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I'd say he merits some sympathy, if not your donations. This was a company that was in the final stages of liquidation at an estimated value well below $2 so it's not like shorting it at $2 was based on a faulty premise. All their promising drugs had failed, and the last one remaining was only...

I couldn't see anything even if I created an account - they kept nagging me to give them my account info, which I'm not going to do. Any way to share what that page is showing?

the issue of zero return days when the portfolio is sometimes all in cash is not an easy one. They get counted fine towards the average return, but for strategies with a mean significantly different than zero, averaging these in can distort the other risk/volatility measures. If it were me...

Well, yes S~1 isn't great but it's a fair bit better than "long and hope" where stocks or bonds alone might have a sharpe of 0.3 over the long term. Still, if you're looking to raise real money, I'd aim for 2+ with enough track record they can believe it's representative (a couple years). The...

Kurtosis is the 4th moment of the distribution, where a normal distribution has K=3. Larger values mean the distribution has higher probabilities of extreme tail events (either very good or very bad); less than 3 means these are less likely (again compared to a normal distribution)...

Seems like you've got less than a year of history trading something pretty risky and/or with lots of leverage, and that you usually make a little money and sometimes have a big upside surprise at least so far in the sample. Sound about right?

Seems fine to me.

Many small cap equities and some midcap ones, among others, just depends on how IB has classified them on a case by case basis. For example, GAME is almost a $2B market cap stock (listed ADR, $7) and it's 100% maintenance to short. NICK is a $100M small cap stock (listed, $13). I could give...

I see that this is fixed in my account as of today, possibly it was sooner - long positions have a max of 100%. It is still the case that non-marginable short positions in an IB PM account require 110% of their normal margin amount. Until this policy changes, it may make sense to short...

These are good reasons not to be a bad trader. I wouldn't recommend being a bad trader to anyone!

Thank you for the quick reply and the good news!

Of course arguably if you've got a losing account, you should stay away from all brokerage accounts! Also, see my username :).

IB. Sorry I wasn't clear (edited post above). Their recent conservative policy towards PM accounts means everything has an initial margin of 110% of the maintenance margin, which can lead to silly results sometimes. In an extreme case of only buying nonmarginable small cap stocks, you would...

I noticed when I was buying a smaller, non-marginable stock that IB's PM requirements can exceed 100%. If you try to buy $10k worth of non-marginable stock, it will take $11k worth of initial margin since this recent change a few weeks ago took effect. If you have a PM account and also hold...

You might ask some of the big retail firms like Fidelity or Schwab if they're able to buy/hold the assets you want. They don't have good costs for trading or FX conversion, but they won't charge you ongoing fees for just holding assets either. If the account is big enough ($100k), I think...

Get elected to Congress, still plenty of loopholes in their token STOCK act.

Keep telling everyone that so they don't go looking :). Although I will say looking hard enough can turn into a full time job, which does defeat at least part of the point of the free lunch.

Weird list. They only picked big US stocks I guess. Valeant (VRX) is off 40% for the month, more than any of theirs, and it was about $60B before. Exact Science (EXAS) is smaller, $1-2B before, and is off more than 50%. I think I found a couple dozen 50% losers when I checked a screener, but...

Kinda like the old Yahoo boards. Every once in a while you run into someone who actually knows something, but the signal-to-noise is pretty bad.

10% alpha on their insider trades makes you wonder why people bother to run hedge funds and instead just try to elected to public office and fleece the public. http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2012/01/30/congressional-stock-pickers-as-good-as-warren-buff.aspx The STOCK act tried to make...