A message to some day traders.

It is imperative that you understand this point..

If a strategy carries the risk of ruin... for example, investing in the Inverse VIX ETF; chart below, whilst not carry a put option with it(as insurance)...he is carrying the risk of ruin.

vix-chart.png


If this individual trades whilst exposed to this risk of ruin, then he is lucky that he has not been ruined. Therefore, all the profits he has gained, can be solely attributed to luck.

Look at the chart, people who bought a position and held, without insurance, ended up being wiped out due to the 85-95% drop. The gains they experienced were a result of luck. They set themselves up to fail over the long term, and quickly collect as much profit they can in the short term. They were collecting nickels in front of a steamroller, and were lucky they weren't hit. Unlike the individual who was suspicious of his knowledge, and bought a put option. He was lucky enough to be fine. Skilled enough with reality to know that he doesn't know.

Get it?
Look at where it closed and where it re-opened the next day. But for the fact some got burned in after hours period (happens all the time) "Black Swan" was really a White Ghost. Nothing to see here move along.

Naturally you won't ... get it.
 
...yet this thread has gone 70-some pages. I haven't seen such a thing in at least a year -- maybe longer.

The anti-day trading threads pop up every so often. The last one I recall was the “is trading itself a bad trade?” Which reached a similar number of pages in a short time. I remember that OP contributed over 100 wordy posts in 10 days, which I thought was pretty intense, but this OP has him beat with 300+ posts in 5 or 6 days.

To me, there were some reasonable points shared on both sides of the thread debate, but too much vitriol to dig through.
 
You and others continue Ad Hominem. “Get outta Nassim’s Arse” “Nassim this, Nassim that”. In an attempt discredit or disqualify the man so you feel better about avoiding the truth.


Yes, Taleb’s work on ‘Black Swans’ is seminal and important.

But your mandate that financial markets are purely random activities punctuated by Black Swan events is superficial and simplistic.

But you and Taleb appear to have common personality traits.
 
But your mandate that financial markets are purely random activities punctuated by Black Swan events is superficial and simplistic.

I never said the “activities” are random. Randomness is incomplete information. Now I know you have no idea what it is I’m even talking about.
 
Market movement by its very definition is market “activity”.

Yea, I understand that. But for us to look into a chart and extrapolate future movements/events/activity is arrogance at its finest. It contains incomplete information. It’s random in this sense.

The turkey and the butcher. Butcher is higher dimension and more knowledgable than the turkey.

Turkey, looking back at its path, would never suspect that tomorrow will be thanksgiving day, he is unaware. He has no reason to believe that tomorrow will be any different than the past.

saupload_111918-imo-chart-1-with-source.jpg



The butcher knows well ahead of time when he will kill the turkey.

The turkey looking back at its chart, has no idea that his life will “spontaneously“ end tomorrow. No data in his life will have predicted the exact date/time of his demise.

See what I’m saying? It was random to the turkey, not to the butcher.
 
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