From: Olga Bourlin (fauxever@sprynet.com)
Date: Sat Jun 14 2003 - 22:01:48 MDT
From: "Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" <sentience@pobox.com>
> Olga Bourlin wrote:
> >
> > What kind of evidence and how much evidence would you need? We can all
> > find statistical evidence for investors and traders in the stock market
> > - but that's not the point here. There *are* people who do well, so
> > they must be doing "something right."
>
> Does not follow. There are people who win the lottery; it doesn't mean
> that those people alone have discovered the secret pattern of winning
> numbers. It means that a lot of people tried, and a few succeeded, at the
> chance probability. Are there more investors who do well than chance
> would lead you to expect?
Sorry if I wasn't as clear as I could have been. Yes, that's exactly what
I'm saying - that there are investors who do better than chance would have
them do. The rest of my post went: "There are *techniques successful
traders and investors use - it takes time and education and work* - but
there are plenty of people who are doing all right (and many are doing much
more than just all right)."
Because this thread didn't exclude professional traders, I was thinking more
about people who do this for a living. There are many tools available to
professional investors (and they're the *same* tools that are available to
any investor who wanted to learn more about the stock market and how it
operates - Level II, Island, real time quotes on Streamer, stochastics,
candlestick charts, and the many other sites devoted to helping investors).
I do this for a living myself, and am still honing my skills and learning
new things (but even more experienced traders are constantly learning new
things).
As a huge *side benefit,* I keep up with all kinds of interesting news, and
the news recently has been inspiring (and profitable) indeed, especially in
the biotech and nanotech sectors. Check out the recent -
one-to-three-months' - percentage gains on: GERN, GENR, DNDN, TGEN, BIOM,
ALTI, TINY, NGEN, PPHM, VECO, to name a few (most have dropped off a little
since making their big moves due to momentum generated by promising
research news, but are still hanging in there, and are interesting stocks to
watch).
FYI I have never bought a lottery ticket in my life. I have almost an
aversion (and never entertain myself) with games of any kind - card games,
gambling, you name it. Yech.
Olga
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