The new middle-class gambling addicts: how day trading is ruining lives

[lwlee]

Your link did not work because it was not the archive.fo link. It was the original link and behind a firewall.

What?? My original link worked fine.

Reread my original post. I gave the original link and said if you wanted to get past the paywall, there are ways to do it but you have to google for it. I wasn't going to help due to the illegality issue.

 

[zdreg]

Unlike you another reader was willing to step up and to deliver the article,. ET is full of copy and paste articles but fear rules you. So be it.

 

[Rams Fan]

Need to turn the negative into a positive.

 

[HeSaidSheSaid]

I read an article sometime ago. it said day trading lowers sperm count (due to high stress hormone).
it depends on one's personality. day trading is not for everyone (just like everything else in life or else you'd see a lot of doctors, PHd's, CEO's,...

 

[Occam]

The issue is not just the gambling mindset of the daytraders but also the very instrument that they trade. CFD's are not regulated nor are they traded on central exchanges. They are traded OTC basically with the broker on the other side so it is also very prone to market manipulations and unfair dealings as the traders are trading directly against the brokers on the other side and can only win at the expense of the brokers. In essence, the traders were almost set up to lose. This is actually the bigger reason if not the biggest reason for the losses of the traders that the article should have focused on exposing instead of blaming on the gaming mindset of the traders, imo.

Trading itself is hard but if one is working with regulated financial products that are traded on central exchanges, at least one would have some possibility to win but with those CFD's, the chance is virtually zero. This is not trading or investing; this is almost fraud.

All excellent points, thanks! More generally, any case in which the client trades only against their broker inherently (and severely) disadvantages the client; this is true of "bucket shop" forex as well. To a lesser (but much more widespread) degree, this also holds true of any "free" retail broker that sells order flow to Citadel and Virtu; Citadel and Virtu are far more important "relationships" that the broker will bend over backwards to maintain -- just consider how much broker revenue comes from those "wholesalers" now.

 

[TheDawn]

All excellent points, thanks! More generally, any case in which the client trades only against their broker inherently (and severely) disadvantages the client; this is true of "bucket shop" forex as well. To a lesser (but much more widespread) degree, this also holds true of any "free" retail broker that sells order flow to Citadel and Virtu; Citadel and Virtu are far more important "relationships" that the broker will bend over backwards to maintain -- just consider how much broker revenue comes from those "wholesalers" now.

Forex is a CFD really although there is a specific instrument called Forex CFD which is really a CFD on a CFD. If you have ever traded with Australian forex brokers which are required to provide a disclosure document under the ASIC regulation and if you ever read the disclosure document, it clearly states that the retail forex products that you are trading with the broker is a CFD and the broker is the counterparty. Your order may be passed on to a liquidity provider to be filled directly by a liquidity provider and not the broker just like there is still a chance that your stock/option orders may be filled on a central exchange and not by a dealer who's paid for the orderflow but the potential conflict of interest is still there.

I just with the payment-for-orderflow is explained better for traders so people can see the potential conflict of interest in this arrangement, and you are right, the same as in CFD's.

 

[Yannis]

I like daytrading and do not find it stressful: focus on just a few stocks I know well (eg, AAPL, SPXL, QQQ) and play their first moves of the day off their 1- and 2-min charts. I'm usually done by 9:45 ET, either hitting my daytrading profit goal (most of the time) or my daily stop loss (occasionally.) Then I focus on my swing trades. But it took me years to really learn how to do this smoothly so that it works for me - everybody's different.

 

[FreeGoldRush]

For some it's gambling. For others it is a way to profit from their focus and study. For me it's a massive dataset, extremely cool engineering and software development that ultimately pays the bills. Only the gamblers get the attention. Anyone working hard and making money at this comes across about as abstract and boring as a highway traffic engineers. A profitable trader can ramble on all they want about how to trade and practically no one will pay serious attention. That's because it's WORK. Many people can trade for a living but it's not, "let me show you how I made $10 million trading 90 minutes each morning".

 

[CamillaGregory]

Another perfect example of all that you read on the internet is not true. We might not have all the information but we still have brains that can differentiate possibilities and scams.