The next Jesse Livermore, Dimitri Balyasny and Dan Zanger: Atilla Demiray

Quote from Compulsive:

Livermore....so u idolize this man. Went bankrupt 4 times, divorce 3 time and when he "dies" he died broke...but I guess it doesn't matter, after all one can't take his material riches with h"him"

About trading there sure is a lot to learn from Livermore. Are you blind to the fact that Reminiscences is the most-often quoted book of what really captures trading? By the greatest traders of all time? The lessons to be learned are both about making and losing money.

In fact, if you've read Reminiscences and "don't get it" I'd say the joke is on you - unless you're a quant.
 
Welp, it looks like he was wrong.

Sure you we can see how the rest of the move plays out but the fact is pretty much opened up flat IRC.

That's part of the problem with predicting market moves. You will be wrong. I understand he likes the setup to the short side and his bias is leading him there. But where there is boldness in the market call, I imagine there will be stubborness if/when he is wrong.

My take on it it is that he is a permabear that will die by a thousand knifecuts if there is no downmove.
 
He said we'd gap down on Monday and we didn't. In fact he said we'd gap down huge. We were gapped up. He was wrong.

If you look at that chart you posted of his, this trade has not gone according to his expectations as we had a massive move up today. He was wrong on that. In fact we are now closed above his trendlines on that chart. He was wrong. Yet on his blog he still has the trade on. He has made a ton of reasons to be in the trade.

A gold bug can give you a ton of reasons to be long gold. History has shown that for ROI gold is a very poor vehicle to be invested in. What I mean by this is his vision may be clogged.

Where is his stop? 950 on the ES? 1000? Sure chances are high for a down move tomorrow after a 400 point rally, but that doesn't by any stretch of imagination mean that his call was right. Not even close.
 
Quote from Compulsive:

Livermore....so u idolize this man. Went bankrupt 4 times, divorce 3 time and when he "dies" he died broke...but I guess it doesn't matter, after all one can't take his material riches with h"him"


He was only a failure because he did not have the discipline to walk away at the top.
 
Quote from Term:

Welp, it looks like he was wrong.

Sure you we can see how the rest of the move plays out but the fact is pretty much opened up flat IRC.

That's part of the problem with predicting market moves. You will be wrong. I understand he likes the setup to the short side and his bias is leading him there. But where there is boldness in the market call, I imagine there will be stubborness if/when he is wrong.

My take on it it is that he is a permabear that will die by a thousand knifecuts if there is no downmove.

It seems like his previous good calls on the bear side made him overconfident and he just got caught heavily short right at the bottom of the market (ES 666) waiting for the "apocaliptycal terminal move". And you guess what, he is blaming the massive beating he is taking on the PPT and adding more short positions on the way up.

This kind of behavior perfectly fits what Term described.
 
Quote from aradiel:

It seems like his previous good calls on the bear side made him overconfident and he just got caught heavily short right at the bottom of the market (ES 666) waiting for the "apocaliptycal terminal move". And you guess what, he is blaming the massive beating he is taking on the PPT and adding more short positions on the way up.

This kind of behavior perfectly fits what Term described.

Welp,

Here we are... several months later. I still follow his blog and I show the new traders around me: see, this is what you do not want to do.

I can't follow his performance, but I can follow Sol's. Sol, whom Atilla traded his account for on the down move in the fall, made $3.9M in closed profits. He is currently as of today sitting in 3.5M in losses roughly a 90% drawdown. How did he get here?

1. Lack of discipline
2. Lack of understanding of how the instruments he traded worked (I.E. the decay of FAZ, the fact that he has been worked over in almost all of his options trades).
3. Too big of an ego
4. Lack of diversification (if you're going to be running a 4M book, I would hope you'd be hedged in some function in case you were wrong).

I have never seen them say once, "I was wrong". If you're sitting through a 90% drawdown, you were wrong. Very wrong. He's currently trying to dig out of it with these SPY options plays. They may work out for him, but if they don't, he's going to be sitting at a 100% drawdown.

Regardless of how they perform in the future, I don't think anyone can ever say that these guys are "good traders".

Feel free to check my math as I may be off:
http://xpositions.blogspot.com/
ES - 650,000
NQ - 1,830,000
FAZ - 305,110
FAZ - 340,850
FAZ - 268,500
SPY Put - 112,000
SPY Put + 9,000
MSFT Put - 35,000

Total:
-3,532,460
 
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