Bright Trade
- Thread starter trader29
- Start date
Snake oil originally came from China, where it was used as a remedy for inflammation and pain in rheumatoid arthritis, bursitis, and other similar conditions.
Chinese labourers on railroad gangs involved in building the Transcontinental Railroad to link North America coast to coast gave it to Europeans with joint pain. When rubbed on the skin above the pain, snake oil brought relief, or so it was claimed. This claim was ridiculed by other rival medicine salesmen, especially those selling patent medicines.
In time, snake oil became a generic name for the many medicines that were marketed as a panacea or miraculous remedy, whose ingredients were usually secret, unidentified, or mis-characterized, and mostly inert or ineffective. At best the placebo effect might provide some relief for whatever the problem might have been.
The snake oil peddler became a stereotype in Western movies: a travelling "doctor" with dubious credentials, selling some medicine â such as snake oil â with boisterous marketing hype, often supported by pseudo-scientific evidence. To enhance sales, an accomplice in the crowd would often 'attest' the value of the product in an effort to provoke buying enthusiasm. The "doctor" would prudently leave town before his customers realized that they had been cheated. This practice is also called "grifting" and its practitioners "grifters".
Always be cautious. When you get sucked in by the pitches made by the grifters at the Bright travelling road show, what you may really get is a big expensive bottle of snake oil.
still waitin' for doniz to come here and defend his strategies, provin' they are worthwile....it is obvious pairtradin' seems designed to squeeze the most out of commissions, many more profitable approaches out there that don't require accumulatin'/liquidatin' multiple stocks in matter of days...yeah, doniz call it adjustments, R0R.
There are alot of other funds and black boxes that crank out the same pairs as Don's teams. As these participants scale in and out of their pairs, the stocks begin to move in unpredictable ways which diminishes the effectiveness of the paired trade. That's why funds are now bringing their pair strategies to the European Exchanges where there are still far fewer pair traders.
I agree....that's why we changed our basic training to 3 days, and the "boot camps" are 4 weeks...which seems to speed the learning curve up by several months. I realize that it's not easy for many to understand just how difficult it is to bring new people up to speed in such a short time. The "vocal minority" may have doubts about the effectiveness of these programs, but all I can do is go by our numbers....and the training has helped our retention considerably (how better to judge viability?).
Since I don't know of any other firms who offer any type of training at all (any longer, anyway)...I have not been able to suggest alternatives to new traders.
The idea of sitting next to a successful trader makes sense, and we offer that in our boot camps, of course. But, for the most part, good traders don't want someone sitting next to them (I try to make it worth their while).
And, yes, there is no "brain surgery" in a weekend...we do our best to stay ahead of the game...
Don
It all depends on the compensation incentive for the good traders. If compensation is primarily derived from commission overrides (hence the high rates to newbies), then a head trader has no incentive to groom a new trader to become profitable. To him, a new trader is just a body for churning trades.
If compensation mostly comes from a cut of trading profits, then the head trader has a vested interest in making the new traders profitable. There should be no training fees or desk fees, since it is in the firm's interest to have profitable traders. This is the ideal way to build a proprietary trading shop. There should be one commission rate for the group as a whole and focus should be on generating trading profits, NOT commission profits.
Unfortunately, today's trading climate has made daytrading profits very slim compared to commission profits. Hence the emphasis on high rates and high turnover.