Hacker News Reader

Comment by arkadiyt | Hacker News Reader

> A few years into swing trading, and I can say I learned a lot. I’ve made more than I’ve lost. I’m up about 16% ROI year to date.

The article was published December 15th 2017, so he made 16% since January 1st.

If he had bought the S&P500 on January 1st 2017 (2276.98) and sold on December 15th (2675.81) he'd be up > 17.5% (and who knows how much he paid in commissions).

View on HN

Author waits until almost the very end of the article to say this:

> Put another way, if I never did any swing trading and invested all my money into a handful of diverse Vanguard or Dimensional funds, I would have gotten 8%-14% ROI from sitting on my butt!

Not to mention how much it cost in time to do all that work. Index funds don't incur any opportunity cost overhead in terms of your own time, they are fire and forget.

This! I am convinced that with a lot of careful work, you can beat the market a little. But to do so, you've got to work at it more than full time. To get paid for your time, you've got to be working with a ton of money so that a 1-2% beat gives you a good salary.

Otherwise, just invest in the major indices, diversify your portfolio so that it's appropriate for your current and future needs, and do something else with your life.

If he had bought in Jan 2018 what would happen to him today? Index funds are a sound idea when the market is pumping but remember if we really were going into a recession, which we are not as the market is fine, you would have a chance to lose your job which in turn would cause you to sell your index fund investments to maintain your lifestyle, which in turn would be taking a significant loss. Something like a lazy portfolio would help in this scenario where you have money in bonds/stocks and ladder GIC's to be able to buy the dip.

I prefer options and it seems the write of the article is fairly new to trading, excepting to do great in 2-years is like being a neurosurgeon in 2-years, really challenging. The market has its way to chew and spit people out, there is so much to learn from money management, to risk tolerance, to finding a working edge. It takes decades to find something consistent.

Winning in the markets is the toughest profession out there so you have to work at it, but you also have to have capital to work at it. It's hard to turn $5k into $30K, but turning $100K into $150K is much easier.

And the DJIA was up 25%; NASDAQ was up 28% (per CNN). Another Medium triumph.

Negative Alpha, in other words.

He also may have lost quite a bit on taxes.

If you qualify as a day trader according to the IRS rules, then different tax trader rules apply.

https://www.tradersaccounting.com/2017/11/28/trader-tax-stat...

  Traders can deduct interest expenses on Schedule C

Only business-specific interest.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com