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Comment by comboy | Hacker News Reader

You seem like a nice and rational guy, but it looks to me as if your post ended just after the introduction. Apart from the info that there are many profitable trades which success that cannot be explained by luck, I'd love to see counterarguments to other things.

For example, if you are a successful trader, it seems a kind of activity that scales very nicely. If you can be sure you are profitable in say a month (or a year), you are multiplying money, so using leverage or loans you should be able to basically have any amount of money you want (and what about trades in that case?). At least that is my understanding as a non-trader. I'd love to read some explanations for this, especially that I like your writing style.

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> If you can be sure you are profitable in say a month (or a year), you are multiplying money, so using leverage or loans you should be able to basically have any amount of money you want (and what about trades in that case?).

Its not that simple, sadly.

You can't buy $InfinteMoney$ worth of stock X in a single transaction, you end up moving the stock price as you buy/sell. This allows others to respond to your activity. At small scales, a system that appears to work will break down at large scales.

> You can't buy $InfinteMoney$ worth of stock X in a single transaction, you end up moving the stock price as you buy/sell. This allows others to respond to your activity. At small scales, a system that appears to work will break down at large scales.

OK, true it doesn't work up to infinity, but given how much money there is on the Wall Street, I would imagine that when your activities are big enough to move the market, you are way past the point of wondering what you can and what you cannot afford (say $1B+ not to be too vague). Especially given how many instruments there are out there.

He is trading penny stocks with a market cap is less than $50 million, generally.

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/n/nanocap.asp

The amount of money needed to move the needle on these is very small, its why they are often used in pump & dumps.

He doesn't have anything to do with "Wall Street" which works with stocks that follow SEC rules, commodities, etc. in the way you mean.

Deleted my response when I saw this better one. I'll only add these links as they're good for background:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippage_(finance) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_impact

Warren Buffet said the same thing. That he just couldn't take advantage of the same situations now that he moves a lot of money that he used to get to the top.

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