RE:Another day of Manipulation.
I think the same thing when I see Las Vegas. So, part obsessed gamblers whose poison of choice is thinking they can beat the market - not much different from thinking you can beat the book at the track or the house edge at a casino. Bottom line, unless you have an illegal edge, you can't.
Part pro traders and touts running boxes on juniors with or without connivance of promoters and management.
Part honest speculators who look for sector swings and undervalued projects as development progresses.
Actively trading the market is for pros or highly educated by experience traders who have full data terminals and generally concentrate on just a few issuers in one market segment, and who work at it full time when the market is open and they have open positions.
Punters and dabblers (like me) trade and swing trade at our peril. Eventually the pros will clean my clock and empty my trading account. I'm more a buy and hold after significant effort into DD, a tip is never enough. So many scammers and crooks out there.
And the numbers game is the province of highly educated mathematicians or financial analysts, the best of which end up working for hedge funds and large institutions where they make huge paycheques if successful. The math of speculation is so complex. And deluding,
I got a kick out of digging a bit on the weekend as to why nobody has ever managed a perfect March Madness bracket. Just the outcome of 63 games. And the outcomes are all binary. But the odds of a perfect bracket? 9.1 quintillion to one. By way of comparison geologists estimate all the grains of sand on earth probably number in the range of 7.1 quintillion. Those Vegas sports book odds? In time, almost everybody but the book loses.
I know there will be people who say they actively trade the market intelligently, and indeed there are people who through luck, intelligence or hard work have made huge fortunes trading, but for every one of them there are countless losers?
Be right, buy low, sight tight, sell high, ignore the noise and the temptations to jump from position to position. That's my ethos. Happy to wear the label "world's worst trader", but I've done well out of the market over the decades by being stubborn and slow.
cg