underemployed, or otherwise left out of the ‘90s economic boom. When you launch your trading career, there’s no need to worry about finding investors, as would be the case with a brick-and-mortar business. No need to worry about customers beating a path to your door. There are stories of really daring traders – and also fool-hardy. I’d hasten to add – who have amassed their $50K stake by maxing out their credit cards. As long as the potential exists for people to make so much money by putting together a comparatively small stake, day traders will remain with us. Sure lots will flame out and go back to crummy day jobs, just as most people who start small businesses fail and most aspiring actresses fail and most novelists. But a long line of newcomers will always be there, ready to take their places.

That is as long as the potential exists to make money in the markets. To make money, all traders really need is volatility. Needless to say, over the last several years the markets have been notably obliging in that regard.