The Day I Lost a Shit-ton of Money, Part I

Not sure why the title has (2011) in it. This was posted today, November 11, 2014

No surprise to me that these guys win some and lose some. All they are doing is trying to predict the future of a stock with absolutely no knowledge other than a graph of price movement. If it's going down, it will continue to go down. It it's going up, it will continue to go up. It's a fools game.

Wow. I just saw my pageview count go up like a rocketship and saw that HN was the reason why. Kinda cool.

Hey Jbuzbee,

This is what I thought as well when I was initially introduced to the idea of technical analysis and day trading. I was very skeptical.

I don't want to call myself a probability expert but after studying poker theory and reading mainstream works like Fooled by Randomness, I bought into the idea that it was just a bunch of a guys throwing darts and the "winners" whom were trying to sell all their BS were simply benefiting from survivorship bias.

But after seeing the numbers themselves first hand, there's just no way it's random chance. Being net positive 80% of all days traded with all your winners and losers falling in a relatively tight distribution -- luck can't create highly specific, repeated outcomes like that. There is virtually zero tails risk since 99% trades are intraday only.

My loss was a failure of discipline. I froze like a deer in the headlights, failed to execute like I normally do and paid the price. Hope you keep reading to find out what happened!

Just for clarity, the loss in question occurred March 2014.