Quote from ASusilovic:
Provocative thesis :
Are "investors" outperforming "traders" ?...
Taken as a serious question.
All I can go by is the hundreds of traders that I've known, from various exchanges, institutions, other firms, and of course Bright Trading.
IMO, there can be and should be a crossover for professional, serious traders. For example, many in our family make money trading, of course...and we "could" invest in virtually any fund or product available. What do we do? The same thing we advise our traders do, become our own "portfolio managers."
Our immediate family has one great advantage as well... my brother. We put the major part of our "investment" capital into our Family LLC, and we use the Goldman Sachs RegT leverage of 6.67 to one to trade/invest (similar meanings in this context) in various strategies. My brother does most of the trading (I'm the first to admit that he's a better trader than I), and keeps it on the (relative) conservative scale...but we have taken a few (well thought out) "shots" over the years (Selling 10,000 GM puts might be put into that categor, but paid off extremely well). We do a lot of Pairs trading, and if you think about the numbers. If we try to get 6% per year on XXX, we can actually get 36% with the Goldman leverage, which we have done, not every year of course (that would be nice), but we do pretty well (again, thanks primarily to my brother).
By being able to monitor the trades/investments on a day by day basis, and being able to adjust/modify/pull out of, etc. at a very low cost, we are able to effectively be our own hedge fund managers.
We rarely "invest" in outside ventures...thinking that little else will give us the rate of return we are getting on the longer term money.
I know that many of our traders do things in a similar manner.
FWIW,
Don