Why aren't there more Billionaire traders?

mr19 is does trade 5m/day but much of the volume is on the open/close. I've begun avoiding the first and last hour, especially the first since I've found this is when almost all of the reversals happen. 80% of the prints are 100 shares. When placing 1000 limit orders you're inviting people to box you out by a penny price is right style. Market orders for that size are also a bad idea since you can lose up to .5% that way.

It's an especially big problem for me as I've found the best opportunities to be in the small caps which often lag the directional move of the broader market but then overshoot when they finally move. Also it's a nightmare scenario trying to exit your trade for a loss using limit orders when the market is moving against you and not being able to because of the speed of the move.

One solution is to change to a brokerage that opens zero commision trading and place 10 orders for 100 shares ea instead of 1 for 1000 but I have a deal with Etrade where my current margin interest rate is only 2%.

Seems to me other large traders must be breaking up their orders into 100 share lots as large limit orders are very rare.
 
Obviously none of you have heard of Jack Hershey and pool extraction.

Edit: Sorry I thought you were talking about trillionaires, not billionaires.
 
Gnome, the reason most poker players are broke is because they're gamblers at heart. They probably learned how to play poker as a necessity to avoid going broke. They might make 8 figures at the tables and then blow the money pro athlete style. This is especially true of the people you see on t.v. who genuinely love to gamble. Me, I'd never liked to gamble I only like the challenge of making money.
 
Quote from AndrewL:

Gnome, the reason most poker players are broke is because they're gamblers at heart. They probably learned how to play poker as a necessity to avoid going broke. They might make 8 figures at the tables and then blow the money pro athlete style. This is especially true of the people you see on t.v. who genuinely love to gamble. Me, I'd never liked to gamble I only like the challenge of making money.
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Did you only play high-stakes poker online or have you played high-stakes CASH games in person?

Why do you want to move to trading now when you can simply keep cranking out hefty profits playing poker?
 
Quote from AndrewL:


One solution is to change to a brokerage that opens zero commision trading and place 10 orders for 100 shares ea instead of 1 for 1000 but I have a deal with Etrade where my current margin interest rate is only 2%.

Seems to me other large traders must be breaking up their orders into 100 share lots as large limit orders are very rare.
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I guess that is my scenario. FSLR is one of the names I frequently trade but my system is automated and breaks up orders into 100 lots (or more if it is behind pace). Even if it has a large order to place it will only show a small amount and keep the rest in reserve.
 
I would think that you could switch to for example es futures where you could easily scale up in size if you have a profitable strategy.

Also, some traders do have longer term strategies besides day trading. For example, lets say you are bullish on a stock during a bear market.

You could go long that stock while being short an index. So if the market is tanking and you are having problem exiting your trade, you are hedging your risk with the longer term short position.

Finally, if you become profitable trading and build up a few $ millions, you could start a small hedge fund with your money and some friends and family accounts. Once your hedge fund has a proven long term track record, you will end up managing more people's money and in the end make some $ billions by trading.

My goal is just to make a certain amount of money short term trading while having other cash flow from non-trading related ventures.
 
Killthesunshine, I've play cash games also but online was much, much more profitable. I was making daily online what I would make weekly in L.A. or Vegas. In OCt 2006 Congress basically shut down online poker, especially high stakes games by making it difficult to deposit money.

In the worst case scenario I could always go back to poker but now I have enough capital where investing is more profitable. There is only one game in world where I could utilize my capital playing poker, the "big game" in Vegas. It's full of top pros and I'd probably lose money. The stakes are about 20 times higher than the next biggest game which is the level I used to play at. The higher the stakes the lower the player advantage. At "mid stakes" games I used to have a 5% advantage. As in I'd earn $5 for every $100 bet. I increased the stakes about 500% over the years and my advantage dropped to about 2%, doubling my income. The sweet spot these days would be around the limits I was playing when I first started. I'd be bored to death though.

Trading is superior to poker in that you can bet any amount you want instead of only what the other players have. Similary you can "play more hands" since you don't have to wait for the dealer to deal or the players to act. Perhaps best of all you have a lot more freedom in that you can work when you feel like it. I once had to play 20 hours straight because the worst player I'd ever seen was throwing his money away. Off peak hours in poker aren't nearly as profitable which forces you to play every day from 8 pm to midnight at a minimum. The market has it's periods of increased volitality but I don't think that directly leads to better results like in poker when a "fish" shows up. In the market you should be able to make winning trades whenever you feel like it.
 
It isn't easy I read several books and played 40 hours a week for 6 months before I could beat the high stakes games. The best book was Hold em Poker for Advanced Players by David Sklansky.

As a general rule play tight aggresive. The best players typically win the least pots but win the biggest ones. Personally, when I started playing no limit I went with an ultra agressive strategy where I would pot bet out the flop turn and river whether I made a hand or not. Since I played very few hands people rarely had the guts to call that $5000 river bet with an overpair! Half the time they did I've have them beat anyway.
 
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