Unfortunately, that's not of much help to a beginner. Not likely a beginner would be leveraged to that extent. But it's not beyond belief. Beginners are ignorant. They are not necessarily stupid.
Yes, but remember that successful traders get precisely their money from beginners. Without beginners we won't able to make a dime, especially in zero-sum games like the Futures and the Forex market. For example each time I am making money following an up trend, I am essentially taking money from beginners who are short and refuse to close their position and take the loss. Yes I know, it's almost immoral but that's the reality of trading. In fact we are not trading any market, we are trading people.
Which is why beginners need to learn their business, which was the purpose of the original post, which, unfortunately, fell short, hence my original response.
Don't feel bad about it. Life is a zero sum game. There are a few winners and a lot of losers. The market is actually darwinistic, just like the rest of life. It eliminates all but the very best.
"Obviously, something touched you in this thread to go as far as to join ET specifically to critique this thread. Why did you not join to critique other threads, just this one? That's for you to think deeply about". Like I wrote before. Interesting thread.
The reason I just replied is because I just found the thread. I don't really read any trading forums. I figured out they are mostly nonsense pretty early on. I did a google search a couple weeks ago for something trading related and this thread came up as a top result. I clicked in out of curiosity and decided to read on and then reply. What is strange about that?
Yes and no OverDriven, unlike the Forex and the Futures market, the Stock market is not a zero-sum game, in the long run every buy and hold trader wins, due to the upside bias of this market. Got to go now, the Yen and the Australian dollar are kicking hard, so I will put some rock music on and get busy! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDnlU6rPfwY
Careful with that. It WAS kicking hard last week only because of the US government acting like they're getting their act together (which was a lie). Anyone who was smart enough to get on that after the first higher low/high easily rode that wave of false hope to sweet glory. Same with USDJPY of course. If things don't go well in Washington this week then there could be large scale buying of the Yen. Really, betting on almost any trend that developed last week could quickly turn into a trap this week. You have to remember that just because "USD" doesn't appear in the pair doesn't mean that it isn't heavily influenced by sentiment on the USD.
You are right, but don't worry about me, I NEVER trade with fundamentals. If fundamental "analysis" had ANY predictive power, every economist would be billionaire by now. Even Joe Six Pack would quit his day job, analyze stocks and make a truckload of money every day. (Right now I am short the GBP/JPY (at 157.00) and waiting for the Chinese Consumer Price Index report due in 3 minutes...)