Shiny Things
Supremacy Member
- Joined
- Dec 13, 2009
- Messages
- 9,605
- Reaction score
- 854
No, don't do this. It might feel good, but here's a thing - you're one dude sitting in your underwear with a Stanchart account. You have no advantage over prop traders sitting on the trading floor at a bank plugged into every source of information in the world, or over a server that's programmed with HFT algorithms that took years to develop.
The advantage you do have over them is that your time horizon is so much longer. While they're panicking and trading back and forth all day long, you can be doing something else; their time horizon is seconds or minutes or hours; your horizon is years or decades.
The best thing you can do, once you've bought the stocks, is forget you bought them. This article tells the story: Fidelity, a huge retail broker over here in the USA, reviewed the performance of hundreds of thousands of brokerage accounts, and found that the best-performing accounts belonged to people who'd forgotten their accounts existed.
You're going to hear lots of stories about people who made hundreds or thousands of percent by trading stocks with their own secret magic formula. Those people are the exception, not the rule. You are probably not going to be one of those people, and you almost certainly will not make yourself rich by trading. The vast majority of traders lose money. It's a hell of a lot easier - and a hell of a lot less stressful - to just buy some index ETFs (like ES3 or G3B) and sit on them for three decades until you retire.
