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Is trading an addiction for you?

Actually, if you're addicted to trading, quitting is very difficult, which is a good thing if there is success at the end of the tunnel, but a bad thing if it's never-ending series of losses, repeated failures, and repetitions of variations of the same mistake, likely meaning blowing up many...

Right. CDS are institutional instruments, but even if hypothetically you can implement the trade and collect the premiums, you make money 99% of the time, but that 1% the time you're wrong you completely wipe out your net worth and then some. Think about AIG who sold cheap CDS on subprime...

I was watching the futures when nfp #s came out. Initially market sold off ~0.3% on the bad numbers, but then it went green as some thought bad employment figures meant more QE. It only stayed green for a few minutes, then gradually selling down again. By the market open, it was gap down ~ 0.5%...

John Arnold made billions and just retired. He no longer posts on elitetrader. :D

It's because many people are moving money out of stocks and into bonds. Very few people among the general population are interested in stocks anymore.

Time to share a timeless classic. I think we've all felt the same way before at least once, if not many times, sometimes over and over again. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIMwMsY0ndo

Yeah, esp. in the era of central planning. The down moves are so rare, but when they come it's fast and furious. Incredibly difficult to time the downmoves because each downmove is invariably met by stronger buying and you can go broke multiple times trying to short a rising market.

Refer to Lifetime Losing Trader post: http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=222419&highlight=lifetime+losing+trader

Clever chart. Perfectly describes the experiences of 90% of stock traders and probably 99% of futures, options, and leveraged currency traders. What the chart doesn't show is the severe emotional toll in between each of those steps. The years of frustration, disappointment, and mentally...

When volume falls to zero, stocks will trade at infinity.

Direct manipulation would be direct purchases of stocks or futures by the Fed or related entities. Indirect manipulation would be something like QE policies where bonds are bought from primary dealers and the primary dealers may (but not necessarily) use this money to buy stocks. Operation...

The way you say it, sounds so much like a coin toss trade.

What does everyone think? Is there direct manipulation in the stock market?

But plenty of centi-thousandaire traders on ET :) http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=241638

Funny you mentioned NG because I just looked at the quote a moment before I read your post. Down 8.5% today. Pretty fugly for some big hedge fund titans who own millions of shares. I remember reading a while back how John Arnold did well taking the opposite position of Amaranth's Brian...

Fat tails occur more often than suggested by normal distributions. This is why distant volatility is so friggin expensive now, especially in a market influenced by the Fed.

Not really. GMCR's 11/10/11 earnings miss caused stock to crater from 67 to 40, a 40% decline. Yesterday GMCR closed at 50. A 40% decline would have took stock to 30. The puts were trading at 4 cents a contract, so GMCR merely had to go to 29.96 to break even. It was not implausible to...

Whoever bought the GMCR 30 puts made a friggin 100 fold return!!!

IMO, personality, such as your susceptibility to stress, can make a huge impact. People who get stressed easily tend to make bad traders because the anxiety causes emotional decision making.