Quote from stock_trad3r:
So what do you do? Go to login to your online broker and buy 70K of the DDM, or DIA and EWZ and hold em while the market is selling. When the dow goes to 14,000 again you'll have made a lot of money.
Simple huh?
No. And this is the part you don't get. I'm going to try once more and after that, if you still don't see where we're coming from, I'll put you back on ignore and you can go through life all the dumber.
Buying and holding does work. But not always. Even when it does, it is not the method of the
trader. The trader looks to make money on opportunity. And buying and holding simply locks up a trader's assets (money, margin, etc) until the move goes into the green again.
I used to argue this with Skalpz/Coinz on the currency forum before his dumb ass got banned. He would buy EUR/USD when it was tanking and tell everyone "I'll be good - it's going to come back eventually." He held his EUR/USD shorts at 1.21 when the Euro went to 1.36 in December of 2004. Did it come back? Sure did. And he cashed out without a loss. Then he bragged about it to everyone.
Then I reminded him that if he had just took a small loss with a stop loss around 1.22, he could have rode that up move and made money the whole time following the trend.
You're the same way. You think that holding at 14,000 is ok because it'll eventually come back. What traders here
know is that they can make money on the downmove by following the trend, and then if the trend changes course, follow it back up and make money that way too. You don't see that. You miss the whole opportunity cost of holding an open position in the red until it comes back.
That is your problem.