More Alluring than the Super Bowl

The above is a snapshot of a trading platform I used to use. Most of these programs fling far too much information at you and the learning curve is pretty steep as well. You have to play with it using fake money, in order to familiarize yourself before you get the balls to plunk down real bets.

I haven't bet on these ponies in a long while. The reason why is that my little computer, which happens to have a four core AMD (a latest and fairly powerful CPU), cannot in a zillion years outplay the mainframe computers built by Intell and sit in high rises in Manhattan. Who am I to think I can out gun Goldman Sachs?

I'll tell you what the major players do today. They have access to computers like this one below. This is not a Star Wars CGI creation, it's real.

 

These computers can out-think, out-trade and out-do anything my little desktop can do. Not only that, these major players hire MIT math geeks to write formulas that sniff around to exploit trends I’ll never see.

One little completely legal trick they do is they'll “front run” any trade they want. If I make a trade, in a millionth of a second, their computers will spot it and then jump ahead of my trade. In doing so, they'll force the bid up by one single penny, forcing me to pay that. Not much huh? Their computers do that a million times all day long. That's one legal trick they do. There are many other cunning plays that border on felonies and those are designed to manipulate the herd. JP Morgan was busted a few years back with stock manipulation software but, being as rich and connected as they are, they walked away from any prosecution.

****

I'm not a gambling person. I never was. I have never been to Mohegan Sun nor Foxwoods. I haven't the interest. I have made two bets in my life on the dogs at Lincoln park and lost twice when I was 18. But put me in front of a trading screen and I'm hooked.

I started this before the Dot.com boom back around 2000. I wasn't a day trader, I was more a month trader. I'd look around for companies that seemed stable, wait for a general drop in the entire market, then try to time a trade when it looked like the entire thing was turning around and try to get off on the top.

Did I succeed?

Sometimes massively so. Other times I got my head handed to me. On the whole, back then, I was winning more times than I was losing. Though it all stung me when the Dot.com boom blew up which coincided with the Bush/Gore court case on who was to be President.

There are soo many variable to take into account when placing a bet. At the time then I was paying far too much attention to the political side and ignored the overheated technology sector. I figured once this court case was solved, the markets would settle down and begin again its rise. Wrong. I got porked as the real reason for the fall was due to the overly priced tech sector. Ouch!

Well, dust yourself off and try again they say.

I did. But the best wisdom you can have is the one borne from pain. I was far more careful in the trades I made and in doing so, the pay outs became less so, but the losses too hurt less.

*****

The slaughter that occurred during August and the autumn of 2008 really woke me up. I was going to bet the entire farm on Black 13 and spin the roulette wheel when the market finally bottomed but being a scardey cat, I didn't. You cannot predict the future and a fall from 14,000 to 6,500 on the DOW has a tendency to chill your feet. Had I done so I'd be living in a house in West Greenwich with the Happy Maids company cleaning up my house. But as you can see, I didn't.

Do I regret it? No. I had learned to temper my personal greed and emotion with a very sobering fact: You can lose and lose big.

But some years have passed since 2008 and I have made perhaps three trades total and those were conservative ones as well. There are times when I fire up the trading screen and watch it, but don't bet a penny. I just watch the game from the the seats and see the action play out before me.

The Euro Union is teetering and has a larger GDP than the entire US economy. That is true if you can believe it. If it goes, it takes the majority of the world with it. China is choking. We have the US “fiscal cliff” coming up late this year and the fact that whoever is President will have NO influence on the market as it's an unmanageable gorilla. I don't see myself betting anything until the S&P smashes itself against the wall again. And we'll see if I have the guts to do that.

I don't watch sports. I don't attend games. My Monday Night NFL game starts every morning at 9:30 AM and I'll have my screen on, watching this competition...and it's going to be one hell of a ride soon enough.